The title of Dick Reichman's new play summarizes its subject concisely: "The Big One: A Chronicle of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill."
Many writers have produced detailed histories of the disaster in the 20 years since it spread petroleum along a huge swath of Alaska's Pacific Coastline. The saga of alcohol, incompetence and environmental holocaust quickly became popular legend and joke-fodder for comedians. The notion of corporate villains destroying nature in pursuit of profits has become a stock plot line in novels and movies. A number of these accounts -- both fictional and non -- are sloppy and dull.
That's not the case with "The Big One." Running about two hours, Reichman's play necessarily compresses the details and tightens the action. From start to finish it remains tautly dramatic, even melodramatic. And why not? Any accurate depiction of the spill must display the extreme emotions and frantic horror that spread as people realized the scope of the problem. Grown ups really were shouting on the phones the way we see them in the play. Parts of the dialogue appear to be transcripts of actual communications and interviews.
The first act takes us to the point where the tanker has ripped its hull on Bligh Reef and oil is spreading across the water. It faithfully recounts the chain of incidents leading to the spill, from cost-cutting decisions made in Houston and Washington, D.C., to the infamous pre-voyage drinks, to scant seconds of inattention at critical moments.
Despite the fact that we know how this ends, it's edge-of-the-seat stuff because we learn how, at any number of junctures, different decisions might have meant the accident never happened.
The second act tallies missteps taken in the aftermath: the lack of on-site resources to contain the spill; failure to deploy the one chemical (itself a toxin) that had a chance of dispersing the crude; the poisoning of cleanup workers. Dialogue and acted scenes are punctuated by short narratives describing court findings, science and terminology -- such as the observation that, unlike other ships, a tanker is referred to as "he." But the real beauty of "The Big One" (apparently the term was in use before the spill by people who felt that it was inevitable) is not that it makes history entertaining, but that it makes names involved in history real humans.
Most actors in the 10-person cast have multiple roles, but four stand out in key solo parts: Rick Barreras is Captain Joe Hazelwood; Steven Hunt is Exxon shipping head Frank Iarossi; Nava Sarracino is activist gillnetter Riki Ott; Erika Johnson is Dottie, an alcoholic party girl who takes on the unhealthy job of cleaning beaches because she needs the money.
Reichman ferrets into the psyches of these individuals (and, to a lesser extent, the secondary characters) and reveals them not as evil, but as limited. Mistakes sneak up on them, they see the future and are helpless to stop it, they try to direct actions without having full knowledge of ramifications or options, they walk in the dark the way most of us do most of the time. The audience does not forgive, but may discover a little sympathy.
Instead Reichman indicts the system in which the characters are caught up and, as he puts it in the program notes, "a cascade of cost-cutting measures taken by government and industry at all levels."
At one point Hazelwood explains to bar patrons that blaming a company is wrong, like blaming a wolf for killing a sheep (my analogy, not the playwright's); making a profit is what companies do, morality is a human, not a corporate virtue.
"To blame individuals is to miss the point," says Reichman, and his play sticks with that premise. He mostly does it without getting preachy, though the description of petroleum itself as something demonic at the end of the first act is a little hyperbolic.
Yet there is a sense of blame directed at the audience in a final soliloquy, pointing out that even the biggest oil spill is "a blip" compared to the atmosphere of petrochemicals surrounding us at all times, on which we depend for our modern lifestyles. The industrialized world collapses without it. Every Alaskan who gets a PFD check cheerfully cashes it. And even the fisherman whose catch is reduced by pollution needs oil to get to those fish and bring them to market. Like Dottie, we all need the money.
"The Big One" is good history, good theater and good food for thought.
Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332. Comment on this review at adn.com/artsnob.
By MIKE DUNHAM
mdunham@adn.com