An upcoming reading at the Off the Page theatre series will feature comic perspectives on end-of-world prepping, in a play written five years before the most recent global cataclysm.
Playwright Jordan Hall penned How to Survive an Apocalypse in 2014. The work debuted two years later as part of Touchstone Theatre’s Flying Start competition, which supports the dramatization of new work by professional writers. In 2021, in the midst of the pandemic, the Finborough Theatre in London, England staged the play with COVID-19 audience safety measures in place — and a keen sense of irony.
“It almost feels like a naive and hopeful version of our apocalypse,” Hall said. “Around that time, I was starting to feel very disillusioned with my activism. You protested things and you wrote letters but it didn’t seem that the trajectory specifically around environmental [issues] seemed to be changing much.”
After viewing a National Geographic documentary about doomsday scenarios, Hall became intrigued by people’s punctilious approaches to Armageddon readiness.
“They were just sort of preparing for their own little private apocalypses,” explained Hall. “I could feel the charm of that, the sense that I can’t control these huge movements in history that I’m trapped in. So instead of trying to get out there and make change, [they say] let’s accept it and make a bunker and get ready to survive it.”
Some people’s response to existential calamity is a capitalist one, Hall believes: they’re convinced they can buy their way out of peril with bigger and better bunkers.
In How to Survive an Apocalypse, four characters driven by financial hardship retreat to the woods to sharpen their survival skills. One of them, an unemployed game designer, sublimates his fascination with the end of days into digital entertainment. Meanwhile his wife, a magazine publisher, struggles with the spectre of plummeting readership. She seeks solace by buying bottled water, foreseeing a breakdown of basic services like plumbing when disaster comes.
“[Off the Page producer Pam Girone] and I have been watching all these shows about survivalists — The Last of Us and Leave the World Behind,” said series producer Peter Hill, who also works with Anthony Paré to cast and stage dramatized readings at the Heritage Playhouse in Gibsons. “The play isn’t just about that. It’s a kind of love story, but surviving an apocalypse seems to be a popular theme these days.”
In addition to writing for the stage, Hall scripts popular TV series like the Canadian legal drama Family Law and teaches screenwriting at Capilano University. In 2018, her play A Brief History of Human Extinction depicted the creative quietus that might be triggered by environmental catastrophe.
“I’m really interested in human psychological responses to climate change,” Hall said, “and holding up the mirror. We find it easy to envision the end of the world and starting again rather than envisioning the long, hard work of sustaining something.”
The reading of How to Survive an Apocalypse will feature local actors Sophia Ballantyne, Lisa Furfaro, Justin Huston and Steve Schwabl. The performance takes place at the Heritage Playhouse in Gibsons on Jan. 14 at 1 p.m. Admission is by donation.
