Moving Water

Synopsis

Sinister sounds at night. An apartment building moans, alive and in pain. There is something in the walls, or is it imagined? And now Zara has disappeared. Her apartment is suddenly occupied by a new tenant, but with travel restricted because of a global pandemic, it seems impossible that she could have simply moved, or gone back to Pakistan.

Set in a 1960’s apartment building in a large US coastal city, Moving Water proceeds against the backdrop of a pandemic exacerbated by climate change, placing three of the building’s residents in direct conflict with the global crisis and with each other. The search for Zara begins when Sergei, the building’s superintendent, discovers she is missing. They had been working on a project together, one bound up in secrecy and designed to save the building from an impending crisis, real or imagined.

In addition to tracing the story of the superintendent, an unreliable narrator lost in dreams of the approaching crisis, the plot unfolds around Drew, the son of the building’s owner, who is determined to maintain the status quo, and Luna, a graduate student studying oceanography who may have her own radicalized ideas on the environment. As the characters grapple with each other, they come to embody the wider struggle over whether science and technology are enough to solve climate issues, and how inaction has led to the potential for catastrophic loss.

Moving Water is ultimately about how water fragility shapes human interactions. From Zara’s relocation from Pakistan, to Luna’s emigration from Mexico, to moments when climate change impacts people on a cataclysmic level (hurricane, flood, drought), to the individual stories of the building’s residents, the play is about water’s impact on human lives and the life of the planet. Created in collaboration with playwright Eric Henry Sanders, Serious Play’s Moving Water stirs the audience to reimagine their intimate association with water while finding enormous beauty in this primal element.