Alaska News

Theater review: Cyrano's 'Ice-Breaker' doesn't pack much heat

On the day I went to see "The Ice-Breaker" at Cyrano's Off-Center Playhouse, the high temperature in downtown Anchorage was 31 degrees. The average high the week before was 38.7 degrees. The average historical high for this part of January is 23 degrees. And we just experienced what was, by some accounts, the warmest year in recorded history.

Those figures should speak loudly enough to get people thinking and talking about climate change -- and acting to address it. But that doesn't seem to be happening. Maybe it won't happen until climate change affects our daily lives in dire, unmistakable ways, as it inevitably will if it continues on its current trajectory.

By then, of course, it will be too late. Which is why we need art that incorporates climate change into its perspective, that treats it like as much a part of the human condition as night and day or the changing of the seasons.

So a play like David Rambo's "The Ice-Breaker," about a love affair between two scientists studying global warming, seemed particularly timely and necessary. First performed in 2006, "The Ice-Breaker" was one of the first plays to focus on climate change as a central theme. It also helped spawn an entire subgenre of heavy-handed climate change plays, like "The Great Immensity," a musical now infamous for receiving $700,000 in federal funding. (In its opening song, actors sing about poll numbers from The New York Times.)

I was hoping "The Ice-Breaker" would be more tactful and nuanced in its approach to climate change than some of its successors. But the poster did not bode well. It features the two actors' faces staring at each other against a background of cracking ice, with words like "climate change," "people," "love" and "science" floating between them. It is the exact opposite of subtlety.

Unfortunately, that poster is a pretty accurate representation of the play: a few Important Themes thrown together and spelled out explicitly for the audience against the backdrop of a painfully obvious metaphor. Nearly every aspect of the play screams "contrived," beginning even before the actors come onstage, with the set itself: a living room with a carefully composed "mess." (There are wine bottles on the floor -- and one of them is even tipped over! -- so you know the character who lives there is troubled and depressed.)

The script is annoying, with dialogue that feels like a parody of an Aaron Sorkin production: rapid-fire, cloyingly clever, bursting with pseudo-poetic non sequiturs. We are expected to believe that Lawrence, a middle-aged professor, lets a total stranger into his home after an exchange of about 10 words and then proceeds to have an impossibly witty repartee with her even after she reveals she has essentially been stalking him for years. The younger graduate student, Sonia, has the cringeworthy habit of occasionally referring to herself in the third person after she says something (as in, "Dr. Blanchard, I'm not sure exactly where to start, but that's not unusual, she said nervously"). This is, of course, not how humans actually interact, yet the play expects us to take it, and its weighty subject material, seriously.

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Rambo pulls out every dramatic cliché in the book, from thunderclaps punctuating climactic lines to the out-of-the-blue second-act sob story about the death of Lawrence's daughter, which sapped all joy from his life. The romantic plot, with its constant references to ice and heat, is trite. So what does the play tell us about climate change? Nothing, really -- other than that it seems to be happening, which we already know. But even that simple message is buried under a glacier of scientific babble, impossible to decipher, which we just have to assume is somehow true. And since research in this field progresses so quickly, even if the assertions in the script were true in 2006, there's a good chance scientists today would consider them outdated or inaccurate.

However, the two actors do an exceptional job of interpreting the play. While the characters, as they are written in the script, are not believable, the actors infuse them with as much life and presence as they can hold. The character of Sonia may be obnoxious, sure, but Sarah Bethany Baird fills her with a mixture of empathy, curiosity and wonder that isn't present in the script. And Mark Robokoff somehow gives Lawrence that intangible air of aloofness and mental turmoil that seems to waft around all college professors. The powerful acting almost makes up for the script; good acting in a good play is hard enough, but good acting in a bad play is downright impressive. Another aspect that deserves a mention is the stage-left backdrop, painted to look like a Southwestern sunset in shades of red and gold. It's absolutely gorgeous, and I hope to see more work from scene paint designer Elle Janecek in the future.

Although this production does about as much as it can with the play, "The Ice-Breaker" ultimately doesn't give us any new insight, any urgent message about climate change. And the play, predictably, does not achieve the nearly impossible balance between scientific accuracy and artistic liberty. But it is significant in that it represents the start of an era in which art is made and viewed through the lens of a warming atmosphere. And hopefully, it will get more people talking about climate change, even if it doesn't offer any strategies to actually deal with it. It's a start.

THE ICE-BREAKER runs through Feb. 1 at Cyrano's Off-Center Playhouse, 413 D St. Tickets at centertix.net.

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