Review: Hothouse, a Colorful Take on Climate Change, at Irish Arts Center

A confession: When I see a story about climate change in the newspaper, I usually scroll right past it. If I hear something about it on NPR, I switch to music. That’s not because I think climate change is a hoax. It’s real. But what can I do as an individual to meaningfully arrest the Earth’s rising temperature that doesn’t amount to futile self-flagellation?

The Dublin-based theater troupe Malaprop is clear-eyed about this sense of helplessness and about the reality that people usually only learn the hard way. They examine the human impulse to bury our heads in the sand in Carys D. Coburn’s surprisingly insightful Hothouse, now making its US debut at Irish Arts Center.

It takes place on the Crystal Prophecy, a cruise ship that ferries champagne-sipping passengers to the North Pole to witness the melting ice. There’s not much left, but the bookings keep rolling in, so the Captain (Peter Corboy) keeps shipping out, gaily presiding over the onboard entertainment while consuming ever more extravagant cocktails. He’s our narrator for the evening.

He zooms in to tell the story of one passenger, Ali (Maeve O’Mahony), and her family. Her mother, Ruth (Ebby O’Toole Acheampong), grew up in a time of massive change in Ireland. Ruth’s father, Dick (Bláithín Mac Gabhann), is a doctor, drinker, and fan of environmentalist Rachel Carson (O’Mahony). He gives Ruth a copy of Silent Spring, which she reads when her parents are screaming at each other. Years later, she confronts her mother, Barbara (Thommas Kane Byrne), about why she put up with his abuse for so long.

“Because you want to think it’s,” says Barbara, “I don’t know / A blip on the radar / That things’ll go back to being normal / That all this isn’t / Normal / But if you leave, you have to admit it. / That you need to / That you should have all along.” Byrne inhales Barbara’s bitterness with each drag of his cigarette, fully inhabiting a character who took what she perceived as the least-worst path and now resents being judged by people with more options. “The shame if I left you behind,” she says, mentally weighing those options, “the struggle if I took you, couldn’t go back to teaching because of the marriage bar, remember, and the benefit for deserted wives was nothing, and that’s assuming I would have got it with me doing the deserting.”

Coburn speckles the script with little artifacts of the very different Ireland that existed just decades ago. A line about a “newly legal condom” (they only became legal with a prescription in 1980) stopped me cold. So when a shocking statistic is incanted onstage (“If everyone generated as much carbon dioxide as Irish citizens, the world could only support one billion people”), it’s easy to understand how, after centuries of deprivation, Irish people would be inclined to pursue their happiness in the form of Apple tax receipts and fuel-guzzling Ryanair flights.

Hothouse is novel-like in its scope and attention to historic context (the Captain announces each shift in the time by noting which bird species went extinct that year). But this 90-minute adventure never gets bogged down, exuding a playful theatricality that every member of the cast works to create.

An intriguingly strange narrator, Corboy’s captain is an Instagram smile plastered over deep sadness. Gabhann’s Dick is the perfect fatherly mixture of smiley and intimidating. And O’Mahony’s Ali seems to embody the exhausted nihilism of the Western world, a witty cutting remark in lieu of any real solutions.

Claire O’Reilly directs a production that smartly balances the gravity of the subject with the levity audiences crave in an era when so much theater feels like church. Molly O’Cathain’s aggressively orange set and costumes conjure a 1970s Euro-variety television show, eventually giving way to the full spectrum of colors as we approach the near-future. While not a musical, Hothouse benefits from Anna Clock’s delightfully weird original music. Lighting designer John Gunning, in collaboration with choreographers Deirdre Griffin and Paula O’Reilly, delivers a disaster movie climax, which the actors impressively sell as if their lives depend on it. If only it ended there.

Like so many contemporary plays, Hothouse struggles to conclude, with an epilogue that flashes forward to an imagined communal future. I appreciated the happy (if implausible) ending, but it feels like so much lefty catnip — a fleeting reward for sitting through a very important issue play. It resolutely dodges the big question left lingering in the polluted air: If 5 million Irish citizens can create so much CO2 (never mind even more wasteful Americans), what will happen when hundreds of millions of citizens of India and China have the means to enjoy the middle-class lifestyle we take for granted?