"Neither that conclusion nor the uncertainty of what came before it releases us, though, from the burden of trying to understand the meaning of the killing, and in that sense Dael Orlandersmith does a great public service in her new play “Until the Flood,” which opened on Thursday at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. Portraying only eight people — nine if you include her own alter ego — she nevertheless brings the questions, the pain and even the unspeakable thoughts of hundreds, if not millions, to life. “Until the Flood” is an urgent moral inquest.
Its technique will be familiar to those who have followed the genre of quasi-documentary, monologue-based theater, particularly as honed by Anna Deavere Smith and, in some of her earlier plays, Ms. Orlandersmith herself. To research “Until the Flood,” whose title ties together the many images of flow and overflow in the script, she conducted a series of interviews in and around Ferguson. (The play was commissioned by the Repertory Theater of St. Louis, some 15 miles away.) From the interviews she fashioned the local characters — black, white, male, female, young, old — she inhabits here."
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