These days, the pronatalist pitch has become dominated by pundits sounding the population alarm, policy wonks pitching child tax credits and tech bros boasting about dynasty building. Yet, some of the movement’s hardest workers might be its unpaid lobbyists. I refer, of course, to mothers who unflaggingly devote themselves to persuading a single, very specific demographic: their daughters.
Emiliene, or Emi, the fiery matriarch of Phanésia Pharel’s ruminative new play “The Waterfall” by WP Theater and Thrown Stone, is one such woman.
When we meet her, the Haitian mother (Patrice Johnson Chevannes) has recently been hospitalized after collapsing from low blood sugar in the middle of Bible study. When her lawyer daughter Bean (Natalie Paul) arrives, Emi greets her from a wheelchair with impish theatricality — slumping, her tongue lolling as if she’s passed out, then snapping upright with a triumphant: “You left me for dead, but I’m still here!”
Compact as a gymnast, Chevannes fills the stage as if she were at least two feet taller, her strong Haitian Creole accent ringing with mischief. She easily occupies Teresa L. Williams’s luscious set that alternates between Emi’s home in Florida and the waterfall that gives the play its name.
The poet John Ashbery wrote, “Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is.” Emi, as embodied by the galvanic Chevannes, believes it is her life’s mission to find out. She is driven to discover when she might expect a grandchild — and, if necessary, to hurry it along. The American-reared Bean, for her part, has reservations.
Professionally, she’s reaching for the brass ring of partnership, and as we come to understand, she and her (unseen) fiancé are hardly aligned on the question of starting a family. When news of her long-sought promotion arrives, Bean receives the offer with all the enthusiasm of someone being summoned for jury duty. For this lifelong overachiever, who brought home perfect scores as a child only to be ostracized by her peers, success is always titrated with something darker.
Pharel underscores ideas of inheritance by giving Emi’s grandmother the surname Dessources — meaning “of the source” — which she shares with the playwright’s own grandmother. She clearly means to show how ideas of womanhood are passed down from generation to generation. The relationship between Emi and Bean feels deeply inhabited, sharpened by Emi’s easy wit (“Everything your therapist says, Oprah has said it better”) and by the force of her conviction.
But a balanced portrait “Waterfall” is not. Paul’s Bean is a much more recessive figure than her flamboyant mother, which the play requires for reasons that gradually become clear through its nearly two-hour run. She suffers an existential vitamin D deficiency from living in her mother’s shadow. So long accustomed to performing excellence for Emi, she suddenly seems unsure whether her ambitions are truly her own. Emi offers a characteristically forthright diagnosis: “You’ve lost your good angel.” And then translates the Haitian proverb: “You aren’t in your body.”
Under Taylor Reynolds’ direction, it’s often difficult to parse whether Bean is resisting motherhood itself, the person doing the prescribing, or the manner and momentum of the prescription. “Waterfall” might have benefited from another voice in the room — Bean’s fiancé’s, for instance — to lend her resistance greater dimension.
One of the play’s most evocative scenes rows back to the waterfall in Haiti, which Bean has visited only vicariously through Emi’s memory of it. As Venus Gulbranson’s lighting washes the stage in undulating bands of blue and silver, Emi foretells the shape of Bean’s adult life. In that initial vision, she describes seeing Bean as a prosperous doctor, engineer, or lawyer ensconced in a large house. Now Emi reveals, with a radiant certainty, that on a subsequent visit to the waterfall, she saw Bean with a baby. Yet, what Emi sees as a benediction, Bean interprets as a burden; her mother’s vision sets up a stark choice that will redefine their family’s legacy.
As one of Emi’s doctors might put it, love sometimes works in iatrogenic ways. The impulse to provide, to predict, to get ahead of pain can itself introduce a new complication. Bean’s good angel (Chevannes) seems to affirm as much in a final scene when, appearing in a diaphanous white dress, she reminds Bean that freedom resides in choosing — and that endings, too, can be holy.
The Waterfall
Through March 8 at WP Theater, Manhattan; wptheater.org/show/the-waterfall. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
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