From the archives: May, 2008 - Piven Theatre's 'Because They Have No Words'

October 29, 6:07 PMChicago Theatre Review ExaminerCatey Sullivan

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This review was originally published in May, 2008 in Pioneer Press Newspapers

With the beam of a flashlight on a ramshackle wooden framework, Piven Theatre’s Because They Have No Words illuminates the indelible heartbreak of Hurricane Katrina. Almost three years after the levees broke, you may think everything that could possibly be recounted about that tragedy has been covered through the hundreds of hours of television footage, thousands of pages of print and infinite pixels of digital ink. But co-playwrights Tim Maddock and Lotti Louise Pharriss offer a fresh take on Katrina and a riveting tale of and sorrow, survival, death and redemption.

Assailed by the stench of decay as he fumbled through the rotting remains of homes turned into tombs, Maddock (who also stars in the piece) reenacts the moment he first glimpsed the streaked remains of the flood’s waterline. As Maddock describes an abandoned home where a beloved beagle fought for his life, the scene is pitch black but for the eerie pool of light circling near the top of the wooden frame set. There were tiny, frantic paw prints throughout the house, Maddock recalls. A frenzy of claw marks on a bedroom door. And there is the watermark where the flood crested, four inches from the ceiling.“We never found the puppy,” Maddock says. If you’ve ever loved a pet, the moment is truly wrenching.

Yet despite such profoundly sad moments,Words, directed with sensitivity and intelligence by Emilie Beck, is a testimony to idealism and hope surviving in all-but unimaginably disheartening circumstances. Maddock’s autobiographical story shows how bumbling, seemingly ineffectual and insignificant gestures – getting a sip of water to a dying ferret; petting a terrified wolfhound destined for euthanasia – can make a huge difference for the good.

Maddock, an actor based in West Hollywood, decided to volunteer toward Hurricane Katrina cleanup efforts shortly after his mother died. The work, he believed, would give him a renewed sense of purpose and connection at a time when he felt meaningless and adrift. So brimming with do-gooder enthusiasm, Maddock headed south, anticipating a hero’s welcome and two weeks of “cleaning out cages and walking dogs.”

His expectations couldn’t have been more wrong. In the post-Katrina chaos, he was greeted with hostility. The work – breaking into abandoned, precariously unstable homes and searching for pets - was potentially deadly. Organization was almost non-existent. Nobody was in charge. Nobody was accountable. Tens of thousands of emaciated, injured and terrified animals needed to be coaxed out from closets, under beds, and separated from snarling packs that roamed the streets. These were the best case scenarios. Worst case saw volunteers retrieving the bodies of animals that had drowned, starved or perished in any number of other horrible ways.

Maddock and Pharriss write with clarity, emotional punch and unexpected, understated humor about his fellow volunteers (a tightly wound, animal rights activist on probation for ‘liberating’ hippos from the zoo; a former stripper whose act incorporated a thong festooned with peppermint candies; a dognapper whose theft of a Chihuahua named Xena becomes a major plot point) and their harrowing, heartbreaking work (wading through ankle-deep raw sewage in search of a cat named Gasper, comforting owners who had been forced at gunpoint by the National Guard to evacuate, and leave their pets behind.)

The engrossing story also shows how Maddock’s time in Louisiana served as an affirmation of his identity as a gay man. But first and foremost, Because They Have No Words gives an articulate, emotionally resonant voice to the furry, four-footed victims and survivors of Katrina. If you have a pet, you’ll want to go home and give them a bear hug.