Updated September 3, 2025 at 2:49 PM MDT
Anthony Bean is all about preserving history through the arts.
The veteran theater director recently wrote and directed a one night only performance of 504 NOLA: a youth musical about Hurricane Katrina, performed at the Orpheum Theater in downtown New Orleans, Louisiana.
The Aug. 30 production was part of the city's effort to observe the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall Aug. 29, 2005 at Plaquemines Parish, 50 miles southeast of NOLA, and devastated New Orleans in the days that followed.
The play begins in darkness, with only flashlights coming from actors dispersed throughout the auditorium, searching for anyone trapped by the storm. "They say, is there anybody here? We got you. Look, there's a kid over here," Bean told NPR's Michel Martin at a rehearsal in his home studio last week.
The show is a story about the future of New Orleans. It's told through the young people who helped rebuild their hometown. The cast is made up of youth actors all born in the years after Katrina, some of them as young as 7 years old. The story belongs to the generations that came before them, parents and grandparents who may have talked of what they lived through.
In one scene, dancers spin and sway with long scarves representing the Mississippi river. Bean calls the act "the riverfront," where performers embody the floodwaters that breached the levees and destroyed entire neighborhoods.
"The dancers out there become the river and the water and how that breached the levees so they become the water," Bean said.
He said young people really stepped up, helping with rescue efforts
"One of the ideas came from a young man. He's 20. He commandeered a bus," he recalled. "And he drove his family and just picked up people - like Harriet Tubman, picking up people. And there were a lot of young people, rolling people in wheelchairs going to the helicopters."
Their stories, he said, have long been erased. "There's no proof that teenagers, young people, have helped in saving lives." Now he's attempted to change that with his play, 504 NOLA.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bean said he was also inspired by young people who rallied against efforts that would have pushed Black people out from the Lower Ninth Ward in favor of more green space.
504 — named for the area code for the metropolitan area of New Orleans — aims to capture the resilience of the Ninth Ward, of youth, and of a city that was forever changed by Katrina but still creating, making itself anew.
The audio for this story was produced by Lilly Quiroz, with digital editing and production by Majd Al-Waheidi.
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