It’s the Water

This paragraph, a description of a nonfiction performance piece by
Stokley Towles called Waterlines, might be what’s wrong with
theater in America:

Artist Stokley Towles will present Waterlines, a performance piece,
in July at Volunteer Park, also home to the Volunteer Park Reservoir.
Towles will explore local perceptions and behaviors around water use,
its sources and conservation efforts. He traced the flow of our
city’s water through interviews with city utility employees. He will
show his findings, tell stories of our city’s water supply, and share
artifacts in a 40-minute performance that presents the municipal
utility in playful and illuminating fashion.

Apologies to whoever wrote that dreary description—one assumes
somebody at the Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, which
commissioned the project—but you screwed up. Bureaucratic pidgin
like that is like chloroform to audiences. It’s almost as if you
don’t want people to come to Stokley Towles’s bizarre little
piece of journalistic theater about rats, oil-clogged pipes, and
sewer-worker slang for all the used condoms they find crumpled in the
pipes beneath our city (“whitefish”). Thank you, Arts & Cultural
Affairs, for commissioning Waterlines, but can we please not
write about it like it’s homework? It’s not supposed to be good
for you.

Towles is a disarmingly charismatic man—tall, tanned, and
wholesome looking, like a Christian camp counselor—who interviews
people about the mundane facts of their lives, mixes all the details in
a storytelling blender, and then makes shows telling you things you
never even realized you should’ve been wondering about. They’re like
Richard Scarry books—the ones that explain what firefighters are
and how buildings are made—for grown-ups.

Towles hasn’t made many performances—only seven in the past 14
years, most of them in the 1990s—but Waterlines is about
so much more than “perceptions and behaviors around water use.” It’s
about the rats in your toilets (they’re really there), about the
invention of near beer (as a safe alternative to drinking water, since
the low alcohol content supposedly killed germs), and about a local man
named Mel who has walked 90 percent of Seattle’s sewer pipes (the
things he’s found there: a tricycle; part of a canoe; a secret reading
room with desk, chair, and plywood floorboard that somebody obviously
set up as a private hideaway—Mel, Towles says, let it be).

Other topics discussed: secret tunnels leading to springs,
accidentally demolished in Israel; what parts of Seattle have the most
fat- and oil-clogged sewers; the etymology of “rival” (those who share
a river or a stream); and Seattle’s professional water tasters, whose
palates are more accurate than microscopes in figuring out what kind of
algae are living in the water. Microscopes can only see what’s in a
tiny drop, but the tasters can detect a broad range of algae species in
one mouthful and help the city figure out what kind of treatment
methods to use. The tasters, Towles says, claim our source water has a
potato flavor in October, then moves on to notes of cucumber, beets,
and Brazil nuts as the temperature and algae content change. Once,
Towles heard an expert describe her sample as tasting “like summer
camp—a hint of wet life jacket.”

“I find it very reassuring that it’s not left to the mechanics and
computers and pipes to determine how our water is treated,” Towles says
in a trailer in Volunteer Park where he will perform Waterlines for the next few weekends. “Everyday stuff that I thought was everyday
stuff is not everyday stuff.”

Towles has filled the trailer—near the reservoir and Seattle
Asian Art Museum—with maps, photographs, different brands of
bottled water, and other people’s stories about water pinned to the
wall. Don’t be shy about going in. When the trailer opened on a sunny
day last week, the first visitor—a bespectacled, gray-haired
docent at the Volunteer Park Conservatory—timidly walked through
the door and said: “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“No, no,” Towles said, ushering her inside. “It’s for you.”