It would be days before the full nature of the loss could be known, weeks before handmade props and state-of-the-art lighting rigs, or what was left of them, would be tallied and appraised. At the Alley Theater, in the anxious days immediately after hurricane Harvey slashed through Houston and surrounding areas, the scale of destruction was still obscured.

Grime-streaked floodwater nearly slapped the 10-foot ceilings of the lower of the building’s two chambers, lurching up a winding stairway and foreclosing access to the lobby below. But when the New York-based playwright Rajiv Joseph, who recounted his experience by telephone on Wednesday, peered down into the morass on Aug. 27, the grief was instant and deflating. A large banner advertising his ambitious new play, “Describe the Night,” which was to have its world premiere there on Sept. 15, was affixed to a balcony on the building’s stone-gray brutalist facade. Now he was certain he and his crew would be on the first flights out of town, their visions of a grand opening washed away like so much hope in a city deluged by one of the costliest natural disasters in American history.

“It felt like a death,” Mr. Joseph said. He compared the scene to the opening of the film “Titanic,” when a deep-sea vessel discovers the blanched ruins of the ship decaying at the bottom of the ocean.