the ripple, the wave that carried me home

the ripple, the wave that carried me home is a play by Christina Anderson, staged Off-Broadway by Playwrights Horizons as its New York premiere. Tiffany Nichole Greene directs. It is a limited run, and it opens the company's 2026-27 season in the fall.

The play centers on a woman named Janice. Her parents were activists who fought to integrate public swimming pools in Kansas in the 1960s, and the struggle strained her relationship with her family. The framing story takes place in suburban Ohio in 1992, where Janice is invited to give a speech at an event in her father's honor. The play moves between those two periods and asks what a family owes to a political legacy, and what it costs to carry one.

Anderson has worked with this company before: Playwrights Horizons produced her earlier play Inked Baby in 2009, so this is a return.

In 1992, Janice is settled in Ohio suburbia, a long way from the Kansas of her childhood. Offers to celebrate her father's work in public have begun to pile up, and she has to decide how to answer them.

Her answer depends on her childhood. Her parents fought over the pools, and they also taught Black children to swim. The play goes back to the 1960s to show that world, so the audience sees both the public cause and its private cost to the household.

That is the setup, and the rest is best left to the theater. Edwin, Helen and Gayle are the other characters named in the cast list, alongside Janice.

Anderson writes for the stage and also for television and film, and she works as a photographer. In 2022 she earned a Tony nomination for writing the book of the musical Paradise Square.

The script does not run in a straight line. It moves between 1992 and the 1960s, and the themes of justice, legacy and forgiveness run through both periods.

The company lists four actors. As of October 2026, Alana Raquel Bowers plays Janice, Biko Eisen-Martin plays Edwin, Crystal Lucas-Perry plays Helen and Marinda Anderson plays Gayle.

The play first reached the stage in September 2022 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, with the Goodman Theatre as an associate. Berkeley Repertory Theatre also commissioned it. The Goodman staged its own production in early 2023, and Yale Repertory Theatre presented it in April and May 2023 under director Tamilla Woodard.