stage matters / By William Kowinski

Comedy of Hope

Local ensemble takes the prize at Dell’Arte

(June 24, 2010)  The Prize of Hope, a kind of international lifetime achievement award for live theatre as a popular and accessible art form, will be presented at Dell’Arte this Saturday as part of the annual Mad River Festival. Given annually by Denmark’s Institute for Popular Theatre in partnership with Dell’Arte, its presentation alternates between the two hosts. Not only is the presentation here this year, but the prize is being given to a local Lost Coast ensemble called Human Nature, and its founders, David Simpson and Jane Lapiner.

Known for environmentally oriented shows Queen Salmon,The Wolf at the Door and What’s Funny About Climate Change, Human Nature will perform an excerpt from its work in progress, Two Old Birds or Tripping on the Tipping Point, as part of the presentation program and dinner on Saturday, June 26, beginning at 4 p.m.

Prize of Hope recipients David Simpson and Jane Lapiner at home in Petrolia PHOTO BY BOB DORAN

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The new show, as their previous one, centers on the complex cacophony of issues called climate change. So among the ironies for Simpson and Lapiner is their home base in Petrolia. “Yes, it’s named after petroleum, because this was the first place in California that oil was discovered,” David Simpson said. “Fortunately it petered out quickly.”

Burning up jet fuel to research climate change and its attendant politics from the Arctic to recent conferences in Copenhagen and Bolivia is a more accustomed irony for the activists, since the warming is global. Plus the gasoline to tour their show, which uses comedy to expose the deadly folly of fossil fuel dependence.

If the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists is right, the outcomes are likely to shake if not dissolve human civilization and life on Earth as we know it, so comedy may seem a counterintuitive approach. But Simpson and Lapiner outline several of its functions, confirmed by their experience with audiences.

Satirical humor that they describe as “not light but not nasty” can expose faulty facts as well as dubious motives. But when people are involved, there’s generally plenty of pomposity and delusion on all sides of the issue. So they’ve gone after enviros, too. The comedy “gets people to laugh at themselves,” Lapiner said. That’s particularly useful when a major barrier to confronting this complicated and immensely consequential problem is the mental and emotional freeze-up of denial.

Getting people to lower their defenses often paid off in post-performance discussions at universities and other venues, which could last for an hour more. “Sometimes a few would stay, often maybe a hundred,” Simpson said. Climate scientists were happy to participate. “We got into some really good discussions, and not just with the converted. There were opponents who took the risk of saying what they felt.”

Human Nature (which includes their daughter, Joyful) toured their first climate change show over four years, at a time when the agenda was confronting ignorance and denial. The new show is aimed at “provoking action.”

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