Of all the initiatives the National Aquarium has launched over the past four decades, few have been as unconventional as its decision to work with Baltimore Center Stage to put on a play.
The result of their collaboration was “A Play for the Living in A Time of Extinction,” a show with a message about climate change and what it means to be human in an era of man-made extinction.
After opening last month, the play is wrapping up a three-week run this weekend. The final shows are Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which is, coincidentally, the aquarium’s 40th anniversary.
This is the first time the aquarium has collaborated with a theater organization. For CEO John Racanelli, working with an arts group provided an opportunity for the aquarium to reach more people with its conservation message.
“We have initiatives that we do to try to raise revenue, and we have initiatives that we do to just raise awareness and accomplish the mission,” Racanelli said. Working on a play with Center Stage was “all about accomplishing the mission…We were honored to be their partner.”
Written by Baltimore playwright Miranda Rose Hall, the show is presented virtually and performed by a single actor, Lindsay Rico. It doesn’t take place at the aquarium, and the aquarium isn’t central to its plot. It’s about a theater company putting on a play to enlighten its audience about climate change.
Hall, 32, graduated from Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore before going on to Georgetown University and the Yale University School of Drama. She calls this play her “meditation on the crisis of extinction.”
Here is how Center Stage describes the plot on its website:
“The Zero Omissions Theater Company desperately wants the audiences of their climate change play to WAKE UP! But when things don’t go as planned, it’s up to their stage manager/light board operator/dramaturg Naomi to find a new way of telling their story.”
Hall said the aquarium’s contribution came during the writing process. She said she and the production team at Center Stage spent time with aquarium scientists, “talking through the science and the ecology that’s mentioned in the play” and “hearing about their work at the aquarium and the importance of storytelling and methods for storytelling as it relates to the climate crisis.”
Hall said Center Stage hosted a “climate communications workshop” with the aquarium and that both the aquarium and Center Stage took part in a panel discussion with the Enoch Pratt Free Library about climate change.
“It’s been a rich partnership,” she said. “I love the aquarium and I really admire all of the advocacy work they do as an organization.”
Hall observed that the aquarium and Center Stage have certain common goals, even though they may approach them from different directions.
“If you think about it, Baltimore Center Stage’s mission is to tell great fictional stories and the aquarium’s mission is to conserve the earth and its aquatic creatures for generations to come,” she said. “This is the perfect overlap of the two missions.”
The difference is largely in the story-telling process, she said.
“This is finding a way into what is real through the vehicle of a fictional story so that it’s not a news broadcast where somebody says, ‘Oh God, I can’t listen to another one of these.’” she said. “It’s using the tools of theatrical entertainment to share the same information that the aquarium is trying to convey … in a different way than a news broadcast.”
Hall said having just one actor was a way to reinforce the sense of loneliness and loss associated with extinction.
“Emotionally, it felt very resonant to try to tell a story of grief and isolation and extinction” by having just one actor, “who finds herself isolated and alone on stage,” she said.
Racanelli said collaborating with Baltimore Center Stage gave his institution a new way to raise awareness of conservation issues.
“We spend a good bit of energy on site and in our various social media trying to open people’s eyes to what is going on with the climate and how that’s going to affect all of us, in terms of sea level rise and in terms of extreme weather events,” he said.
Working on a play is “not a revenue maker for us. That’s OK. We didn’t intend it that way. But we’re very excited to reach people with that kind of important message through the arts, which is really a new direction” for the aquarium, Racanelli said.
Hall said the play doesn’t come out and tell audience members what specific steps they can take to save the planet, as an aquarium might. She said she hopes it will engage the “hearts and minds” of viewers so they’ll think about they can do.
“I hope that the play can be … a call to action for people who don’t feel engaged but that it can also serve as a very meaningful emotional experience for people who are already engaged in this work, because it’s very difficult work,” she said.
“I feel so much for all of the scientists who are on the front lines of the extinction crisis and just watching everything that they care about go up in flames,” Hall added. “I hope the play can support them and support people who need a call to action.”
People come away with different reactions to a play, which is fictional, than they have after visiting the aquarium, which is reality-based, she said.
“I want the play … to create the emotional and intellectual conditions, as only theater can do, to have the vulnerability to look at what is happening in the world without turning away from it, without that boundary of denial or fear or sadness” that people get from news stories that they can scroll past on their mobile devices.
The final shows are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Ticket information is available at centerstage.org.
Ed Gunts is a local freelance writer and the former architecture critic for The Baltimore Sun.
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