On the surface, Christina Anderson’s engrossing drama “the wave, the ripple that carried me home” is about the fight to integrate public swimming pools in the fictional suburban town of Beacon, Kansas. But like water itself, there are depths here that defy cut-and-dried boundaries.
As Anderson points out in passages that sometimes ripple toward poetry, water is both destroyer and redeemer, a font of life and a taker of it. On stage as in life, the movement to integrate public pools in the 1960s and ‘70s was marked by violent history and lethal racism. But there is also a buoyant sense of joy flowing through the world premiere running through Feb. 12 at the Goodman Theatre, in a co-production with Berkeley Repertory Theatre (to where it travels later this year).
