Post-Harvey, political play is awash in new context
Rajiv Joseph thought his play was dead.
The author of “Describe the Night,” the world-premiere production that would signal the start of the Alley Theatre’s new season, woke up on the morning of Sunday, Aug. 27, at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Houston not knowing he had just survived Hurricane Harvey’s worst night of rain.
Nor did he know what the city looked like after the relentless storm, what had or hadn’t survived. Joseph, an Ohio native, decided to venture outside, walking north to check up on the Alley Theatre.
But then he had to stop. A few blocks before he could reach the Alley, a dark torrent of flowing water raged, swirling up to the top of stop signs and parking meters. Part
of downtown had been swallowed up by the engorged Buffalo Bayou. That included the Alley, which had water nearly reaching past its elevated front steps.
Then Joseph saw it: a door that was cracked open, with water gushing inside. The entire lower level of the theater, which includes the Neuhaus Theatre where “Describe the Night” was supposed to be staged, was flooded.
“My feeling was, it’s not going to be the Alley’s priority to worry about my production,” Joseph said.
But the Alley Theatre never planned to abandon the play by this former Pulitzer Prize finalist. In the days following the storm, general manager Dean Gladden was in talks with the University of Houston, asking if the Alley could use the university’s smaller Quintero Theatre as a new home for “Describe the Night.” They could.
The show would go on, and will, as the play sets up shop on the UH campus through Oct. 15.
“Describe the Night,” after all, was going to be an important event, in a theater season full of politically minded productions. This exploration of Russian political events since 1920 traces a story about how regimes, like that of Vladimir Putin, manipulate the truth. It can be seen as a contemporary “Animal Farm” in the way that it shows how governments censor and propagandize fact.
But after that brutal Sunday morning, “Describe the Night” no longer appeared to be a reaction to the current political climate.
The play became a story about how people persist and even form intimate bonds in the face of catastrophe. In “Describe the Night,” after an apocalyptic plane crash, a journalist befriends a car salesman, who in turn takes actions that forge an even deeper bond between them.
The journalist and the salesman were brought together not by choice but by unfortunate circumstance. Human instinct kept them together and made their presence valuable to one another.
The story of how Harvey affected Houston was similar. Joseph saw the barrage of volunteers at the George R. Brown Convention Center who outnumbered evacuees 2 to 1, he said. It was a side of Houston he never would have seen while holed up in rehearsals and hotel rooms.
“I hope, even though it’s about a very different time and place, there’s themes and ideas in the play that promote a reflection about crisis,” Joseph said. “It’s about being in danger and the feeling of powerlessness that so many people face in crisis.”
“Describe the Night” also delves into the idea that the world moves in fast, often incomprehensible ways, yet humans always manage to find both beauty and meaning from those seemingly random events. The play was inspired by Joseph’s stumbling upon the diary of Russian writer Isaac Babel, who was likely silenced by the Russian government for his subversive ideas. Some people anticipated “Describe the Night” as theater that could speak to how an American government can manipulate the truth. And it still might. But now “Describe the Night” is also cast as a post-Harvey play.
Joseph said he’s a master of his play, not its context. He hopes that context can change over the years as a way of keeping “Describe the Night” alive.
“Our world moves so quickly. What’s on the news changes so quickly. As a playwright, you cannot be concerned about that,” Joseph said. “If you write toward the news cycle, your play will always be outdated. I was not trying to write about (President Donald) Trump. It just so happened that it’s relevant.”
The play’s big idea, after all, is something that’s both too timeless to be swallowed up by a storm and too universal to be boiled down by political headlines.
“It’s about, what is true and what is not true? What stories do we end up electing to be true? How do we tell history? That is both a philosophical question for the ages but also pertains to today,” Joseph said. “My hope is that it’s relevant for different reasons now, and 10 years from now.”