David Finnigan’s “Deep History” at The Public Theater NY Shakes Us to our Core as He Rewinds the Climate Crisis Ingeniously – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: Deep History

By Ross

This isn’t so much theatre, but more like a wake-up call. Or possibly and more accurately, Deep History, a play written and performed intelligently by David Finnigan, is like a snooze alarm going off once again, for the umpteenth time, after going off time and time again since we woke up on this planet, beginning long before we even could even hear it. It’s a powerful engaging theatrical presentation, bordering on the idea of required viewing. I couldn’t help myself, but part way through I wanted to actively bring every high school and college student to the Public Theater in NY to see this. I wanted to light a fire (not literally, or maybe in an indigenous fire management kinda way) under every person I know, so hope could rage inside me as strongly as how this show made me feel.

In a way, we, and I’m talking about us in the larger, collective humanity sense, really are the metaphoric teenagers Finnigan (Scenes From the Climate Era) describes in his fascinatingly deep dive into the climate catastrophe, unpacking the framing with far more clarity than I could ever imagine trying to explain here. We, collectively, are adolescents, self-involved and unconscious, not wanting to wake ourselves, or be woken up by the facts around us, in our ever-evolving climb toward adulthood and to take on the responsibility of the world we inhabit. 

Finnigan, as his 2024 self, takes us through his own personal climb, rotating himself around to his younger self who started this project at the end of 2019 in the English countryside. He introduces himself, then rewinds to the time when, at the request of his hospitalized father, flying high on pain meds, he started working on a six-point thematic unwrapping to find a way through what is fast approaching. Actually, he clarifies, that we are currently in the midst of this crisis, not at the beginning. And those numerical turning points, captivatingly unpacked for us, are the moments in our history, starting as far back as 11,000 years ago, that have ushered us forward to this current moment in time; to a place where our ecosystems have transformed and our planet is on the brink of an “unthinkable climate disaster“.  And he does it in the most powerful, meaningful, creative, ingenious, and honest manner that you can’t look away. You don’t want to.

It’s delivered forth with such passion and engaging intensity that it’s impossible not to hear the fire alarm bells going off as he shifts gears in and out of a one-soul narrative in an attempt to uncover some lessons about our human selves that may help us survive. He also shifts and inserts his life’s experiences with his scientist father who, after a telling and dramatic fall, dedicates his life to the study of climate change, and the bushfires that ravaged Finnigan’s hometown of Canberra. But more importantly, the possible personal apocalyptic scenarios that sometimes happen when quick choices are made without thinking. When fear and selfishness, two emotional states that might be the reason we find ourselves in this crisis, drive us into the flames and destruction of our planet, with no safe route out.

“Over one single summer in 2019, the catastrophic nature of fire revealed itself as something new and unfamiliar,” the powerfully appealing Australian playwright tells us as he writes and performs Deep History from his heart and his soulful intellect, eliciting disturbing imagery and upsetting emotionality as he walks us through the wildfires of Australia that leveled an area the size of England, burning and killing over one billion animals, including many trapped humans. With the compelling evidence mounting, utilizing video, designed solidly by Hayley Egan (NT’s London Tide), matched with engaging music by Reuben Ingall, and structured solidly under the watchful eye of director Annette Mees (Artistic Director of Audience Labs), Finnigan runs us through his proposal, utilizing texts he received from loved ones who were racing to evacuate the devastation while backing up his hypothesis with a fiery video that will ignite your senses in the most powerful manner possible. 

It’s a performance that intensely interweaves 75,000 years of humanity within an incredibly personal reframing, displayed in a cascading pyramid of sugar granules destined to challenge the way we look at things forever more. It is delivered engagingly, backed up with scientific research, phone footage, and an illuminating story about our transforming planet and how we have arrived at this troubling point in history. The movement through the piece vibrates at an intentionally high frequency, shifting our thought patterns around and about climate change and the impact it is having on us now, not in some abstract future. It’s not what will come, suddenly somewhere down the road, but something that is already happening all around us under our very feet. Facts aren’t enough to shift us into action, as both he and his father learned long ago. Intelligence must find its way forward, past fear and selfishness, into an arena where we can learn from our mistakes with each and every disaster that has come and is sure to come.

“If we are going to get through this, we need a roadmap“, he tells us. The well-articulated ideas brought tears to my blue Mohawk eyes, as he wisely brought it all home with statistics about plastics ingested into our bodies, piling up in our digestive systems, and the composition of the air we breathe as we sit listening with intention in this very theatre. We, as a collective, living on stolen colonialized land, trying to live the good life with care and dignity, are running the risk of denying it, even if that makes us feel better or less anxious. It’s not enough to give Land Acknowledgment, over and over again to the point when we aren’t even paying attention anymore. Humanity is an adolescent, opting for optimism, in our modern-day creation story. One question remains to be answered. Will we swim our way up to the surface, look at the fires raging in the horizon, and take notice, or will we be pulled out by the dangerous rip currents and drown ourselves in complicated denial?

Go see this show, and be forever changed.