Most of us think about climate change in the wrong way, David Finnigan tells us. It is not “this apocalyptic event that’s on its way, and we need to prevent it from hitting,” Rather, “it’s here….we’re in it, and we’ll be in it for the rest of our lives.”

Finnigan asks us to rethink climate change as “the climate era.” It is the latest of six eras that began perhaps 75,000 years ago, each of which marked a turning point in the course of humanity — and each of which Finnigan explains in fascinating detail in “Deep History,” a one-man show exported from Australia that opens tonight at the Public Theater.

“Deep History” is billed as a play, and Finnigan sees himself as a theater artist who for twenty years has used his art to inform and alert people about the climate crisis. There are  many theatrical touches large and small in his show: Finnigan tries to weave together disparate personal and imagined narratives into a theatrical whole;  his narration is underscored by Reuben Ingall’s music, and occasionally takes a break for some pop songs; he makes use of a couple of props and an hour’s worth of slides and videos, sometimes artfully; he moves around  the stage on bare feet. But I mean no disparagement when I say that “Deep History” works best as a lecture about climate change – one that is extremely well-timed, opening on a day when the latest hurricane in Florida, intensified by climate change, inflicted massive destruction, and even caused a meteorologist to cry. 

One of Finnigan’s stories is about his father,  a hardcore rock climber who in 1969 was injured by a falling rock that had broken free because of melting ice (“an early warning sign from climate change.”) Unable to continue as an elite climber, his father became a climate scientist – back when climate change was called “the Greenhouse Effect” — and moved the family from Great Britain to Australia. It’s he who came up with the six turning points that his son attempts to dramatize. The narrative conceit is that he’s writing up his father’s notes in real time in front of us back in 2019.

 Between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, he begins, the human population collapsed and almost died out. Scientists don’t know why, but speculate it was the aftereffects of a cataclysmic volcanic eruption that resulted in a poisonous cloud that covered the whole of the earth.

“How did we survive? We don’t know.”

But out of that first of the six eras, Finnigan extrapolates a lesson, which he dutifully writes on a large piece of brown paper: “1. Survival is possible.”

For each era he describes, he searches for a lesson that can  be applied to the crisis of the present day.

Some of it sounds optimistic. Some 68,000 years ago, human beings had recovered from near-extinction and multiplied, spreading to almost every continent: “There is room for you,” he writes as the lesson and then elaborates on how the lesson relates to what’s happening right now: “The world is changing and humans are changing in response. We’re transforming how we live, how we travel, how we travel, how we eat. Because climate change is not just a story about things collapsing and breaking. It’s also a story about how we’re building a new world in the ruins of the old. So this feels positive to me.“

But he struggles to find the optimistic lessons in the more recent turning points  — colonization 500 years ago, which spread disease and upset ecosystems, and, 75 years ago, the beginning of the nuclear age. 

“There have been more than two thousand nuclear explosions since 1945. Every single cell in our bodies is contaminated with plutonium and cesium from the radioactive fallout.” 

There is also the matter of climate deniers and the active obfuscation by the fossil fuel industry. 

“Deep History,” like the recent epic production of “Counting and Cracking,” is a discovery by the Public Theater’s artistic director Oskar Eustis during his recent trip to Sydney (although as Eustis notes in the program, at the other end of the scale — “theater as portable…with a light carbon footprint.”) In many ways, it is presented from an Australian perspective. Running parallel to Finnigan’s explication of thousands of years of human history is a moment-by-moment account of out-of-control fires in 2019 surrounding his hometown of Canberra that threatened his best friend and his family.  This didn’t really achieve the tension and suspense that it was clearly meant to inject into “Deep History.” But it did not need to; members of the audience already have tension aplenty from the current news reports full of climate emergencies.

Deep History
Public Theater through November 10
Running time: 70 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $75. Rush: $30. Students: $40
Written and performed by David Finnigan
Directed by Annette Mees
Video design by Hayley Egan
Music by Reuben Ingall
Photographs by Joan Marcus