ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
When the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico back in 2010, it killed 11 people and hundreds of millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf. Those are the big headlines from that story. But a deeper look reveals a complex tale to be told about people's relationships to oil. And that is what a new play by one of the creators of "The Laramie Project" explores. From member station WWNO, Eve Troeh reports on the play "Spill."
EVE TROEH, BYLINE: Playwright Leigh Fondakowski had never been to southeast Louisiana when she took a boat ride out of Bay Jimmy several months after the well had been capped. She was leading a workshop with a scientist, showing students her method of using extensive interviews as a basis for theater.
LEIGH FONDAKOWSKI: We were parking the boat it the dock and they were autopsying dolphin bodies. And it's a very striking image to see the body of a dolphin on a table and then see body bags. And I sort of knew almost instantly, like, I'm going to have to do something about this.
TROEH: Something like what she did with "The Laramie Project," a collaboration with Moises Kaufman, using the real voices of people affected by the murder of gay teen Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. What she found in south Louisiana was a culture cut off from even the rest of the state, just a few miles to the north. One of her first interviews with a woman in a bayou town made that clear.
FONDAKOWSKI: She said: It's different here from up north. And we thought she meant New York, but actually she meant Baton Rouge.
TROEH: Up north, people don't live so close to the land. Fishing, hunting, boating and drilling are all intertwined on the bayou. The reality that oil is part of everyone's life every day hit home for Reeva Wortel. She's a visual artist who painted portraits of all the interviewees that are used in the production.
REEVA WORTEL: There are many degrees of separation between the oil industry and our lives, so that I think it's really easy to make moral judgments about the oil industry if you're in the bubble.
TROEH: Oil itself becomes a character in the play, at first an invisible force driving the action.
FONDAKOWSKI: We're taught that an oil well is like a living thing, and it has gas in it and sometimes it kicks, which means it's coming in on you. And the job of the rig worker is to control this. It's like a wild horse. It's like breaking a wild horse.
TROEH: In a tightly choreographed sequence, we see what happens when that wild horse is not broken. Using survivor interviews and court testimony, Fondakowski recreates the blowout.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "SPILL")
TROEH: The play then explores the aftermath of the BP spill through the voices of oystermen who can't harvest their beds and work long, hard days to clean up the oil. Amar Atkins plays the head of an oysterman's group.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "SPILL")
TROEH: The playwright also interviewed victims' families. Silas Cooper plays a father who lost his son.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "SPILL")
TROEH: That message is simple - don't let industry gamble with human life, says Keith Jones. His son, Gordon, a mud engineer, died on the rig.
KEITH JONES: Gordon is on my screensaver and his picture is on my credit card. And I do everything I can to surround myself with his memory.
TROEH: His biggest hope for the play is that it renews a dialogue about profits versus safety that all but dried up once the Deepwater Horizon dropped from the headlines.
JONES: The best way to remember and honor Gordon would be to never accept what anyone says: oil company employees, executive, drilling company's employees or executives, politicians. Never accept anything they say on face value. Always know that everything they say is motivated by the dollar.
TROEH: And be skeptical, too, of the delusions many of us carry about oil and our ability to extract ourselves from it, says playwright Leigh Fondakowski. She held a staged reading in New York. And in the discussion after, she says audience members seemed to expect someone in the play to speak up.
FONDAKOWSKI: When is the character going to come in and say we're going to stop drilling? And so all these people who you get really connected to over the course of the piece and you feel their sorrows and their heartbreaks and you, you know, you get in sync with them and you're waiting for them to agree with you, and they don't.
TROEH: The fact that they don't reflects the kind of complexity Fondakowski was going for. Keith Jones, the father of Gordon, whose grave is the sunken rig, says he will go see "Spill" first as a scout for his son's mother and his widow.
JONES: And I'll report back and tell them if I think there's anything about it that will be upsetting to them. I think they both would like to see it but don't want to be put through an emotional wringer to do it.
TROEH: For NPR News, I'm Eve Troeh in New Orleans.
Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.