David Finnigan is an Australian theatermaker and the son of a climate researcher with an urgent story to tell about how climate change is already wreaking havoc on the planet. With Hurricane Milton barreling down on Florida just days after Helene devastated wide swaths of the southeast, the wake-up call seems especially on point. “Anthropogenic climate change — human-induced climate change — is not on it’s way — it’s here, and it has been for decades,” he inveighs near the top of his one-man show, Deep History, which opened Wednesday at the Public Theater.
We’re living in a new era, the climate era, Finnigan argues, and we had better get used to the ways in which Mother Nature will disrupt our day-to-day lives. His show is an engaging but sometimes awkward blend of personal history, documentary (complete with slides and video footage), and science lesson. Rest assured, he doesn’t delve too deeply into hardcore science even as he steps back, way back, to recount how the volcanic eruption at Mount Toba nearly eradicated early humanity 75,000 years ago. He then leaps forward to different eras in our past, seeking to draw lessons for how we might confront our current predicament.
Finnigan, a handsome man with a stubbly salt-and-pepper beard and a tight army-green t-shirt that shows off his toned frame, is an appealing tour guide to our shared history. He moves barefoot about the stage, playing cheesy pop songs and working himself up over the plight of a childhood friend trapped with his family in the deadly wildfires of his native Australia in 2019-20 — blazes that claimed 34 lives and destroyed a land mass the size of Louisiana. There’s a visceral sense of dread to his description of those fires that contrasts with his drier, more sober approach to his chosen subject — and he savvily plays on that dichotomy.
At one point does a TED talk become a work of theater? I’m not sure that Finnigan ever manages to bridge that gap despite his boyishly energetic stage presence and sincere intentions. Take one of the show’s visual metaphors: a funnel placed on a table, with a cellphone camera recording as he pours sugar into it. The sugar piles up on the table at first in spoonfuls, and then in a mountain as the entire bag is dumped in, to represent the rise in the human population over time. It’s a striking image, but the case for Malthusianism that you might expect from such a demonstration never follows. So what point is he making exactly? Similarly, he gets so agitated over those Australian wildfires — the footage he shares of orange skies and a drive through a fully-ablaze forest is truly harrowing — that he winds up abandoning his plan to deliver takeaways from his bulleted talking points. It seems there’s nothing any of can actually do to avoid, or even mitigate, the devastation.
In the end, Finnigan reminds us that humanity is stuck in a situation that’s in large part of its own making — even though none of us are individually responsible. Science may not be able to save us. Nor art. But we’re somehow going to have muddle through this ongoing, ever-unfolding crisis together. And it’s better to come together, like strangers in a darkened theater, than to try to go it alone.
DEEP HISTORY
Public Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 70 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through Nov. 10