Dael Orlandersmith’s play both is and isn’t about the 2014 shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson. This event is the catalyst for Until the Flood, which digs into the aftermath of the shooting and unearths ugly truths about race in the United States.
Over the last few decades, American theatre has developed a tradition of processing trauma through documentary. Until the Flood follows in the footsteps of The Laramie Project and Anna Deveare Smith’s verbatim shows, bearing more than a passing resemblance to the latter. The play is based on interviews with people in St Louis, but – unlike Smith – Orlandersmith has turned these real people into fictionalised composites.
In front of a candle-filled, flickering memorial to Brown, each speaker is fully inhabited and dispassionately held up for inspection. With a single item of clothing and a subtle shifting of her limbs, Orlandersmith transforms into her characters one by one. There’s the young black man who jitters with fear, praying that he escapes Brown’s fate; the racist who leans into the audience as he spits out the N-word; the white woman who fiddles nervously with her wine glass as she tries to see both sides.
Race comes in and out of focus. Orlandersmith allows her characters to be more than their politics or prejudices, a choice that can make the racism even more horrifying when it rears its head. We get a glimpse of these people’s lives, their struggles and dreams, making it harder to dismiss them when they utter something abhorrent. No matter how educated the white speakers, what’s striking is their failure to grasp structural racism, the inability to appreciate their own privilege.
The politics of the play itself is understated. There’s an implicit statement in the delivery of these monologues by Orlandersmith as a woman of colour, but she doesn’t let even a flicker of her own judgment about the characters inflect her performance. Only at the very end does she step into her own skin and deliver a spare, ambiguous poem, hinting at both hope and despair for the future of her country.
• Until the Flood is at the Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, until 25 August, and at Arcola theatre, London, 4-28 September.
• Read all our Edinburgh festival reviews.
