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 Just Add Water by Matthew Ivan Bennett and Elaine Jarvik, featured here. For the other play, Eb and Flo by Elaine Jarvik, which is Plan-B Theatre’s 13th Free Elementary School Tour (FEST) production, follow this link for The Utah Review preview.
At the beginning of Just Add Water, a new play by Matthew Ivan Bennett and Elaine Jarvik, the Great Salt Lake is not just a place. It is, according to Brien, a magically enhanced brine shrimp, the personification of majestic beauty— a queen. Initially, she appears to be dead but as the sounds of a simple dirge expand into a call-and-response chorus suitable for congregational worship, she rises weak and scared but still proud. She says, “Who calls me?! Who dares to summon me from troubled dreams into this form?”
Irritated and wondering why such a seemingly inconsequential creature as a brine shrimp was tapped as the messenger by the mountains to signal that, contrary to her beliefs, she is far from dead, she chaffs at being called a queen or any other honorific. “I was those things! Now? Look at my shores. Dry. Withdrawn. Poisoned. Half of me is already dust. They should put a tombstone right here. ‘Lake.’”
But, Brien is persistent: “The Mountains have called you for you. Because despite the fact that you’re hurting, and feel hopeless right now, you need help. Don’t you?” His persuasion taking hold, Great Salt Lake agrees to go with Brien to the city even though she is convinced that she has been nearly forgotten and no one wants her there.
So begins the Great Salt Lake’s adventure, which is part of Just Add Water, as the momentous opener for Plan-B Theatre’s 35th season in a production, directed by Penelope Caywood. In tandem, for Plan-B’s 13th Free Elementary School Tour (FEST) production, Jarvik wrote Eb and Flo, a play geared toward students in kindergarten through grade 3, also about the Great Salt Lake and how even small acts can be significantly helpful (see this link for an accompanying feature in The Utah Review).
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.
Plays by Bennett and Jarvik are well known to Utah theater audiences, which made it natural and effortless for Jerry Rapier, Plan-B’s artistic director, to ask both of them to collaborate on writing Just Add Water. Joint efforts like these can be risky, especially when both principals have cultivated, respectively, impressive portfolios of original plays that have received successful productions and justified critical praise.
Before Jarvik became a full-time playwright, she worked as a journalist who thoroughly comprehended Utah’s news landscape. Despite the fact that she has lived in the area since the Seventies, her direct engagement with the Great Salt Lake has only flourished recently, notably as part of her research for writing the Eb and Flo script. In an interview with both playwrights for The Utah Review, Jarvik admitted that like many others, she often avoided the lake because of its odor. In one scene when the personified Great Salt Lake is in a Salt Lake City bar, she says, “Yes, I’ll admit it: I stink. Of growth. Of the kind of growth that’s not convenient to you, not appetizing enough…” In fact, it was Jarvik who thought the play should be about a personified Great Salt Lake embarking on a heroic adventure.
Meanwhile, Bennett, well-known for his boundless intellectual curiosity and incisive, assertive opinions, initially believed that they would be writing and combining short vignettes. But he also was drawn to Jarvik’s concept of the hero’s journey. In a Plan-B Theatre blog post, Bennett recalled that they tossed aside a good bit of original material: “And we ended up deciding to rework our approach to many scenes just by talking through the weak points. It’s very different to how I’ve written before, where I’ve put something out there, gotten feedback, and then rewritten. At every stage, Elaine and I discussed the point of scenes (as opposed to just critiquing), and that discussion became the basis, really, of the collaboration.”
The script abounds in positive evidence of that collaboration. Jarvik added, “Most of all, though, I worried that I wouldn’t be smart enough to keep up with him.” As for Jarvik, Bennett explained, “Specifically, I wanted to work with Elaine because of her sense of humor, her whimsy, her ability to see things less literally than I tend to.”
Other key figures in this process were dramaturg Heather May, journalist and executive of Great Salt Lake Collaborative, which comprises 17 news, educational and civic organizations; biologist and author Jaimi Butler and Darren Parry, a local Shoshone Nation elder. Another source was Ben Abbott, a global ecologist at Brigham Young University and the executive director of Grow the Flow. He has worked on global water security projects around the world and has developed expert assessment methodologies for basic and applied research. He has led major expert assessment studies on air pollution impacts, permafrost degradation, global wildfire and water policy.
Last year, Parry wrote in a social media post, “Saving the Great Salt Lake is not a science problem, but a values problem.” The script for Just Add Water springs, in part, from the theme of the Great Salt Lake as our “nonhuman kinfolk,” which Parry recalled how his grandmother referred to it. In recent years, a good number of creative programs in the visual and performing arts areas have been effective for engaging a constructive, welcoming atmosphere that primes the ground for transcending partisan stubbornness, political identity and, hopefully, a good chunk of the recalcitrance we use in balking at our responsibilities as stewards of nature.
The 90-minute play will clip along through a series of scenes in which the Great Salt Lake and Brien are joined by numerous characters.There is a robust blend of wisely chosen bits of science that many will find surprising for how they correct widely held misconstrued conventions about the lake matched by plenty of entertainment in the style of a variety or vaudeville show.
For instance, Great Salt Lake has her own mic drop moment. The perils of dust events — for example, which have not been emphasized as widely as other impacts in the public forum — are wisely inserted into the dialogue, without interrupting its rhythm. As Jarvik said during an interview, “with each draft, we asked ourselves how we do know a fact is actually true,” which, of course, meant going to the original source wherever available. Bennett said the objective was to write a “levelheaded but hopeful piece.” Likewise, Jarvik explained that in writing a play that is fun and informative, the aim was not to be too pessimistic, but also not overly optimistic.
The characters include a chauffeur, a pair of tundra swans who migrated from the Arctic, journalist, scientist, an angry slam poet, bar patrons, characters from an old-time television commercial, TV game show host, farmer, bulldozer, ecological activist, Utah legislator and brine fly. One character goes by the TBH acronym, literally an avatar for the brutally honest expressions by humans about the Great Salt Lake. There also are antagonists representing drought, apathy and development. Great Salt Lake even meets the North Arm, which was once part of the lake. As noted in the accompanying feature about Jarvik’s Eb and Flo play for younger students, it is the ideal theatrical companion to Just Add Water, which is also suitable for all ages.
The cast for the production includes Latoya Cameron as the Great Salt Lake. Amona Faatau plays Brien, along with several other characters. Rounding out the cast are Alec Kalled and Isabella Reeder, who handle numerous characters.
The production runs Oct. 2-19 with performances in the Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts. Performance times are Thursdays and Fridays at 7 p.m., Saturdays at. 4 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. For more information, see the Plan-B Theatre website.