Review: Sulfur Bottom Buries a Good Message With Complicated Storytelling

The Jerry Orbach Theater at the Theater Center provides a very particular flavor of NYC venue: musical parodies of Friends, The Office, and Seinfeld each offer three or four performances a week within the same space. So, Rishi Varma’s cerebral, structurally complex Sulfur Bottom, about the devastating impact of a factory’s toxic waste on a local Black family, seems like an unlikely addition to the weekly roster. Add those jarring surroundings to the sense of disorientation that Sulfur Bottom already exudes.

The play opens with a man lying in the center of a house. As a father and daughter discuss how he got there, it becomes clear that the man is actually playing a dead deer which seems to have some sort of electrical current pulsating through it. In the next scene, a different actor portrays the corpse of a whale somehow beached on a living room rug. The whale later starts to talk.

Varma situates these elements of magical realism in a generations-leaping story of a family debating whether to leave their increasingly toxic home. Fran (Kendyl Davis) dreams of getting out of town as does her Aunt Mel (a vibrant Joyah Dominique), but Fran’s self-confident dad, who’s dubbed himself Sir Cavin (Kevin Richard Best), insists the family stay in place.

Though Varma’s time-jumps contribute to the play’s sweeping arguments about intergenerational destruction, director Megumi Nakamura’s staging doesn’t do much to situate us in any particular time periods: since characters time-travel to moments they weren’t alive during, interacting freely with long-dead family members, the production could do more to make those ambitiously overlapping timelines clear.

Still, there’s effective work from lighting designer Sam Weiser in animating distinct corners of a limited playing space and from sound designer Sid Diamond in delivering the play’s mounting ecological catastrophes.

In crafting an eco-tragedy rooted in environmental racism, Varma most closely echoes the work of Erika Dickerson-Despenza, whose plays highlight with unyielding righteous rage the ways in which Black residents in Flint (Cullud Wattah) and New Orleans (shadow/land) have faced unmitigated destruction from their own waters. “They chose us because we deserve this,” a Black factory representative (standby Aaron Dorelien at the reviewed performance) cheerily announces in Sulfur Bottom, misleading his neighbors with the claim that agreeing to dispose of industrial waste beneath their land will be a worthwhile investment.

Like Varma, Dickerson-Despenza heightens her storytelling with hints of the supernatural or spiritual, but she matches those turns with a consistent poetic language that invests her work with an epic feel. Varma is more successful in his broader gestures than in the details of his dialogue: the quotidian tone of the family scenes feels misaligned with the play’s far-reaching aims. Eric Easter, playing Fran’s husband Winter in a lovely off-Broadway debut, fills that tonal gap most convincingly, first as a hapless young father and then as a worn-down old soul.

In its ever-twisting form, Sulfur Bottom succeeds in unsettling expectations in a series of unpredictable scenes. But Varma’s complicated storytelling doesn’t serve the play’s mission to call attention to environmental injustice. By diverting the audience’s efforts to keeping up with who’s when and what’s where, Sulfur Bottom dilutes its critical message.