The conflicts raised by climate change, threatened fisheries and conservation policy are dynamic and sometimes divisive in our communities look at the Maine winter shrimp fishery in limbo, or the strong feelings over extending federal protections to the Gulf of Maine’s Cashes Ledge. These issues are dramatic. Could they also be dramas that is, could they be enacted onstage? The Seacoast area theater company Stage Force is doing just that in commissioning a new play, Carlyle Brown’s Finding Fish, to explore the issue of ocean sustainability in our region. Stage Force presents a staged reading of Brown’s drama on Sept. 11 at the Seacoast Science Center, in Rye, N.H., under the direction of Stage Force founder Kent Stephens, and as part of the Portsmouth Public Library’s Maritime Month.
Finding Fish is the first play commissioned by Stage Force, but its seed was planted in Stephens years ago. Upon moving to the Seacoast area in 2004, he was immediately struck by the importance of the sea in people’s lives. On the coast, he found, there’s a higher degree of concerned consciousness about the possible import of human choices, he says. Concerns about ocean sustainability impact what my neighbors put on their lawns, how they clean their boats, how we shop for our fish. As a theater artist, he became concerned that, as he says, there have been very few plays in the history of drama that could even broadly be characterized as having a focus on ecology, much less climate change. Stephens wanted the theater to play more of a role in our vital conversations about the environment.
One drama from the canon that does address environmental concerns, Stephens notes, is Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, a play about contaminated water in public baths, and he imagined a Seacoast version of Ibsen’s story: a dying fishery on the coast of Maine. The unholy triangle of fisherman, ecologists and government regulators, he says, offered a scenario rich in conflict and ambiguity, good potential ground from which to grow a play.
To write such a drama, Stephens tapped Brown, a nationally renowned playwright with whom he’d worked in the 1990s at Midwest Playlabs, in Minneapolis. Stephens knew that Brown writes excellent research-based plays, often about African-American history, and also that he spent formative years piloting tall ships around the northeast Atlantic. Brown had also, long ago, introduced Stephens to his old friend and former shipmate Jeff Bolster, now a University of New Hampshire historian who specializes in the ecological history of the Gulf of Maine. Between these two men, Stephens saw great possibilities for the commission: A top flight national playwright, a noted scholar on the subject of ocean sustainability, and they happened to be old friends, says Stephens. The stars seemed to align, almost uncannily.
In collaboration with Bolster and his ocean sustainability research, Brown sought to create a script with both topical relevance and dramatic power. My approach to the play was to write a story about three characters with a deep love for the natural world, he says, but deep disagreements with regard to their relationship to it. The story of Finding Fish concerns two brothers in a rough fishing village on the coast of Maine where no fish are pulled in except by one man, Peter. When Peter’s scientist brother, Michael, tries to solve the riddle of why, he must also puzzle over Peter’s mysterious beauty of a new wife, who speaks in monosyllables and swims naked in the stormy waves. Before long, old rivalries rise between the brothers as they contend with what is happening in the sea and to those who need it to survive. Stephens describes Finding Fish as science fiction set in the probable future, based on research done in this region by an artist who is an acknowledged master at converting research into compelling drama, says Stephens.
Stephens believes that a community’s theaters have a responsibility to reflect, discuss, raise questions about, and serve as a gathering place for the most vital issues of that community, and he sees the global climate change as the most consequential problem for our present and future generations. Whatever small role STAGE FORCE can play in contributing to a repertory that focuses on man’s relationship to the environment, the way so much repertory focusses on war or political intrigue or race or inheritance, he says, we will try to play it. Carlyle, Stephens and Bolster will further explore the issues and science of the play in a panel discussion on Sept. 12, at the Portsmouth Public Library, called Literary and Artistic Responses to the Changing Ecology in the Gulf of Maine.
For his part, Brown, too, feels the imminence of the tensions and disasters he has conjured in his fictional drama. I tried to write a play about the future, but the future seems to get closer every day, says Brown. I hope that the play brings the public awareness, a sense of urgency and a personal commitment to save our planet, each in our own way.
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