Continuity: A New Play By Bess Wohl

Or: In The Last Five Minutes of Light

In a desolate corner of the Nevada desert, dressed up to look like the arctic wastes, Maria (Rebecca Spence) is trying to salvage her movie. Formally an acclaimed documentary maker she has been chosen to steer a Hollywood blockbuster about eco-terrorists and melting ice, but finds herself sabotaged by the studio, thwarted by her location, infuriated by her stars, and tangled by the presence of her writer/producer/ex David (Marc Grapey).

It is a curious truth than any work of fiction designed to introduce an audience to idea of conservation, climate change or Nature itself will invariably be upstaged by the human story injected to give it cohesion and palatability for the general public. Insignificant entanglements: love affairs, villainies, quests to triumph over the establishment, all cast long shadows that obscure whatever place or phenomena the work purports to be about. This so much the case with the beginning of Bess Wohl’s Continuity, a very dark comedy on the tales we tell about Climate Change, and is so crushingly inverted by its end.

It is so, so very nearly an excellent show. Wohl’s sense of comedy bouncy balls off walls of darkness and then send us chasing after it to drop down into a new pit of schadenfreudic despair. Her threading of ideas is the work of a master needlepointer (particularly when it comes to actors Jake (Ryan McBride) and Lily (Netta Walker) and the strange camaraderie between them.) But perhaps the play is still finding its feet (or perhaps I just caught an off night) and there’s a little more needed to be chipped away before the statue is free and polishable. Except for the PA (the always excellent Rammel Chan, who infuses his furniture moving role with crystal clear intention) we are uncertain, for the first few scenes, if we would weep should a horrible climate change tripped end befall these arrogant and thoughtless tinsel town critters.

We are saved from apathetic revulsion by Spence who, in one of those sweet synchronicities between a sterling actor and a copper bottomed part, lifts and cradles and illuminates Maria. She gives a pitch perfect performance of a female director under siege: carefully stroking the volatile star (as played Amanda Drinkall, with a forced imbalance but a great wealth of feeling and an amusing turn at acting under the influence), while straining to keep things level with her writer/producer/ex and showing no weakness to the wolves the studio has sent to bring her down. Her frustrations, her gentle moments of kindness, and the tears she cannot shed for fear they would mark her as soft and weak and be her undoing, are all subtly but brilliantly embodied by Spense. It is a glory of the world when Maria finally stops being polite and seizes her authority, and we and her crew and the play are electrified in equal measure.

But, alas. That gripping, edge of the seat moment of movie magic is swallowed up Larry (Bill McGough), the film’s science advisor who drifts through the set like the worn out Ghost of Climate Yet To Come. He is adamant that David’s script be “buttoned up” on its facts (lest the Climate deniers use it to dismiss fact as fiction.) Unfortunately one of the facts he insists be included is that (and spoilers, I suppose) it’s all ready to late to do anything. We’ve passed the point of no return and before even the end of the century, the human race, if not indeed all life on earth, will have perished in the rapidly inhospitable transformations of our dear world and it will All Be Our Fault.

Now of course that’s an oversimplification, as Wohl (through Maria, bless her) is quick to point out. We can’t really know exactly how things will pan out; if perhaps can find the magic bullet that will keep us existing and out of the dark ages at the same time. But given how closely it matches the current line (not to mention the multitudes of violent hurricanes, droughts, and other inhospitable weather) we cannot turn away from Larry’s fact that our home is changing, and not for better.

I’ve seen some depressing endings before: Castro Smith’s Feathers and Teeth was plain horrifying, Ruhl’s Eurydice was gut stealing and heart wrenching, but never have I been left with a show that leaves you ripe to step out of the theater and throw yourself under a bus (or, if you really loved the planet, to collar a couple of pedestrians and take them down with you.) And of course as a species we wield stupidity and distraction to our survival, and tomorrow we’ll go about our business, Noch Amol. But Continuity is blaring wake up call, even if it comes after the train has gone and we are left bleary in bed wondering what happened. As Larry mildly charges, learning inconvenient truths from the comfort of theater seats builds complacency: “You’re part of the problem.”

The outlook, at least from Wohl and the greater Climatologist community’s standpoint, is grim. But if the dark is fast upon us (as Maria, trying to squeeze in a few shots in the last five minutes of light, is always trying to outrace) let it not be said that we gave up our stories. Let it be said we held on to that at least. For, complacent and harmful as they might be, they kindle and carry the best in us. The insignificant entanglements that somehow tie us to the fate of the world entire.