Endlings @ Cry Havoc Theater Company
—Jan Farrington
In the company’s final performance before “sunsetting” (aka closing the doors), Cry Havoc Theater Company left me as I began the first time I attended one of their plays: moved, enlightened, impressed. So glad and grateful to have seen many of this young troupe’s “devised” shows, all created from interviews with real-life people. And so sorry it’s coming to an end.
Founded in 2014 as what she thought might be a two- or three-year project, educator and writer Mara Richards Bim guided her teenage actors into territory not usually considered for “youth” theater: gun violence, border and immigration woes, freedom and repression, gender identity, and much more. For each show, the cast and their adult mentors fanned out to record facts, stories, and ideas in interviews with experts, politicians, and people whose lives were affected by the issue.
It was (and is) called “devised theater”—made from real life. “Verbatim” (word for word) interviews became plays audiences got involved in—and kept thinking about.
Endlings, the company’s closing show (directed by Bim, who developed the script with the teens of Cry Havoc), is about the global climate crisis. And to watch these young actors play environmentalists, activists, foresters, naturalists, river salmon (and themselves)—all warning of the dangers and trouble ahead—well, it was hard.
One environmentalist interviewed for the play calls what we’re feeling “anticipatory grief.” Not only for our changing, diminishing natural world—but also for the people we love who will live in it far longer than we.
The actors vividly express their own experiences and emotions, and make the interviews come alive—good work, done with the emotional and theatrical intelligence Cry Havoc is known for. “We’re at zero hour,” said one. “There’s no time to wait to be ‘given’ a seat at the table.” The Earth is family, said another: “We live among relatives, not resources.” “A million species on track for extinction.” “A lonelier world for us.” “Do something—the world is on fire!”
In an inspired and moving bit of movement theater, the young actors linked hands and moved as a group of salmon struggling up the Columbia River. As they moved through the waters one teen and then another came through to the front—taking a turn facing the current’s battering in the “point” position. Words can move and teach; so can visuals.
In a short discussion after the play, one person spoke of “using art to bring critical light to issues.” In its theater-making, Cry Havoc’s “light” —and the teens and adults who shone it—made us look, see, feel, think…and sometimes act.
