BP

New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre is hundreds of miles from the Gulf Coast and it’s been seven years since BP’s Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing eleven men and starting one of the worst environmental disasters in our nation’s history.  
 
But Spill, a play written and directed by Leigh Fondakowski, makes it seem like only yesterday. The play opens in small-town Texas diner, during an interview with Shelley Anderson.

I am a community organizer with Steps Coalition, a grass roots social justice organization in Biloxi, Mississippi.  In 2014, we were invited by a group of residents living in the Cherokee subdivision to help support their organizing efforts to reduce their exposure to industrial pollution.  The subdivision is located near Bayou Casotte Industrial Complex in Pascagoula, which houses the largest Chevron refinery in the world, two sandblasting and paint operations, two chemical plants, and a BP processing plant and gas exporting facility.