Melissa (Joyah Dominique, center) serves freshly butchered deer to her niece Fran (Kendyl Grace Davis) and brother Cavin (Kevin Richard Best) in Rishi Varma’s Sulfur Bottom.
Playwright Rishi Varma was motivated to write Sulfur Bottom by his concern for environmental justice, defined by the show’s partner organization WE ACT as “ensuring that people of color and/or low-income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices.”
Varma isn’t really successful, however, at integrating the issue in his multigenerational family saga where people interact with their deceased relatives and, in a bit of magical realism, a whale shows up in the living room. Making his Off-Broadway debut with Sulfur Bottom, the playwright—a 2022 college grad—may not yet have the skill set for a compelling environment-themed allegory.
Melissa and Copal (understudy Aaron Dorelien, right) debate plans for industrial development in Sulfur Bottom.
His script also lacks clarity. Sulfur Bottom is the town where the characters live, but neither the name nor the town’s geographical location is ever mentioned. The racial makeup of Sulfur Bottom is never discussed, either, though it’s presumably important since—as a program note points out—racism often undergirds environmental injustice, and Sulfur Bottom’s no-last-name family is Black.
In the first scene, a young woman named Fran (Kendyl Grace Davis) is living with her father, Cavin (Kevin Richard Best), and her aunt Melissa (Joyah Dominique) in the house that had belonged to their parents. The second scene jumps ahead at least a decade, to find Fran and her husband, Winter (Eric Easter), now the house’s occupants and the parents of a baby daughter. Subsequent scenes move forward to when that baby, Maeve, is a teenager (Feyisola Soetan) and move back in time to when Fran is a newborn—and Cavin agrees to sign a petition from his childhood friend Copal (Isaiah Joseph), now a local political operative, in support of opening factories in town.
Those factories’ detrimental effect on Sulfur Bottom’s quality of life and its residents’ health is apparently Varma’s main target here, yet his script contains only brief references to “issues about the water quality, about the soil.” And instead of an intriguing tale of lies and cover-ups and a population unaware that a business is introducing potentially dangerous substances into the environment, Varma’s scenario makes his victimized characters look kind of foolish and gullible.
Fran (Davis) pulls an oddly tiny match—not matchstick—out of a matchbox, with “the whale” (Best), formerly Cavin, looking on.
Copal tells Cavin straightaway that the company looking to move into town is called Chemical and Hazard Solutions, and it has determined that Sulfur Bottom’s land has “the mineral composition to support storage underground … hazardous waste, I assume, soils, sludges.” Given that information—and that the presence of factories anywhere generally hurts residential property value—it doesn’t seem likely that residents would be sold on the pitch that “we might be sitting on a gold mine” and their homes will “be worth millions,” as Copal says.
Mostly, Sulfur Bottom seems to be a story about multiple generations of one family and their fluctuating attitudes toward their ancestral home and hometown. In every scene and generation, Cavin’s family is dealing with their house’s deterioration, which is unrelated to Sulfur Bottom’s plight—a septic tank could malfunction anywhere, and the house had problems before factories came to town. And the environmental justice theme all but vanishes in the final third of the 90-minute drama, which revolves around Maeve’s discovery of family secrets.
While the lighting and sound design provide effective mood-setting, director Megumi Nakamura has made a few peculiar choices with staging and props. As the play opens, Fran has just collided with a deer, and Cavin is busy cutting up the dead animal for meat … in the middle of the living room! And the deer is, inexplicably, portrayed by an actor (Easter), who must lie stock-still throughout the scene.
Later on it’s Best’s turn to lie on the ground for a whole scene and represent an animal—a beached whale that appears first in the house, then all around town, as some sort of cautionary tale about humans’ relationship with nature. Family members seem only mildly surprised by the whale, not confounded by the physical impossibility of it, so it would seem Varma conceived this in an absurdist vein. But it just doesn’t work, because the tone of the play otherwise is straightforward and serious.
Sulfur Bottom’s non-Equity actors hit some nice emotional beats and generally perform well enough. Still, the production feels constrained, not only by its unfocused script but by the performance space, which Sulfur Bottom (on a twice-a-week performance schedule) shares with the long-running parodies of Seinfeld, Friends and The Office.
It’s not an ideal venue for the play for another reason: There’s something to see on the stage’s floor in most scenes—deer, whale, overflowed sewage, rubble after the house has been destroyed—but that floor, which is lower than audience seating, isn’t necessarily visible from beyond the second row.
Sulfur Bottom runs through Oct. 11 at the Theater Center’s Jerry Orbach Theater (210 W. 50th St.). Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and 1 p.m. Saturday. For tickets and more information, visit sulfurbottom.com.
Playwright: Rishi Varma
Director: Megumi Nakamura
Sets: Daniel Prosky
Costumes: Roger Teng
Lighting: Sam Weiser
Sound: Sid Diamond
Original Music: Jacob Brandt
