"The play tries to take on too much, feeling at times more like a treatise than a character-driven drama, but that’s partly because so much is in danger of being lost."
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"...'shadow/land' brings the mass destruction into focus by centering on two women...Nothing brings family closer than tragedy, and as mother and daughter watch the water rise around them, long-buried secrets and uncomfortable truths begin to surface."
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“ ‘shadow/land’ is, according to press materials, just the first in Ms. Dickerson-Despenza’s planned cycle of 10 plays exploring the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the city and its inhabitants. It’s a decidedly promising beginning.”
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" 'Shadow/Land' is only the first play of a planned 10-play cycle about Katrina and its ongoing effects. With this ambitious opening act, Dickerson-Despenza and the Public have set high expectations for a tale of biblical proportions."
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“It's a richly dramatic situation, played out against a background of climate disaster and massive governmental failure…Oddly, however, shadow/land was more successful as an audio play than in Candis C. Jones' full staging in the Public's LuEsther Hall. This is in part because the script is so packed with references -- to the dance hall's storied past, to complex family relationships, and to events from New Orleans' history -- that it can be hard to unpack in a fast-moving theatre production filled with lighting and sound effects.”
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“Dickerson-Despenza explains that the play is the first installment in a 10-play Katrina Cycle. As ‘shadow/land’ forcefully shows, the hurricane and its aftermath remain a devastating, painful, and shameful period in U.S. history ..the series of plays should offer a suitable monument to the victims of Katrina and a chance to artistically redress a national atrocity.”
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"The crucial concerns are not so adequately and outspokenly confronted that they raise Dickerson-Despenza’s follow-up Public piece nearly as high as the etched-in-memory Katrina waters rose."
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"shadow/land" by Erika Dickerson-Despenza is a play about the August 2005 disaster, Hurricane Katrina. It is the first episode of a ten-part magnum opus. "shadow/land," though, is more than a play. It is a painfully rich vision of what hundreds and hundreds of stranded rooftop denizens, so touted in the media, must have gone through behind the waterlogged walls of New Orleans. It is the rare theatrical work that recreates the agony and frustration of a natural disaster that transcends the fourth wall, seemingly without artifice, so involving is the entire endeavor.
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