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Keegan Theatre’s The Wilting Point Flows Unsteadily But With Potential

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In the second scene of Graziella Jackson’s new play, The Wilting Point, playing through April 30 at Keegan Theatre, Antuca Otero Veracruz sits with her silent son, Takudo, cataloging the bean varieties her family and neighbors have grown for seven generations. Wistfully describing each variety before it is packaged for preservation by a seed library, Antuca stops at the humble cowpea, praising its unique ability to simultaneously nourish its human growers while improving the quality of the soil from which it is harvested.

Touching moments like this, which root the play’s characters in the land they deeply cherish, are the emotional bedrock and best parts of Jackson’s first entry in her four-part climate-focused Elements play-cycle, developed by Keegan Theatre’s Boiler Room Series. While future productions will center on air, earth, and fire, The Wilting Point centers on water. Jackson, Keegan’s 2022–2023 Playwright in Residence, takes her audience to the Sangre de Cristo mountain region of southern Colorado, where a close community of channel irrigation farmers struggle to cope with the disappearing water and upstream pollution brought on by the new wealthy (and White) residents. 

The Wilting Point follows Antuca (Sally Ann Flores), Takudo (Gabriel Alejandro), and his child River (Sophia Colón Roosevelt) as they cope with a flood of water-related challenges while the mysterious death of a local businessman looms overhead. Podcast host Mina Melo (Beverlix Jean-Baptiste) travels to Colorado to investigate the murder at the behest of her pushy boss Finley Grey (Judy Lewis), but soon comes to realize that the bigger story is the excruciating dehydration of the land. In a Greta Thunberg-inspired turn of events, River takes on Musk/Bezos-replication Maximillian Wasser (Silas Gordon Brigham), garnering both internet fame and bona fide climate activist credentials. 

Jackson notes in the show’s program that she wrote The Wilting Point to be a time capsule for what life was like when we were on the brink of climate catastrophe. But the production often feels so committed to depicting today’s technological milieu that it prevents the dramatic tension from rising to a level that meets the impending catastrophe the play continually references. Periodic appearances by Maximillian halt the story’s progress rather than augment the dramatic tension, and as River becomes an internet sensation, a series of loud and chaotic voice-overs mimic internet chatter that feels out of place. 

Even so, The Wilting Point contains impactful moments that underscore generational and economic divides that families everywhere are facing. Flores’ Antuca is tender and endearing, and the audience can easily connect with her struggle as she holds to the ground she can no longer rely on. She turns to the stars for answers, which River pointedly reminds her may actually be billionaire-funded satellites. “I can still believe in stars,” Antuca smiles, refusing to allow the easy cynicism of today’s technology to get in the way of her connection with nature. Too often, climate change is framed for how its large-scale impacts will affect entire populations across the world. Perhaps, by doubling down on the individual, familial stories, like those of Antuca’s, Jackson can inspire the action her play demands.

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Written by enovate

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