Family memories swirl in Berkeley Rep’s urgent ‘ripple’

Janice is carrying a lot of water weight. She’s weighed down by a lifetime of family and community history centered around water and who gets access to it.

In Christina Anderson’s powerful new play “the ripple, the wave that carried me home” getting its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, narrator Janice is asked to speak at an event honoring her father’s decades-long campaign to integrate the public swimming pools in her Kansas hometown.

The request brings to the surface long-submerged feelings and memories about the deep wounds in her community and the rifts that the long struggle created in her family, leaving Janice distant and uncommunicative, with a distaste for water. It also raises questions about who gets the credit for the fight her parents had always taken on as a team.

Produced in association with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, “ripple” was commissioned by Berkeley Rep and developed as part of its Ground Floor new play lab. It’ll play the Goodman in January, and Kansas City Repertory Theatre will also produce the play in March.

Born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas, Anderson has deep connections to Bay Area theater. San Francisco’s Crowded Fire Theater produced several of her plays, including “Drip,” “Good Goods” and “Inked Baby,” and her “pen/man/ship” premiered at Magic Theatre.

Anderson was nominated (alongside Larry Kirwan and Craig Lucas) for a 2022 Tony Award for best book of a musical for “Paradise Square,” which premiered at Berkeley Rep in 2019. She wasn’t one of its writers in Berkeley but was brought in afterward to rework the show on its way to Broadway. It closed in July.

This latest “ripple” is set in the fictional city of Beacon, Kansas, remembered by Janice from her new home in Ohio in the “present” of 1992. Her life there is orderly and tightly controlled, down to under exactly which circumstances she can expect phone calls from Beacon. She keeps her new life as separate as possible from her old one, not even letting her husband and kids join her if she has to visit.

The story spans decades, and director Jackson Gay’s production, with a strong cast of four Chicago actors, brings every period to life with vivid immediacy. When we first meet father Edwin, he’s a cheeky kid excitedly boasting about his attempts to sneak into whites-only swimming pools with his friends.

Ronald L. Conner is warmly exuberant as Edwin, especially when he’s with Helen, Janice’s mother. Aneisa J. Hicks’ Helen has a playful rapport with her husband, and with Janice as a child. Hicks exudes a deep, silent strength in Helen that enables her to keep her composure under the worst of circumstances.

We see the characters at many ages, beautifully delineated by the actors and by Montana Levi Blanco’s costumes and period-appropriate hairstyles.

Brianna Buckley is a delight as larger-than-life Aunt Gayle, whom Janice aptly describes as “like a cross breeze that glided through a hot house.”

Christiana Clark’s Janice lingers lovingly on the memories while maintaining a sense of guardedly keeping her distance from them, protecting herself as best she can from the feelings they stir up.

Todd Rosenthal’s set depicts a wonderfully detailed indoor swimming pool room, with tiled walls, a trophy case with fogged windows, and just a sliver of the empty pool in the foreground with its side lights shining.

Anderson’s enthralling language is peppered with brilliantly evocative turns of phrase. Phone calls home are called the “Sunday polites.” People from the middle-class and poorer Black neighborhoods are routinely called the Thinking Class and the Necessity Class. One character (also portrayed hilariously by Buckley) is literally named Young Chipper Ambitious Black Woman, “Young Chipper” for short.