Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
✭✭✭✭✩
by Alanna Mitchell, directed by Franco Boni with Ravi Jain
The Theatre Centre, Toronto
March 19-23, 2014
“The ocean contains the switch of life.... And that switch can be flipped off”
The first thing to know about Alanna Mitchell’s Sea Sick is that it is not a play. Instead, it is a fascinating, well-written and well-delivered 70-minute lecture about a topic of major importance based on Mitchell’s 2009 book Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis. It may have sound and lighting cues and director Franco Boni make refer to as a play, but it isn’t one. This is not a criticism. It’s just a potential audience should know what the show is like. There have been autobiographical plays staged in the form of lectures before, most notably Rick Miller’s Bigger Than Jesus (2003). Yet, even there Miller was not playing himself as much as one version of himself. In Sea Sick, there is no question of Mitchell playing a role. She simply is herself, and her lecture, in fact, draws its strength from her complete authenticity.
Virtually the first thing Mitchell tells us in her soft-spoken miked voice is that she is not an actor and is not a scientist. She is a science journalist, once on staff at The Globe and Mail, and her duty as a journalist is to find stories that need telling and to tell them. They may not be stories people want to hear but that does not mean they should not be told. As it happened, she stumbled upon the biggest story of her career and it was not a story that people wanted to hear. It is, however, a story that must be heard.
Mitchell tells us how growing up in Regina with her parents – her father a biologist and her mother a painter – gave her just the right background to appreciate the story she was to discover. Her father, a fan of Charles Darwin, gave her an a love of facts and respect for a man whose theories overturned the comfortable view of the world people held in the 19th century and still challenge people today. Her mother gave her a love of art and the knowledge that facts alone do not convince with as much impact as facts presented skillfully. Before she even became a journalist, her father made her aware of the steep decline in numbers of the greater sage grouse, an iconic bird of Saskatchewan, due to habitat destruction.
After she became a journalist, Mitchell had the idea of writing an article about the importance of Charles Darwin and set out to recreate some of his famous journeys with modern scientists. While in the Galapagos Islands, she happened to have Sylvia Earle, a famous marine biologist, as her roommate who pointed out to her the danger of the “red tide” that was washing up on the islands. A red tide is the common name for harmful algae bloom and is a sign of toxins and/or depleted oxygen in the water, thus presenting a danger to any species living near the coast or in coastal waters.
Mitchell had been afraid of water ever since an incident in which she nearly drowned, but her conversation with Earle made her aware that an important story was to be found in the sea rather than on land. Because it is so vast and deep the global ocean makes up 99% of the living space on the planet. Between 50 to 85% of the oxygen in the air we breathe is generated in the ocean by phytoplankton, the foundation of the oceanic food chain. As Earle made clear, if life on earth were to die off, life in the ocean would still survive. However, if life in the ocean died off, so would life on earth.
She soon read all she could about oxygen depletion in the ocean due to ocean acidification and realized that scientists were concerned about a phenomenon of crucial importance to the survival of life on the planet, but one about which the public knew nothing. People may know that global warming comes about because the burning of fossil fuels spews so much carbon dioxide into the air. What the general public didn’t know was how this increase in carbon dioxide affected the oceans. About a third of the carbon dioxide humans put into the atmosphere enters the ocean and about 80% of the heat caused by climate change is absorbed by the ocean. Carbon dioxide interacts with water to form carbonic acid which kills off ocean life. Excessive heat also kills off ocean life. If ocean life is killed off, then so, eventually, will life on land.
There have been five mass extinctions of life on earth in the past. Worst was about 250 millions years ago during the Permian period when the ocean no longer produced oxygen. At that time, known as the “Great Dying”, 90% of the species then alive died. As Tim Flannery, a famous Australian biologist, told her, “The ocean contains the switch of life. Not land, nor the atmosphere. The ocean. And that switch can be flipped off.”
Mitchell tells us about how she joined the crews of leading scientists to see firsthand what is happening around the world. She sees the rare sight of coral spawning near Panama, she sees a deoxygenated dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where fertilizers from farms poured into the Mississippi River have emptied and she sees an area of ocean, once known for its prolific aquatic life but now with an acidity level too high to support life. She even notes that the National Naval Aquarium in Plymouth, England, which has the highest concentration of marine biologists, has had to close its “Mediterranean” tank because fish that once lived in the Mediterranean Sea have moved out to other areas, including England’s waters, because the sea itself has become too warm. During the 264 years since the Industrial Revolution, humankind has succeeded in making the ocean 30% more “warm, breathless and sour” than it has been for millions of years. These three conditions are unfavourable for ocean life and thus unfavourable for the production of oxygen for life on land.
To lend the lecture an air of theatricality, Shawn Kerwin has designed a “set” on the bare stage of the new Theatre Centre consisting of a white circle painted on the floor, a blackboard, and a table with a glass pitcher and tumbler on it. Lighting designer Rebecca Picherack first makes the circle glow when Mitchell mentions the ring that mating prairie grouse make when they do their dance to impress the females. In the course of the evening Picherack’s lighting helps us imagine the circle as the earth, the ocean and as the submersible in Mitchell’s scary, awestruck but hilarious account of descending 30,000 feet below sea level.
Obviously, the people who will want to see Sea Sick will be people who already “believe” in global warming and are not averse to facts. Mitchell’s calm, self-deprecating, non-combative account of what she learned and how she learned it is an ideal way to acquaint oneself with this global problem. You will likely ponder the implications of her conclusion long after the lecture is over.
Yes, it is a lecture, but it deserves the greatest possible audience. It is the inaugural work chosen to open the beautiful, first-ever permanent home for the Theatre Centre at 1115 Queen Street West, inside a former Carnegie Library, a heritage property built in 1908. Do go to see Mitchell but also enjoy Toronto’s newest theatre venue.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Alanna Mitchell. ©2014 Chloë Ellingson.
For tickets, visit http://theatrecentre.org.
2014-03-20
Sea Sick