Seattle Rep's 'Breach' looks at the human divisions exposed by Hurricane Katrina

Over seven hot days in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina became the most expensive and among the deadliest hurricanes in the history of the United States. The sixth-strongest hurricane recorded in the Atlantic Ocean destroyed hundreds of homes and thousands of lives. A half-dozen cities on the Mississippi River were devastated and every levee in metropolitan New Orleans breached.

Eighty percent of the city and many neighboring areas were flooded, and maybe 80 percent of the residents were forced to flee. More than 1,800 people died and more than $81 billion of damage was done.

Not only was the Army Corps of Engineers widely condemned for its role in the disaster, so were local, state and federal governments for their inadequate and irresponsible response to the catastrophe.

Those are the essential facts.

A new play, "The Breach," which opens Wednesday night at Seattle Repertory Theatre, gives human dimension to those statistics, to those who lost everything or nearly everything.

The play was written by three playwrights -- Catherine Filloux, Tarell McCraney and Joe Sutton -- who are different in personality and age. None has a close association with New Orleans.

The concept was Sutton's "brainchild," said David Esbjornson, artistic director of the Rep, who is staging the work in Seattle.

"He began to think how he could respond as a writer," said Esbjornson, "and as a result of sorting that out, he decided one voice was not enough to handle the situation as completely as it deserved. He felt three writers might give it a perspective different from what he would write.

"The task for the three writers was to create their own stories, which would then be woven into one play instead of doing three one-acts. That is the challenging part of presenting the play -- making sure the playwrights are allowed to retain their individuality in terms of their voices, but linking them together in a unique way. What I have attempted to do is to allow some overlap in very specific places. Resonances in certain places provide a commonality to the whole."

Sutton, Filloux and McCraney were not close before "Breach." Sutton is a well-regarded playwright on a number of subjects (his "Voir Dire" was premiered at the Rep); Filloux has written about human rights, social justice and genocide for two decades; McCraney just graduated from Yale University.

"They are a wonderful, and different, combination of personalities and talent and abilities," Esbjornson said.

"One of the distinctions that Joe makes about this project is that he wants it to be a way in for an outsider, a way for the nation to go through this experience. The play does not attempt to give voice to all the stories in New Orleans. It is very honest in that regard. The main character in Joe's play is someone who went down to try to figure it all out. The other two plays handle things very differently. Tarell's is about an African-American family caught on a rooftop, trying to wait out the disaster. It is a very intimate story about one group of survivors. Catherine's play deals with a paraplegic who stuck out the storm, then gets caught in the floodwaters after the hurricane and tries to survive. He is eventually rescued."

The play tries to deal with more than one thing, Esbjornson said. Many ideas are expressed. However, there is a common denominator: the exposure of racial and economic divisions in New Orleans.

"I hope the play will raise questions and promote debate and discussion at how we get at these things. Plays like this can be a wonderful kind of catalyst."

Although the Rep did a workshop of "Breach," its official premiere was by the Southern Repertory Theatre last year in New Orleans. That was one of the theaters, Esbjornson said, that struggled to survive post-Katrina. The Seattle production is distinct from the New Orleans one, he added. There are changes in the material, the roster of actors is larger, although a handful of them still play multiple roles, and some of the production aspects of the play are being handled differently.

"I am not someone who chases disasters," Esbjornson said. "I am always a little bothered if things like that are exploited. However, in the case of Hurricane Katrina, I felt enough time had passed to look at the situation so we might be able to gain some understanding of the circumstances that created it and examine how we are dealing with our own domestic issues that have been neglected."