Journalist delivers dramatic facts about world’s oceans

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This article was published 11/03/2022 (1607 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Alanna Mitchell is a breathtakingly atypical presence taking the stage of the Tom Hendry Warehouse this month.

She doesn’t project the easy confidence of the more seasoned performer we’re accustomed to seeing treading those boards. She is a journalist, you see.

In her Tuesday evening performance of her own work Sea Sick, she confessed to having a nightmare about showing up on stage without pants.

Yet Mitchell comes through as a comforting presence. If you’ve worked in a newsroom, she’s precisely the kind of affable, interesting sort with whom you may enjoy a chat in an ongoing quest to avoid your own work.

More to the point: If you knew you had bad news coming, she’s precisely the kind of empathetic person you’d want to deliver it.

That, in fact, is her mission in Sea Sick, roughly 65 minutes in length, not counting the Q&A session following each performance. Mitchell’s beat is science. She was raised on the Prairies of Saskatchewan, by a scientist father and an artist mother, which suggests she had a genetic predisposition to presenting factual material in colourful ways.

This is how she manages to describe, say, a coral mating event with an almost erotic fervour.

Mitchell spent years covering the subject of oceans, as the carbon crisis inexorably raises temperatures and pollution turns the water acidic, to potentially cataclysmic effect. Mitchell illustrates the mortifying result of that latter circumstance with a clear pitcher of vinegar and a piece of chalk.

And, oh yes, there is a blackboard.

The play is the theatre centrepiece of The Bridge, RMTC’s annual festival of ideas, focusing this year on ecological topics: Our Only Earth. That theme attempts to balance the dire circumstances of global warming with a hopeful call to corrective activism.

Even for Mitchell, apparently, it’s a hard ask. She learns a disturbing fact: If all life on land ceased, the ocean would go on, but if life in the ocean ceased, it would be lights-out for the world.

This realization leads to her own month-long crisis of doom-laden depression before accepting an assignment that would take her on a submersible going 3,000 feet deep.

It’s funny that a plunge into the darkness at the bottom of the ocean might serve to snap you out of a dark funk. Also funny: a story about finding yourself having to pee in a tight space shared with a male scientist who happens to look like a movie star.

Director Franco Boni (with an assist from Ravi Jain) stages this show with minimal stagecraft, relying on Mitchell to hold the audience with a simple collection of anecdotes, well told, describing scientific concepts with the crystal clarity of white vinegar… pre-chalk.

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