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Racism is a violent and violating police encounter. It\u2019s angry white mobs enforcing their own laws. It\u2019s when your hometown in Kansas decides that integrating swimming pools is so difficult that it\u2019s better to close public pools altogether.<\/p>\n
In Berkeley Repertory Theatre\u2019s<\/a> \u201cThe Ripple, the Wave That Carried Me Home,\u201d racism is also burying dreams and watching your adult life pass by. It\u2019s shame that the world forces upon you, shame that metastasizes inside you until it transmogrifies into its own horrible violence.\u00a0 It\u2019s divided passion and love unfelt. It\u2019s relationships that never get to be what they could have been. It\u2019s stolen joy.<\/p>\n Christina Anderson\u2019s world premiere, seen Friday, Sept. 16, seeks to more thoroughly enumerate racism\u2019s tolls and reclaim some of that joy. In imagining the not entirely unified, decades-long fight for the right to swim by Janice (Christiana Clark) and her parents Helen (Aneisa J. Hicks) and Edwin (Ronald L. Conner), the play asserts that decent, thoughtful, unflashy people are worthy of dramatization.<\/p>\n It elevates the everyday to poetry: \u201cWater is a complicated element,\u201d Janice says. \u201cIt heals, destroys, rescues, erases. It drowns. It saves. It holds memory. It washes away pain.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet the script, directed by Jackson Gay, relies too heavily on narration, perceptive as Janice is of the world around her and her own mind. You might find yourself longing to see events play out in the present tense so you can feel things for yourself instead of being told what they felt like. For instance, the deaths of three unseen little boys as a result of segregation, supposedly an inciting event of the play, get talked about as if they\u2019re a policy decision.<\/p>\n In its compassion for its characters, its insistence that what they went through and felt means something important, the play is perhaps too thorough, almost as if it\u2019s a biography rather than a work of fiction that\u2019s free to take license. We might not need to hear which classes Janice takes in college or how much she loves farm work in her youth, since neither of those episodes much relate to anything before or after. Likewise, the nuts and bolts of activist strategy accumulate in wonkish, too-dutiful detail.<\/p>\n Yet Gay\u2019s solid cast frequently set the world of \u201cRipple\u201d aglow.<\/p>\n Hicks devises a sadly hopeful expression that could in and of itself be the engine of the play. In a scene about a childhood Edwin pondering the distant whites-only pool he\u2019ll never be allowed inside, Conner fixes his brow with a kind of uncomprehending righteous dejection that must, simply must, rebel and come up with a scheme. It\u2019s a face that could light a fire. Brianna Buckley, in the roles of \u201cYoung Chipper Ambitious Black woman,\u201d has eyes so earnest it\u2019s as if her character could solve all the world\u2019s problems by opening them wider still.<\/p>\n To Janice, who shoulder\u2019s the bulk of the storytelling, Clark brings a heavy-hitter\u2019s fearlessness and acumen. Her Janice has had to be so strong and independent for so long. She\u2019s used to carving out a place in the world with a blunt axe and making a home inside, come what may.<\/p>\n In its final glorious poolside scene, \u201cRipple\u201d lets her come out of the fortress she\u2019s built and rediscover the joys of the water. That complicated element, in addition to all its other powers Anderson listed earlier in the show, also means baptism and rebirth.<\/p>\n L<\/span>\u201cThe Ripple, the Wave That Carried Me Home\u201d:<\/strong> Written by Christina Anderson. Directed by Jackson Gay. Through Oct. 16. One hour, 45 minutes. $23.50-$100. Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. 510-647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org<\/a> <\/p>\n \t\t\t \t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/sfc-datebook-wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/09\/MER5a4b61cf746feb9147e2514d9f5e9_ripple0917-scaled.jpg\")
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