STEPHANIE GAMBA
Naja Selby-Morton stars in “the ripple, the wave that carried me home” at Luna Stage in West Orange, through May 25.
Janice — the main character in Christina Anderson’s 2021 play “the ripple, the wave that carried me home,” which is currently being presented by Luna Stage in West Orange — works as an administrator for alumni relations at a small college in Ohio. But — as you may have guessed already, from the play’s title — she has the soul of a poet.
“My ancestry is a tree of small rivers, roots filled with lakes of memory,” says Janice, who is played by Naja Selby-Morton in this production (which is directed by Adrienne D. Williams). “So while I grew up in a landlocked environment, the family was an ocean. I sit on that lone branch that yearns for the sturdiness of land.”
Later, she says: “Water is a complicated element. It heals, destroys, rescues, erases. It drowns. It saves. It holds memory. It washes away pain.”
The play is, to a large extent, about those memories — which, for Janice, will always be connected with water — and the way in which Janice is daunted by them, but ultimately able to make peace with them.
Selby-Morton, who is positively luminous in the show’s central role, manages to be convincing whether she is portraying Janice as a mature, reflective, sensible (but also somewhat guarded) adult in 1992 Ohio, and as a more naive, emotionally volatile youth back in ’60s and ’70s Kansas. Anderson’s script bounces back and forth between the two time periods.
The 1992 scenes, crucially, coincide with the Rodney King trial in Los Angeles, which the characters follow on television. This adds another layer of political meaning to the play; Anderson doesn’t harp on it, but it is there.
STEPHANIE GAMBA
Naja Selby-Morton and Donathan Walters in “the ripple, the wave that carried me home.”
The play begins with Janice, in ’92, being called repeatedly by Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman (yes, that is the character’s name), who volunteers for The African-American Recognition Committee in Janice’s original hometown of Beacon, Kansas. It turns out that YCABW wants Janice to come back to Beacon, to accept an honor on behalf of Janice’s father Edwin, who died a few years ago.
When Janice was young, her father led a movement to integrate the town’s public pool. It was a long and arduous fight, but it was ultimately successful. And now, the pool is being renamed for him.
Janice is, initially, reluctant to attend. She is busy with her life as a wife, mother and university employee. But also, her memories are just too overwhelming — not just of the deeply ingrained racism that she grew up with, but of her sometimes strained relationship with her father. She also resents the fact that while her father is being honored, her mother Helen, who also played a big role in the struggle to integrate the pool, is being ignored.
But Janice realizes that she won’t be able to heal if she keeps running away. The borderline-annoying YCABW persists — and she and Janice even bond, a bit — and Janice finally says yes.
In the flashback scenes, Edwin and Helen — played by Donathan Walters and Nedra Snipes, respectively — are richly multi-dimensional: Fun-loving but also sometimes stern; driven crusaders for social justice but also, sometimes, wracked with doubt. In addition to playing YCABW, Latonia Phipps plays Janice’s charismatic and beloved aunt Gayle, who helps the young Janice see that there is more to life than what she has come to know in Beacon.
STEPHANIE GAMBA
Naja Selby-Morton, left, and Nedra Snipes in “the ripple, the wave that carried me home.”
The costumes (designed by Deborah Caney) and hairstyles help create an authentically retro feel in the flashback scenes, and Williams and scenic designer Tony DiBernardo surprisingly turn the intimate Luna Stage space, at times, into a swimming pool. (You do have to imagine the water yourself, though.) Water-y painting on the walls, by Ashley Basile, helps underscore the water theme that Anderson returns to so frequently and so effectively.
It may seem contradictory, but for Janice, water is … grounding. Reading from a letter that her mother (who taught swimming) once sent her, Janice shares the thought that water’s “power and peace” can be something that “establishes a rhythm in your life that can sustain you for the rest of your days.”
It certainly seems to have done that for her.
Luna Stage in West Orange will present “the ripple, the wave that carried me home” through May 25. Visit lunastage.org.
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