This is part black comedy, part satire, and all fun.
Directed by Dominique Purdue, the show is thrillingly fast-paced. Actors Izabella Louk and Victor Y Z Xu give wonderfully audacious, high-energy performances. (I’ll admit it took me time to attune to the piece’s theatrical language: at first, I was fearful of sensory overload.)
By British playwright Maud Dromgoole, 3 Billion Seconds tells the story of two population growth activists, Daisy and Michael. Acknowledging that one of the greatest challenges facing humankind is our exploding numbers, they dedicate their lives to raising awareness about the problem. And then they find they have a little problem of their own: Daisy is pregnant. How can they offset the impact of bringing a child into the world?
Their answer is what makes this black comedy.
The satirical element could be broken into two strands.
One is a poke at the dreadful arithmetic of consequentialism, that oddly reductive vision of ethics which (in its worst forms) assumes the difference between right and wrong can be calculated numerically. In the play, this is signified by a fixation on pie charts. Consequentialism’s vision of morality is based on outcomes. To most people, this might seem an entirely natural approach. After all, don’t we determine whether an action is right or wrong depending on its consequences? Trouble is, we don’t always know the consequences. (A radical critique, or a radical honesty, might suggest we never know the consequences. And certainly not in a way that can be expressed numerically.) It takes little imagination to see that an ethical philosophy that manifests both a whiff of epistemological arrogance and a weakness for calculation might only too easily mutate into a force for dehumanisation. The events of the play certainly suggest this – though not with little imagination, with glorious comic invention.
The other satirical strand targets anyone (everyone?) who puts their personal wants before the needs of the community. (And that community can be defined in ever widening circles.) The production’s final haunting image brilliantly encapsulates this threat. But juxtaposed with this image of menace are the closing lines of dialogue, which are a very human expression of a very human desire. In this refusal to be reductive, the piece attains dramatic excellence. To face the greatest of challenges – the threat to our planet, to our species, to all species – we will need all our best qualities, and that includes honesty.
Paul Gilchrist
3 Billion Seconds by Maud Dromgoole
presented by Blinking Light in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre Co
at KXT on Broadway until 2 May
Image by Phil Erbacher
Theatre Red 