In 'The Ripple, the Wave That Carried Me Home,' a Family Fight for Integrated Pools

Playwrights Horizons is staging "The Ripple, the Wave That Carried Me Home," Christina Anderson's play about a Black family's decades-long fight to integrate whites-only swimming pools in Kansas. Alana Raquel Bowers plays the narrator, Janice, at every age.

The play opens in 1992 Ohio. Janice is 30-something, married to a sweet, unseen husband, with young sons. A perky stranger phones with an invitation: a pool in her hometown is being dedicated and named for her father, who died several years before. She is on the fence about going. She is also miffed that her father is memorialized while her mother is forgotten.

The story then moves back to mid-20th-century Kansas. Whites-only swimming pools are a bane of the tenaciously racist city where Janice grows up. Among the older generation in her family, civic awareness is a way of life. They gently mock any relative naïve about how the system works.

"Is this your first time in America?" they tease. "Let me show you around."

Who is fighting, and for what?

Janice's activist parents, Helen (Crystal Lucas-Perry) and Edwin (Biko Eisen-Martin), are local movers and shakers. Each comes from a different Black neighborhood in their city. They operate as a true team, devoted to the betterment of their community.

From the time Janice is a toddler, they raise her to be a strong and joyful swimmer. Since before she was born, they have fought to integrate the pools. By the 1970s, when she is a teenager, they are still at it. She has had enough.

In a fit of adolescent defiance, Janice tells them: "I don't want to spend my life chasing after white people, begging them to let me play with their toys."

What does the play actually chart?

The narrative question is how Janice came to abandon her parents' cause, distance herself from both of them and develop an antipathy for water, of all vital elements. She recounts that story herself, from her 1992 kitchen-table distance, and Anderson's writing has been described as pensive and intimate rather than polemical.

The play shows its audience around, in the manner of Janice's teasing elders. It locates systemic racism not in speeches but in a specific municipal object: the public pool, a place of childhood joy for one family and a site of exclusion enforced by the city around them.

The dedication ceremony in 1992 gives the story its frame. Whether Janice returns to Kansas for it — and whether her mother's role in the struggle is acknowledged alongside her father's — remains the question the play sets out to answer.

What does this change for audiences? It offers a domestic, three-generation lens on the civil-rights struggle in the North, told through one woman's break with her parents and with the water itself.