After appearing at The Public to widespread acclaim, this gorgeous, emotional play makes one of its first appearances outside New York at Stages. Winner of the 2021 Smith Blackburn Prize, cullud wattah follows three generations of Black women living through the current water crisis in Flint, Michigan. It’s been 936 days since Flint has had clean water. A third-generation General Motors employee, Marion is consumed by layoffs at the engine plant.

When her sister, Ainee, seeks For this show, Stages is partnering with Bayou City Water Keepers to create a discussion about water access in Houston. Justice and restitution for lead poisoning, her plan reveals the toxic entanglements between the city and its most powerful industry, forcing their family to confront the past-present-future cost of survival. As lead seeps into their homes and bodies, corrosive memories and secrets rise among them. Will this family ever be able to filter out the truth?

This family drama shares the stories of people navigating life through obstacles that feel inhumane and the hideous choices that people living on the margins of poverty are forced to make. This is a piece of poetry about the human price we all pay for those realities.

Meet the Playwright and Director

Erika Dickerson-Despenza (Playwright) is a New Orleans-based Blk radical leftist poet-playwright and womanist cultural memory worker. Afrosurrealism, magical realism, narrative re/memory, kinesthetic imagination, and Black queer women's interiority and erotic fugitive are conceptual preoccupations of her work. Erika's primary thematic foci are Black land legacies, Black apocalyptic rituals, and environmental racism. Her work occupies sites of intimate reckoning, a situating rupture in traditionally sacred or “safe” spaces to make invisible systems of environmental oppression and cultural trauma visible and ultimately ask us to consider abolitionist political ecologies.

Rachel H. Dickson (Director) Rachel is excited to return to Stages, having directed Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar and Grill in 2021. Rachel has been a professional artist in the Houston Community for over 20 years. She has worked as an actor, director, playwright, dramaturg, educator, producer, technical staff, and artistic consultant. Rachel is honored to currently serve as the BOLD Associate Artistic Director at The Ensemble Theatre. Rachel holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the University of Missouri-Columbia, a Master of Fine Arts Theatre from the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, and a Master of Social Work from the University of Houston.

For this show, Stages is partnering with Bayou City Water Keepers to create a discussion about water access in the city of Houston.

The play is 2 hours and 20 minutes long with a brief intermission. Make plans to attend one or more of the performances.

• Wednesday - Thursday, 7:00pm

• Friday, 7:30pm

• Saturday, 7:30pm and 2:00pm

• Sunday, 2:00pm

For more information, visit stageshouston.com.