A Brief History of Human Extinction
(Cultch Mainstage)
Year: 2018
Creative team
- Directed by Tamara McCarthy
- Created by Jordan Hall and Mind of a Snail
- Performed by Stephanie Elgersma, Jessica Gabriel, Daniel Martin, Dave Mott, Lisa C. Ravensbergen, & Chloe Ziner
- Design by Stephanie Elgersma, Jessica Gabriel, Chloe Ziner, Jerguš Opršal, Chantal Short & Nancy Tam
About
160 years in the future, a vastly changed climate and a creeping fungal plague has trapped the last remnants of the human race in a hermetically sealed biosphere. In a desperate gamble to preserve the species, Ever Pickwas-Holtz, the last descendant of the brave scientists of the Next Earth Project, works to complete an ark – an embryo ship that will carry Earth’s genetic legacy to a new home in space, while also caring for Ommie, the last living sea otter. With the launch looming closer and closer, Ever records messages to the potential future colonists, a cautionary history of humanity’s conflicted relationship with the natural world. But while her tales for the future children of Earth may be intended to shape our new beginning, Ever’s growing uncertainty about both humanity’s future – and her own – cannot help but leak through.
As Ever struggles to explain our checkered ecological past, Adam, her genetically-engineered childhood friend, has begun to suspect that launching the Ark will exhaust the facilities fuel reserves and condemn both of them to death. With the fate of the human race in the balance, tensions mount in their fragile Biosphere, and a series of strange occurrences outside reveal an even more terrifying possibility: There’s something alive outside the facility, and it would very much like to come in.
Using multiple forms of puppetry to evoke the natural world and our desecration of, and estrangement from it, A Brief History of Human Extinction paints a portrait of a world irrevocably altered by human progress, and asks: Is extinction a catastrophe? A natural process? The inevitable result of human progress? And if it is, what does it mean if we’re causing our own?