Laurence Fishburne Portrays Joe West’s … – Duane Morris LLP

No image available.

By Emily Sawicki
March 28, 2024
Law360

By Emily Sawicki
March 28, 2024
Law360
This weekend marks the end of a three-week debut run of the one-man show “Like They Do in the Movies,” written and performed by Tony Award-winning actor Laurence Fishburne — which includes the moving story of what his longtime friend Duane Morris partner Joe West endured at a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina. Laurence Fishburne and Joe West As the storm made landfall in August 2005, West and his physician wife, Nadine, were holed up in New Orleans Methodist Hospital in the city’s hard-hit east side with their infant son, in what would become a desperate weeklong struggle to keep patients alive while they awaited rescue. Now, West’s heart-wrenching story has come to life on stage thanks to Fishburne, who included West’s experience at Methodist Hospital in his semi-autobiographical one-man show currently being staged in Manhattan’s Perelman Performing Arts Center. Duane Morris LLP litigation partner and chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer Joseph K. “Joe” West and Fishburne first met in 1997, when West represented the actor in a property acquisition. Since then, the two developed a friendship built on mutual support, both West and Fishburne said in an interview with Law360 on Thursday, with West’s sons referring to the actor as “Uncle Fish.” West said that, while others were fleeing the city ahead of the hurricane, he and his wife, an OB-GYN at Memorial Hospital, decided to remain in the city. Nadine stayed to offer medical assistance, including to three patients already in labor at the time the storm was making landfall. While their two older sons were evacuated north to Baton Rouge, West, Nadine and their three-month-old son, Andrew, sheltered in the hospital. “When you marry an OB-GYN, you’re essentially marrying her patients, as well,” West said. A trial lawyer with close to 20 years of litigation experience at the time, West said that when the power went out at the hospital, despite lacking professional medical training, he donned a pair of scrubs and began using a hand-powered respirator to aid intensive care unit patients who had been on ventilators. For about 36 hours, West and others — “whoever was there: people who worked in the cafeteria and janitors and a couple of cops and National Guardsmen,” he described — worked around the clock to provide oxygen to the patients, but one by one, each succumbed. “There were so many of them [patients], they were just on the floor, in the hallway, in the stairwell, and so everybody who was there, whether they had medical training or not, was really pressed into service of one kind or another,” West said, “either helping to care for people, helping them make people comfortable or, when helicopters finally came to rescue us, if you were able-bodied enough to do it, carrying people to the roof to put them on helicopters. Or, after the ones on the roof died, you know, carrying them back down and placing them in what became sort of a makeshift morgue.” Among the last to be evacuated, West said he worked to identify those who had died over the week, many of whom did not have charts or IDs, leaving notes of any information he knew. Since nearby hospitals and area residents knew Methodist was planning to stay open during the storm, some patients had been dropped off at the front door and left during what West described as the “madness and chaos” of the city’s evacuation. The hospital was demolished after the hurricane, and a new hospital reopened nearly 10 years later under a new name, New Orleans East Hospital. West said the trauma he experienced at Methodist Hospital, which included personally witnessing the deaths of 10 patients, has had a profound effect on his personal life and his practice. “I’ve done a lot of litigation over the course of my career — I still do,” West said. “It’s so intense, and there’s so much focus on perfection, getting things right. I know people who, if there’s a comma out of place in a brief, it’s the end of the world.” “When you experience something like that, you realize that’s not the end of the world,” West said. “It’s something that can be corrected. But when you experience something like what I experienced, you realize that perspective is really important.” In the months and years following the hurricane, Fishburne said he would speak to West about the attorney’s experience of living through a catastrophe Fishburne said was as important to United States history as Sept. 11, 2001. “I was so moved by all that he expressed to me and by all he shared with me, that my initial response was I’ve got to figure out how to make a movie about this,” Fishburne said. “I’ve got to get my production company together and make a film.” By 2018, the actor was determined to find a way to share West’s story. It was around that time Fishburne said he realized West’s experience could be included in a one-man play he had started to write but shelved about 15 years earlier. “I realized that I needed another story and that Joe’s story would be the perfect story to add to my show,” Fishburne said, later adding, “It’s essentially the heart of the show. I’m just incredibly grateful because it really — it moves audiences to tears, but more importantly, it’s also helped Joe arrive at this place that he’s at now.” The “place” Fishburne described is West’s decision to write a book about his experiences during Hurricane Katrina, a decision Fishburne lauded. “I think the events of Katrina are still living,” Fishburne said. “The effects of it are still with us.” Fishburne, well-known for his roles in “The Matrix” movie series and on the long-running television show “Black-ish,” has focused much of his career on telling what West described as “important stories.” Those include roles in 1995’s “The Tuskegee Airmen” and 1991’s “Boyz n the Hood,” as well as his work narrating the PBS series “Slavery By Another Name.” Fishburne and West backstage “As an artist, he’s made those kinds of choices to really tell important stories that have a lot of impact,” West said. “That makes me feel even more honored that my story has been a part of that lineage.” For his part, Fishburne said it was he who was honored to tell the story. “I was honored that Joe felt safe enough to share his story with me personally, like that, and so that’s the context that I use for it in my show: It’s simply my friend talking to me and telling me what happened,” Fishburne said. The title of the show — “Like They Do in the Movies” — came in part from Fishburne’s perspective on balancing his real life with the characters for which he has become best known. It is also excerpted from a statement West made while reflecting on his first encounter with death at Memorial Hospital, which he was only able to describe to Fishburne during a personal conversation several years later. “I remember saying that to Laurence, and the reason I said it is because experiencing that person’s death, and the deaths of so many other people, was so visceral,” West said. “I still remember the sounds, the smells. It’s really not like they do in the movies.” Reprinted with permission of Law360.

Joseph K. West
+1 202 776 7806
jkwest@duanemorris.com By Emily Sawicki March 28, 2024 Law360

Joseph K. West
+1 202 776 7806
jkwest@duanemorris.com