Drilling into 'The Great
Divide'
It was the role of the 19th-century
playwright to opine and cast judgment; it's the role of his 21st-century
analogue to negotiate and facilitate dialogue. At least, that's
what a theatergoer might conclude after watching Adam Chanzit's
The Great Divide, a modern adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's
An Enemy of the People. Their very titles show a stark
contrast in the playwrights' temperaments: Whereas Ibsen was confident
that the masses didn't know what's good for them, Chanzit sees
the complexity in every political battle, and, thus, he refuses
to delineate between right and wrong.
Such even-handedness makes
The Great Divide — a new Shotgun Players production
directed by Mina Morita — seem thoughtful, discursive, and
balanced, but also a little unsatisfying. Chanzit chose to tackle
one of the most contentious political issues of the day —
hydraulic fracking, which, by itself, is fabulous grist for drama.
Not only does it split us along political and economic lines;
it's also divisive in the literal sense: "Frack" is
short for "fracture," i.e., fissures created by pressurized
fluid, with the intent of extracting natural gas. In the last
two years, it's become a major national news story, particularly
in light of a University of Texas study that raised concerns about
water contamination, waste management, air quality, and explosions.
Chanzit took all of these
matters into consideration in writing his play, which he set in
a small, economically depressed town in Garfield County, Colorado,
which stands to benefit substantially from a gas boom. When a
large company steps in and decides to drill there, the town residents
suddenly have jobs. Most of them work at the plant; others, like
Rita Lopez (Sarita Ocón) snag jobs as company flacks. The
new industry helps bolster the local economy, lower gas prices,
and pave the way for more development. Its effects reverberate
everywhere, and no one is impervious to the Gold Rush mentality.
Into that setting comes
Doctor Katherine Stockmann (persuasively played by Heather Robison),
a dyed-in-the-wool progressive who spent several years working
in Latin America, but repatriated to Garfield County in search
of a simpler life. Her brother Peter (Scott Phillips) is the town
mayor, her mother (a salty Michaela Greeley) is the de facto matriarch
of what was evidently a local dynasty. Like her namesake in Ibsen's
play, Stockmann quickly discovers contamination in the water and
concludes that it's a by-product of the new industry. Her complaints
fall on deaf ears, since fracking has become not only the town's
economic backbone but also part of its political infrastructure.
Just as the original Dr. Stockmann found himself maligned for
protesting a line of toxic "medicinal" baths in Norway,
this Dr. Stockmann incurs the wrath of locals who are blinded
by sudden prosperity.
Thus, Chanzit retained the
basic contours of Ibsen's plot, but made the story more nuanced.
In The Great Divide, no one is either unilaterally good
or unilaterally evil. The townspeople who stoutly defend the merits
of hydraulic fracking are also the ones who suffer its environmental
consequences. The journalist, Hovstad (Ryan Tasker), who could
be a whistle-blower, ultimately yields to popular opinion. Even
Dr. Stockmann makes a somewhat wobbly moral compass. As Peter
notes, she left him to care for the elder Mrs. Stockmann while
she went off to do human rights work. It's a source of ever-festering
resentment.
To honor so many conflicting
points of view is admirable, and Chanzit did, indeed, write a
political play that manages to not be pedantic. That said, he
also burdened Morita and her cast with an unnecessarily complex
script, and with characters who don't demand that we feel invested
in them. It's occasionally hard to tell who works for whom, owing
both to "The Company" having no proper name and to the
mayor's inability to separate its interests from his own. All
political machinations aside, there's the problem of not-easily-digestible
subject matter. Hydraulic fracking is by definition wonky, whether
or not it's a hot news item. When your Greek chorus of drillers
is rhapsodizing about "viscosity," don't be surprised
if some audience members nod off.
To their credit, though,
Morita and her crew also managed to find romance in their subject
matter. For all the talk about natural gas and fuel economy, there's
also a bleak Colorado landscape dotted with rusty derricks, all
captured in Martin Flynn's industrial set design. There's an undertow
of desperation, filtered through the heavy female breathing that
dominates Colin Trevor's soundscape. And there's youthful infatuation.
Early in the play, Stockmann's daughter, Petra (Luisa Frasconi)
climbs one of the rigs with her beau, the journalist. Bathed in
an orange spotlight, Petra dangles her legs over the landscape
of Garfield County. The two of them talk about the future as they
gaze down at a deeply fractured rock layer, and at a town on the
brink of transformation.
