Salty
Fuck the odds.
Salty, AJ Clauss’ new play, up now at The Voxel from Truepenny Projects, is a real postcard from the edge. Set in a zoo’s artic exhibit area in a Baltimore (?) of the near future, it concerns Adélie penguins, particularly Bowie (Griffin DeLisle) and Silver (David Brasington), two males who have accidentally been mated, which seems like a surprising oversight until you realize that the humans around are a little…distracted. As keeper Winnie (Vicky Graham) casually mentions on her tours: “Nature is on her way out, and she’s taking us with her.” Turns out climate change was real after all, of fucking course, and the world is tipping dangerously close to the void. In fact, these might be, and probably are, the last. Definitely penguins. And maybe humans, too.
If I’m making this seem kinda dark, well it is, but it’s my favorite kind: darkly goofy. Penguins are hella awkward on land (once they’re in the water, they make way more sense) and the actors have their movement vocabulary (thanks to Movement Director Nigel Semaj and Costume Designer Liz Dunlap) down to an artform, with hilarious results. With their goggles, wet suits, and webbed feet (Dunlap delights in playing with lush texture, from the patchwork florals of the zookeepers uniforms to the shiny neoprene of the birds to the harsh harness buckles and pointy nails of a wily fox) the penguins, much like their human counterparts, are acting weird, and of course they are. The earth is being squeezed like a stress ball, and things are decidedly Not Okay. In fact, the entire play is about how quaintly ridiculous the everyday seems when you can look out your window at the mushroom clouds. It sends its little emails, it Windex’s its little windows, it suffers its little infatuations, and all the while, the end grows ever nigh. But hope springs eternal, and survival still insists upon itself, and sometimes, an egg appears.
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Director Tessara Morgan Farley keeps the blocking contained, careful, a bit claustrophobic, which makes sense given the exhibit parameters, and leads to some great choreo of bewildered birds constantly running into the walls. Her handling of the transitions between penguin and people is fantastic, silky, fluidly ushering us from one world into the next with almost no breaks, emphasizing how similar they are as we all go down with the ship. This porousness is carried through in the set, too (Luke Farley, Emerson Balthis, Tyler Brust), which is absolutely perfect down to the little feet painted on the floor and the animal facts on the ramp leading down to the seats, with features that seem to move seamlessly. Lights from Eric Nightengale and sound from Mark Navarro are so effective that there are amusing moments that I forgot I wasn’t actually in a zoo — the cool tones of the cloying arctic “environment” and the measured announcements for lost and found really lull you into a false sense of security that is gleefully shattered almost immediately.
The cast here is tight, managing a script equal parts humor and pathos with relative ease. DeLisle and Braisington are the emotional center of the piece, their courtship and subsequent parenthood so very soft and sweet that I clutched my partner’s arm several times (I’m one of those people who would have killed to visit the real gay penguins, Roy and Silo, back in the late 90’s at the Central Park Zoo). Caitlin Weaver, one of my favorite actors in Baltimore, checks in as Snickers, a penguin dealing with unimaginable loss, and also Steph, a zookeeper who will do almost anything to find a match. Weaver is incredibly adept here, taking us on a painful journey one second, morphing into comically mortified crushbound the next. Will Murphy is adorable in his keeper form of Mason, an oblivious poet type that takes awhile to come around, but finds something more profound in penguin Edward, supporting his partner while quietly trying to heal himself. And we meet Graham (who I last saw, and fucking loved, in I Will Eat You Alive) and Sydney Marks as Winnie and Des, a couple at the “beginning of the end” of their relationship, both human and as penguins Fauna and Flora. They turn in the funniest scene in the show, pissed and squaring off during their annual catastrophic molt, and also hit some heartbreaking beats — funny how small personal extinctions still matter, even in the face of the Big One.
But for me, it is the otherworldly, potent performance of Nigel Semaj that’s the take away, and when I tell you it is astonishingly good, you will believe me. Semaj plays a fox that drips, swishes, and oozes all over. If Bowie and Silver are this piece’s beating heart, the fox is the metaphysical one, the wild, brutal and untamed truth that nature may empathize at times, but she doesn’t have to care, and she is more than justified in her anger at us. Semaj pulls off a level of connection with the audience that made me hold my breath; it’s like they literally read our minds. Their command of the space is unparalleled, and their ultimate moment made me gasp out loud, it is that singular. I have seen a lot of theater, but I can’t think offhand of a performance that got me like this one, Semaj is almost spooky — delicious, specific, cruel, and knowing.
Look, we all know the end is coming, because the end is always coming. It’s especially bitter this time, sure, because it’s definitely our fault, but you never know, maybe something will survive, somewhere. Hope isn’t a delicate thing, it’s a clawing, desperate, pointless, awful, beautiful shine deep in the belly of the beast. If we keep our eyes on that light, we might come through. Or we might not. Either way, I’m going to go look at the penguins at the Maryland Zoo this weekend, the funny little birds I suspect I’ll never see the same way again, and I’m going to try harder. If not for us, for them. For them.
Salty plays through June 22nd. For tickets and information, go here.
