God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(22)
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AS IT HAPPENED, I was supposed to be in Houston rehearsing a new play. I had planned to drive down on Sunday, August 27, but Harvey got there before me. All the roads were blocked. My actors had already arrived for costume fittings, and they were marooned in the hotel. I had a video chat with them on Monday, and they kept looking away from the screen to the window, where the storm continued to rage. Their eyes were filled with awe.
My play is called Cleo. It’s about the making of the movie Cleopatra. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are the main characters. Their illicit romance began on the movie set in Rome in 1962 and became the most scandalous love affair of the twentieth century. I was radiated by their romance, which happened to coincide with the onset of puberty. I have been working on the script, off and on, for twenty years. Bob Balaban, the actor, is our director, and we had a reading at the Alley Theatre in January 2016, on the little Neuhaus stage downstairs. The audience was wonderful, and after the reading, Gregory Boyd, the artistic director of the Alley, offered us a production.
The roads to Houston were just beginning to open up when I drove down on August 30. The Colorado River was well over its banks, and the sodden fields under the heavy sky appeared unnaturally lush, like an Irish landscape. Some of the access roads were still flooded. I saw an eighteen-wheeler trapped under an overpass; only the top of its cab was above the waterline. I wondered what had happened to the driver. There were only a few cars on the interstate, including some freelance rescuers towing swamp boats. Nathan Rott, a reporter for NPR, ran into a bunch of guys with oversized four-wheel-drive pickups who were forming up in Columbus, seventy miles from Houston. One of them told Rott, “It’s moments like these—and only moments like these—that America truly appreciates its rednecks.”
When disaster strikes Texas, one of the most effective first responders is a local chain of grocery stores, H-E-B, which dispatches a convoy of fifteen vehicles, including mobile kitchens that can produce 2,500 meals an hour, fuel tankers, portable generators, and Disaster Relief Units that contain pharmacies, ATMs, and business services equipment. By the time Harvey made landfall in South Texas, the convoy was already on the way to Victoria and Rockport. Over the next several days, various units headed to Houston. On Thursday, August 31, the Beaumont emergency management coordinator called H-E-B to say that the city was marooned. There was no water pressure. No supplies were getting in. And the state wasn’t able to help in a timely fashion. The H-E-B convoy charged through. That’s my idea of enlightened Texas capitalism.
As soon as I got into Houston, I went over to the theater. It’s on Texas Avenue, in the heart of the Theater District, only three blocks from Buffalo Bayou, which marks the northern edge of downtown. I had seen photos and videos that cast members had sent me during the storm. Texas Avenue had essentially merged into the bayou. The water was five feet deep in front of the theater. When I arrived, the streets were mostly dry, with jumpable puddles along the curb. The storm had moved off to Beaumont, but the wind was still gusting through the canyon of skyscrapers. I was prepared for the worst, I thought.
The Alley had its first performance in 1947, in an unheated (and certainly uncooled) dance studio on Main Street that accommodated eighty-seven people. A sycamore tree grew through the roof. A high-school drama teacher named Nina Vance was the founder. That same year, director Margo Jones created America’s first nonprofit resident theater in Dallas. Until then, theater outside New York was largely made up of touring Broadway productions, but it is because of visionaries like Vance and Jones that the flow reversed. Most original works—such as Cleo—now start in regional theaters, where they can be developed and find an audience.
The Alley opened in its current, brutalist-style building in 1968. It looks to me like a fifteenth-century Venetian fortress, with turrets that have also been compared to anti-aircraft emplacements. It’s not the kind of building to concern itself with hurricane winds. On the street in front of the theater was a vacuum truck, a sort of tanker that is used in the oil fields to suck fluids and slurry out of fracked wells. It had been going for twenty-four hours, the driver told me, but so far had only gotten two feet of water out of the theater.
I followed the suction line inside, where the chief engineer, Daniel Naranjo, greeted me. Daniel’s regular flashlight was out of batteries, so we relied on my iPhone. Upstairs was the recently renovated 774-seat Hubbard Theatre, where Cleo was intended to be staged; it was untouched. We could have put on the play that afternoon, except for the fact that the utilities were all drowned.
We headed down a spiral staircase toward the little theater below, but we only got a few steps before the water greeted us. The Alley had been flooded before. The previous high-water mark came from Tropical Storm Allison, in 2001—the worst rainstorm to hit an American city until that time. Harvey eclipsed that mark by a solid two feet. Below the submerged stage was a basement, which contained the dressing rooms, restrooms, laundry, wardrobe department, and about a hundred thousand props from the seventy years of the Alley’s existence, all of it buried under millions of gallons of water like a sunken ship.
It would take ten days to drain the theater before the demolition could begin. The main problem, Daniel explained, was the electrical panels, which were custom made, and would require at least six weeks if not several months to replace. Cleo was supposed to begin performances in three weeks.