Fringe 2025: The Katrina Project: Hell and High Water ⭐⭐⭐

Edinburgh Reporter

09-08-2025

'Louisiana, Louisiana
They're trying to wash us away
They're trying to wash us away' (c) Randy Newman, 1974
Randy Newman's Louisiana 1927, which is played to open The Katrina Project: Hell and High Water, is a song about a different disaster, a different time. After that Great Mississippi Flood – still the most destructive river flood in the history of the USA – the world's longest system of levees and floodways was built to protect the area from future devastation.
78 years later those levees and floodways failed.
On 29 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Buras-Triumph, Louisiana. It hit New Orleans with such staggering force that 80% of the city was flooded. 30% of its population was already living in poverty. Over 1,300 people died.
Now, twenty years later, the students of The Willow School Theatre Department bring the story of what happened in their home city to the stage of theSpace. The Katrina Project, written by Michael Marks and Mackenzie Westmoreland, is based on interviews, stories and found texts from survivors.
The play is performed in the round, with students taking the roles of residents, a police officer, a priest, and various government officials. Whilst this stage set up did allow the students to address each side of the room, I struggled to hear some of them when they had their backs to me. One or two also spoke rather too quickly, making it hard to keep up with their words. Despite this there were some outstanding cameos from gifted actors.
When mayor Ray Nagin issues a mandatory evacuation order, officials are keen to reassure everyone that 'everything is under control' – but it quickly becomes clear that this statement only ever applies to the affluent, largely white, sections of the population. Poor people, people who don't have cars, simply cannot leave. They are advised to try to get lifts, or if all else fails to shelter in the Superdome. They are further advised, however, that going there is 'not a good idea', and that the Superdome is a 'refuge of last resort.'
People have no choice.
A particularly well acted vignette focuses on a Chinese immigrant. Her family in China think she is living the American Dream; in fact she is scraping a living;
'No one is coming for me. I thought America cared.'
An elderly couple decide to shelter in their own home. As the storm rages, the shingles fly off their roof. The 'music' they hear is, they soon realise, the sound of the 'beautiful, terrifying' wind.
The students use the stage well. Officials, weather forecasters and relief workers speak from the corners of the room while residents shelter in the central area, driving home the point that for days no government help arrives. The thousands of people in the Superdome are without food, water, working sanitation and air conditioning. President Bush has to be shown a film made by his own staff before he accepts the severity of the situation; he still attends a birthday party and a baseball game before turning his attention to the catastrophe unfolding in New Orleans.
Meanwhile we hear more horrific stories from those who are trapped and those who go to the city to try to help them.
There is fine acting from the student playing the police officer; devastated by what she sees, horrified by the looting she's supposed to be stopping, terrified for her own family, outraged at the lack of official preparation for what was a well-forecasted inundation.
The president's mother, Barbara Bush, notoriously comments,
'….so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.'
As government officials continue to insist that everything possible is being done, the students convey the rapidly mounting anger of the people left behind. Journalists tackle the chief of Federal Emergency Management Agency and the governor – but other media describe white people taking items from closed shops as 'looking for food', black people doing the same as 'looting.'
'Can you imagine the government leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing — NOTHING — to do with this!' Michael Moore in a letter to President George Bush, 2nd September 2005
Whilst The Katrina Project rightly lambasts the numerous, deadly failings of the US administration in its lack of care for some of its poorest citizens, the play also celebrates community spirit. People realise they can't depend on the government so they come together to help and support one another, and to care for the 'Generation K' children who have lost their families. Many countries send aid. Celebrities hold benefit concerts, sports associations make large financial donations.
Although gradually the levees are repaired and the city eventually starts once more to thrive, many of its poorer residents have by then left New Orleans for good.
The students of The Willow School are impressive in this heartfelt, powerful production.
The Katrina Project was at theSpace @ Niddry Street (Venue 9) at 12.45pm. Its run has now ended.
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