Real stories tell the deeper story of Louisiana Oil ‘Spill’
In the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, there is a delicate balance between nature and the oil industry as these two disparate forces attempt to coexist. It was here in 2010 that the two collided when the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 and dumping hundreds of millions of gallons of oil into the gulf. Playwright Leigh Fondakowski visited the area and found there’s more to the story beyond the newspaper headlines.
Fondakowski, a member of Tectonic Theatre Project, also was the head writer of “The Laramie Project,” about the 1998 gay-bashing death of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, and “The People’s Temple,” a look at the religious cult whose members followed leader Jim Jones in a mass suicide in 1978. She was on a trip to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico with students from Wesleyan University who were studying her method of using extensive interviews as a basis for theater when she realized there was “a major American play here if you looked deeper into the story.”
“The juxtaposition was stunning,” Fondakowski recalls. “Dolphins were jumping alongside the boat and in the distance were oil rigs for as far as the eye could see.” Plus this area of Louisiana has “such a rich cultural identity and people are so connected to the land but still inextricably tied to the oil industry. It’s a complicated situation.”
Over several years, Fondakowski collected more than 200 hours of stories and interviews with fishermen, victims’ families, town officials, biologists, cleanup workers and others who live and work in this remote area of Louisiana. These untold stories form the text of “Spill,” which is making its Midwest debut at TimeLine Theatre, under Fondakowski’s direction.
Listening to people’s stories is becoming a lost art, and Fondakowski is particularly good at drawing them out, says Kelli Simpkins, artistic associate of About Face Theater and a member of Tectonic who served as dramaturg for “Spill” and is also in the cast. “It’s something that is incredibly profound and revelatory, especially with a tragic event like this,” she says. “These people didn’t make the news, they didn’t have a voice. ‘Spill’ keeps these stories alive.” In addition to the interviews, Fondakowski culled through thousands of pages and hours of recorded testimony to piece together a concise account of the disaster and the two years afterward. The testimony included that of the rig workers who survived the explosion; the play begins with their story.
“I went down to make a play about an oil spill and realized there’s this whole other story here about the rig world and how complicated drilling is,” Fondakowski explains. “People compare it to space travel. I felt I had to do due diligence and get to know this industry because it’s part of the culture and interwoven into lives here.”
Fondakowski grew up in a small Massachusetts town and couldn’t wait to escape to the big city. She says the deep ties these Louisiana natives had to nature and their culture and their community was something she didn’t relate to at first.
“Here generations and generations of people continue to live exactly where their ancestors lived, and they are sort of cut off from the world,” Fondakowski says. “I had never experienced that, and I was struck by how distinct and unique it felt to this place.”
But Fondakowski stresses that it’s not just these Louisianans who have ties to the oil industry — we all do. She hopes the play gives rise to the question: How do we change our dependency on fossil fuels?
“I think this situation in Louisiana and the gulf is a metaphor for the rest of us,” Fondakowski says. “We don’t want oil rigs in our backyard but we are all completely tied to oil. We couldn’t exist without it. Knowing what I know and having seen what I’ve seen, I don’t think we are moving fast enough away from consuming fossil fuels. And that terrifies me.”