Stir Q&A: Journalist Alanna Mitchell travels from the ocean floor to the stage with Sea Sick
The non-fiction play taking a deep dive into the disastrous state of the world’s waters is back
Alanna Mitchell. Photo by Alejandro Santiago
The Cultch presents Alanna Mitchell’s Sea Sick, produced by the Theatre Centre (Toronto), from February 9 to 19 at the Historic Theatre as part of its fifth annual Femme Festival.
CANADIAN JOURNALIST ALANNA Mitchell never imagined when she travelled to the ocean floor as part of a three-year research journey about the state of the world’s seas that her global fact-based quest would one day turn into a solo piece of theatre. That’s exactly what happened, however, following the publication of the investigative reporter’s book Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis in 2009. Commissioned by the Theatre Centre in Toronto, with directions from Franco Boni and Ravi Jain, Sea Sick, the play, premiered in 2014, was nominated for a Dora Award for outstanding new play that year, and went on to tour internationally, including two sold-out runs in Vancouver (2015 and 2019).
If you don’t recognize Mitchell’s name from the international bestselling non-fiction book and critically acclaimed production about climate change, you may recall seeing it in various publications, including the Globe and Mail, New York Times, and Canadian Geographic, or hearing it on CBC’s Quirks & Quarks.
When the pandemic hit, Mitchell was booked to tour the play for months on end, including a stop at the National Theatre in London. She did a small Sea Sick tour of Ireland last fall and performed at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. Now, Sea Sick is coming to Vancouver for its first sustained run since Mitchell appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019.
Stir connected with Mitchell in advance of her upcoming performance at the Cultch to learn more.
Can you take us way back to before Sea Sick, the book, existed? What motivated you to go on that three-year trek around the globe?
I started thinking about this material when I was a reporter at the Globe and Mail. I kept getting press releases about what a terrible state the ocean was in, but I didn’t know what that meant. I needed to find out. So when I left the Globe in 2004, I started writing to scientists to see if I could tag along with them on their journeys and eventually discovered a far bigger story than I imagined: the ocean’s chemistry is changing in lockstep with climate change.
I remember being really driven to do the journeys. I had a huge pile of academic papers and books by my bedside and would pore through them, trying to figure out what was happening to the ocean. It was an obsession. At one point I remember standing in my kitchen, almost wailing to my (brand-new) husband: Why am I doing this? And he, wisely, said: Because you have to. He was right. I did.
This would be a book in itself, but what has changed with respect to the state of the global ocean, for better or worse, since the publication of Sea Sick in 2009?
The only good thing is that we know more about how systems in the ocean work. For example, our understanding of the Southern Ocean is far more advanced now, because there is an observation system in place to track oxygen, carbon, pH, etc. That was unimaginable when I was first researching my book. All the Southern Ocean research was done expensively by ship, when possible. And it turns out the Southern Ocean holds the key to much of the change in the global ocean. The currents are changing. Old carbon is being swept from deep below up into the atmosphere. A huge swath of warm water from further north is advancing toward Antarctica. It’s changing the whole balance and future of the planet and all for the worse.
In other news, the ocean has absorbed about 90 percent of the extra heat trapped against the surface of the planet by greenhouse gases. Awful for life in the ocean. And that’s just intensifying as carbon emissions and concentrations rise. The stripping of oxygen from the ocean is also advancing. The ocean is absorbing more carbon from the atmosphere, too, and that lead inexorably to ocean acidification. It’s not a pretty picture. And all of it is worsening.
How did the play come about? And why theatre? What is it about this genre that you felt would be an effective vehicle to convey the book’s complex themes?
I happened to give a talk about my book to a group that included Franco Boni, who was then the artistic director of the Theatre Centre in Toronto. He suggested we could make a play out of it, with help from artistic director Ravi Jain. And so we did. It was the furthest thing from my mind. I would never, ever have thought of it on my own.
But it’s been transformative for me to do the play on stage. It’s so incredibly intimate an experience, for me and, I think, for the audience. I think the medium of theatre allows for a greater, deeper understanding of the meaning of the information. The material is so complex that it needs art to bring it alive. As I say in the play: Science can only take you so far.
Has the play taken on any new or different resonance amid the pandemic?
Yes. I think the early days of the pandemic really showed us how we can pull together as a single species against a common foe. We can suspend our own wants and needs for the greater good. Governments can make new rules when the old ones don’t work anymore. It’s a living blueprint for how to tackle climate heating. And I think that lesson cannot be ignored. I wrote all this into a new ending for the play.
Why is it back now?
Sea Sick, the play, feels even more relevant now that it did when we premiered it in 2014. The issues are more dire. The trends more clear. But the will to grapple with them is stronger than ever. What I’m trying to do in the play is help us all have faith that we can come back from the brink.
For more information, see the Cultch.
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