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Theatre in Review: Hothouse (Malaprop/Irish Arts Center)

Photo: Nir Arieli

Climb aboard the Crystal Prophecy, a luxury liner carrying its overprivileged clientele to the Arctic -- the former Arctic, really -- "to see where the ice isn't." (We are told it is sixty degrees Fahrenheit at the top of the world; you might need a sweater but skip the fur parka.) It's sometime in the not-too-distant future and polar ice caps are a thing of the past. Bird species are dying out with clockwork regularity and parts of Dublin are regularly under two feet of water. You've heard of cruises to nowhere; we're on a voyage to the heart of oblivion, courtesy of that old devil climate change. This is the world of Hothouse, which, grabbing at our lapels to get our attention, turns pending global catastrophe into vaudeville sporting an unsettling rictus.

Providing the entertainment on this ship of fools, performers promenade like Vegas showgirls; representing various avian types, they are shot dead or strangled. A creature named Madame Rabbit takes the stage to warn about the killing properties of DDT over several generations. No less a personage than Rachel Carson ("the one, the only Cassandra of Climate Catastrophe") shows up to announce, "It's not commonly known that I'm a big fat lesbian." The "last humpback whale" takes the stage, but it is so covered in plastic bags as to be unrecognizable.

A product of the well-regarded Dublin theatre company Malaprop, Hothouse does not lack for imagination or theatricality. And kudos to playwright Carys D. Coburn for tackling a crucial issue that, mishandled, is enough to send audiences running for the exits. At a time when so many playwrights harp on their personal identity issues, it can be thrilling to see a play that squarely faces the mess we're all in. In Hothouse's best moments, Coburn casts a cold, clinical eye on matters domestic and global: A bitter matron of several characters caught in a generational cycle of abuse, tells her pregnant-out-of-wedlock daughter, "You know your grandfather had another family we never knew about? That I've a sister I've never met? How'd he pull that off, when he couldn't boil an egg?" (That last line, so casually delivered, carries a sting not easily forgotten.) At the same time, the cruise's captain, taking the long view, describes the earth's climate as a falling house of cards: "A plane has just crashed near Tomsk in Siberia as a result of extreme turbulence, directly related to thermal pollution from a data center in Svalbard, directly related to a cryptocurrency transaction in which a Dutch teenager bought child sex abuse images an Irish man took in Bangkok!!! It's all true, but who can bear all that, all the time?"

It's a good question and Hothouse works its gaudy feathers off trying to make its point without terrifying the paying patrons into immobility. This is not to say that Coburn, director Claire O'Reilly, and their talented, game-for-anything company have figured it out. The show's sense of humor veers wildly from Monty Python silliness to satire with a death rattle in its throat, never settling on a consistent, unifying tone. At the performance I attended, the audience often started to laugh, then trailed off nervously, unsure how to take jokes that are, at heart, brutally deadly serious. (This is especially true of Anna Clock's songs, which seem more determined to provoke than engage.) Then again, the script has trouble keeping its mind on the central topic, veering off to focus on LGBTQ issues, toxic families, and the evils of capitalism. A narrative of sorts focuses on Ruth, who is billed as the protagonist; an abused child who grows up to become a spectacularly bad mother, she is replaced by her daughter Ali, who, onboard, flirts with another passenger, Robin, with an exchange of nerve-wracking truths. These scenes don't mesh with the entertainment's music hall aspects; Ali's decision to abandon her dying mother cues the play's most arresting passage, but it also amounts to a massive distraction. Coburn and company do their intersectional best to explain how all these evils support each other, but the dots don't get fully connected, especially when the narrative leaps into the future, depicting a fuzzily imagined utopia in which children are raised in some sort of group situation that defies description.

The company is certainly nimble, leaping through every contortion the script demands. The production design -- Molly O'Cathain's orange-inflected scenery and costumes, John Gunning's lighting, and Carina Metz's wigs and make-up -- keep the production visually arresting. Hothouse also bears an interesting thematic resemblance to Deep History, a similarly themed piece now at the Public Theater: Both argue that giving in to doomsday predictions is far too easy; whatever happens next, we have to be engaged and creative with the changes that are surely coming. But this theatrical voyage carries too much cargo in its hold, making it difficult to stay on-topic. The challenge of dramatizing climate change continues. --David Barbour


(28 October 2024)

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