Louie Crowder is a playwright living and writing in uptown New Orleans.
About the Play
Frankie St. Pierre, Eden Duplantier, and Sunday Mislove live and love together in downtown New Orleans.
While Sunday, an African American, is being arrested and booked on murder charges after fleeing the scene of a shooting, Frankie is planning a revolution as he struggles to wrap his head around the precarious existence of the city and their place in it. As he realizes: "We are living in the cataclysmic."
Meanwhile, their controlling partner, attorney Eden, desperately tries to hold her mismatched family together in the pressure-cooker environment of the new reconstruction.
Calme Au Blanc is currently being performed at:
Big Top Gallery
1638 Clio Street
New Orleans, LA 70130
(504) 569-2700
Performances begin at 8:00 PM March 13 and 14, 2008; March 21, 22, and 23, 2008; and March 27, 28, and 29, 2008.
Tickets are $10.00 for students, $15.00 in advance and $20.00 at the door.
Excerpt
An Excerpt From the Play
Calme Au Blanc
by Louie Crowder
Reprinted with Permission
INTRODUCTION
The excerpt below is from Louie Crowder's play, Calme Au Blanc. It is a dialogue between Frankie St. Pierre, Sunday Mislove and Agwe, a Voodoo spirit.
FRANKIE:
…I swear, I can’t help but think there’s a master plan to get all the New Orleanians out of New Orleans. We’re being pushed out so that a different kind of people can move in: industrious capitalists like in the Northern Outposts of Atlanta, or Charlotte: places where the spirit has been eradicated. We’ve been slotted to become a capital of industry, a population of affluent and soul-free living. What a shame, too. The culture of New Orleans erupted and evolved out of poverty. It’s the poor, the desperate, and holy who created all the things that make this place special. And now we’re no longer welcome. There won’t be anything left of us except shadows in these fucking leaning buildings we take so much pride dying inside of. Look at me like I’m crazy all you want. The indifference of our leadership is too methodical. The post-Katrina motto of the Mayor’s Office is ‘The only thing wrong with New Orleans is the people.’ So he’s painstakingly orchestrated genocide and economic strangling to rid the place of us all; to make room for the affluent. It’ll work, too. So long as the universities are maintained there’ll be people here to serve the new inhabitants. Servitude is our only acceptable contributing role isn’t it? – We’re guilty in all this, too. We’ve taken on the Victim role. We don’t want to be saved anymore. The time for that is over. We’ve clocked year two of the aftermath. We’re all nestling into our comfortable interiors where it’s dark and safe and impenetrable. It’s the same place where crazy lives. We’re holding out now for romantic deaths. We long to have our portraits painted as we’re lying on pale sheets with a slight trickle of blood coming from our mouths, a guttural hint of a voice just vocal enough to utter ‘consumption.’
AGWE:
It’s money that’s driven and created by greed and ego that destroys people then civilizations. It’s serving money over people that conjures catastrophe. I want you to know you share in the guilt, you have your piece of the responsibility for whatever has happened in this place. It’s remarkable, isn’t it? After being stripped clean, poised to create the extraordinary, money once again trumped humanity. The arrogance is overwhelming. Just after the storm there was a moment of absolute potential for truly great, magical things to occur here in this place. There was love, compassion, humanity. My God, Ed, joy filled the skies and angels danced along the surface of the seas. It didn’t take long for that potential to be destroyed though, did it? You’re all lost in the throes of genocide now because you didn’t pay attention. Look into the skies these days, Ed; the skies are filled with carrion birds, birds just like you, eh, Ed?
FRANKIE:
You stop medicating a body when you hear the death-rattle. It’s not deserting, it’s recognizing the inevitable. We’re the ones who were deserted. We’re completely vulnerable here. This is a city primed to die. And, frankly, my love, what’s another poor black man put to death to these fools in charge of this place? They’ve been very consistent in their allegiance. – I wish revolution were not idealistic. I wish I were a Che Guevara. Please don’t ever, ever tell Eden Duplantier I said that. I’d never hear the end of it. – VIGILANTES TAKE UP YOUR ARMS AND PROTECT WHAT’S YOURS. It fits me like a glove, Sunday Mislove, my love. I can see men and women standing guard on their front porches throughout the fallen neighborhoods of the Old New Orleans with weapons in their grips protecting what’s theirs from the vultures who’ve flocked to pick our bones clean. I love the image because its people concerned about their dignity and salvation. It’s people who intimately know true justice does not come from a political system.
(Beat.)
So if that were to happen where would we be when the waters rise again? They won’t rise from a storm this time you see. They’re already rising from the Gulf simply taking back what belongs to the ocean. My beautiful vigilantes will ceremoniously, and as delicately as poetry, sink with their land in sea: sacrifices to ideals and to love. God help us all. We are all living here bittersweetly. We are living in the cataclysmic.
SUNDAY:
We are leaving the cataclysmic aren’t we, Frankie?
