TRIBECA: What was your initial impetus for writing Juicy and Delicious? LUCY ALIBAR: I wrote the play right when my dad was starting to get sick. Usually I’m a pretty in control person and pretty poised, but for some reason I couldn’t really process it; it really threw me for a loop. So I started writing a play about this kid named Hushpuppy losing his dad, and his world starts to fall apart in terms of time and order and space. Grits start raining down from the sky and the Aurochs start coming out of these caves through the red clay of Georgia to devour schoolchildren, and the teacher and the father are trying to prepare the children for the end of the world when there aren’t any grown-ups left and they’re not children anymore.
Looking back on it, I think I was writing about me not being a child anymore—figuring out how I’m actually going to live through that. Because you can’t be a child if there aren’t any grown-ups, and I felt like my grown-ups were falling away. So that was the start. Benh liked the story, and he liked the Aurochs, and he liked the characters.
He wanted to do his first feature with these characters and storylines, [but set] it in south Louisiana where the ground is actually sinking. He was shooting [his short film] Glory at Sea at that time—that was how he came to New Orleans—and we drove down to the end of a road in Louisiana and found a spot, which is where we put The Bathtub. He really wanted to make a movie on that land, where it’s actually sinking.
Read the whole interview at Tribeca Film.