EDITOR’S NOTE: For its 35th season, Plan-B Theatre has produced The Great Salt Lake Plays, part of Wake the Great Salt Lake, a temporary art project supported by Salt Lake City Arts Council, Salt Lake City’s Mayor’s Office, and Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge. One is Eb and Flo by Elaine Jarvik, which is Plan-B Theatre’s 13th Free Elementary School Tour (FEST) production, featured here. For the other, Just Add Water, follow this link for The Utah Review preview.
In 2017, for Plan-B Theatre’s Free Elementary School Tour (FEST) program, playwright Elaine Jarvik wrote River. Swamp. Cave. Mountain., geared toward elementary school audiences ranging in age from kindergarten through grade 3. That play featured two young siblings – an eight-year-old girl (Izzy) and her five-year-old brother (JJ) – who go on a journey that leads them to understand their grandmother’s death. At the beginning of the play, Izzy tells the audience that her mother explained that people go on a journey when they die. She says a journey is “momentous” – “which is a fancy word for big and important. That’s because when you come back home from a journey you’re different from when you left.” The two children are searching for a treasure they believe their late grandmother left them. JJ wonders about where their journey is leading them. He tells his sister, “I’m going back to when Grandma wasn’t dead.”
Nearly two years ago, Jerry Rapier, Plan-B’s artistic director, who was taking his son to school heard a report on KUER-FM public radio about how dust from the exposed portions of the Great Salt Lake bed was a direct threat to the snowpack. With that, he asked Jarvik if she would be interested in writing a play about the lake, would be targeted at a similar school-age audience. Mentioning the communal nature of feeling grief and a sense of loss about what has happened to the lake, Rapier explained in a Plan-B blog post, “Although science tells us it’s not possible to restore Great Salt Lake to what it was 40 years ago, science also tells us that perpetual, adaptive management—lake speak for stemming loss—will ensure our terminal namesake doesn’t fall prey to its terminal diagnosis.
The result is Jarvik’s Eb and Flo, which is Plan-B Theatre’s 13th Free Elementary School Tour (FEST) production for the 2025-2026 school year.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Jarvik, a journalist-turned-playwright who has been living in Utah since the early Seventies, said that she initially had no affinity for the lake when she moved to the Intermountain West. Unlike the picturesque sights of lakeside cottages common in the eastern U.S., the isolated alien-looking shoreline landscape of the Great Salt Lake left her underwhelmed. The swarms of brine flies that made a dinner cruise on the lake unpleasant and the sulfurous odor associated with the lake only aggravated the unflattering impression. Later, visits to Antelope Island and the Spiral Jetty, as well as books and articles by writers including Terry Tempest Williams and fellow journalist Zak Podmore drew her closer to the visceral impact of the lake’s precarious health and future. “Last fall, for the first time in the 54 years I have lived here, I floated in the lake,” she added.
Instead of crafting the story of a journey to comprehend and absorb sensations of loss and grief, for this latest play, Jarvik created two characters who meet on the Great Salt Lake shoreline— Eb, a worried gull, and Flo, a fantastic flamingo— and become fast friends. Not to have their flamboyance restrained, Flo has escaped from the Tracy Aviary in Salt Lake City and is surprised to discover that they are not at the ocean, but discovers at the lake that there also are no other flamingos. As bright and chipper as Flo is, Eb is deep in thought, concerned about why the lake is getting smaller.
Without allowing the story to be didactic, Jarvik easily slips in plenty of useful facts about birds, the lake and the significance of its place on the great bird migration highway. In between honks and squawks and clever ditties (composed by Penelope Caywood), Eb introduces Flo to the lake’s value, the importance of brine flies and brine shrimp, the process of evaporation, the importance of mountain snows and the dangerous risks of dust events. Eb and Flo become good friends, especially when Flo begins to understand why Eb is so concerned and, in return, Eb appreciates Flo’s enthusiasm for finding hope. Eb says, “Let’s remind people that the lake is our friend. And when a friend is sick or in trouble, what do we do? We check up on them. We try to help them.” And, Flo delights Eb by offering to “write a save-the-lake song.”
Eb and Flo, directed by Jerry Rapier, is the ideal family companion to Just Add Water, another new play that Jarvik wrote in collaboration with Matthew Ivan Bennett, which will premiere in a Plan-B Theatre production run, directed by Penelope Caywood, beginning Oct. 2. Both plays are The Great Salt Lake Plays, part of Wake the Great Salt Lake, a temporary art project supported by Salt Lake City Arts Council, Salt Lake City’s Mayor’s Office, and Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge.
Both plays have plenty of hope, entertainment and manageable nuggets of information for everyone. A recent performance of Eb and Flo for teachers attending a workshop at the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program Center at the University of Utah emphasized a compelling appeal for teachers just as strong as it would be for students in the target age group. Many expressed how surprised they were in learning so much about the lake in a clear, accessible manner. The performances of Taylor Wallace as Eb and Benjamin Young as Flo were charming, witty and absorbing.
Between now and May 2026, tens of thousands of Utah students in grades K-3 will see the play. Four actors will play the roles in rotating casts. In addition to Wallace and Young, other actors for the production are Estephani Cerros and Amona Faatau. Public performances also will be offered in the Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts in downtown Salt Lake City at 1 p.m. on the following Saturdays: Oct. 4 (sold out), Oct. 11 and Oct. 18; Feb. 14, Feb. 21 and Feb. 28, 2026. Admission is free but tickets are required.
Photo Credit: Sharah Meservy.
As in every annual FEST production, Plan-B has prepared a study guide for teachers, as a supplement to the performance. The guide news toward state core standards in fine arts, health education, language arts, science, and social studies. The study guide objectives amplify the themes associated with the play, so the students will “cultivate an appreciation for theatre and its power to illuminate complex topics; enhance understanding of animal migration and ecosystem balance, and develop social and emotional skills, including making friends, celebrating strengths, naming and managing emotions, and collaborative problem-solving.”
Each Utah school, which participates in bringing FEST performances to students, will receive a copy of The Great Great Salt Lake Monster Mystery by Bonnie Baxter and Jaimi Butler. The story follows a group of kids looking for the fabled Great Salt Lake Monster encounters tiny baby monsters (brine flies), monster food (brine shrimp), giant furry creatures (bison), the ridges of the monster’s back (microbialites) and pooids.
Directed by Rapier and designed by Arika Schockmel, the production also was assisted by consultants, including Butler and Darren Parry, a local Shoshone Nation elder. Kallie Filanda is tour manager, while Sharah Meservy and Penelope Caywood are education coordinator and education liaison, respectively.
Schools looking to schedule performances will find contact and essential information at Plan-B’s education page. A digital playbill for Eb and Flo also is available.