Kayak Navigates into Climate Change Debate

Vancouver playwright Jordan Hall throws down the gauntlet on climate change with her award-winning play Kayak. A meditation on the intimate consequences of environmental issues, it follows the journey of BMW-driving Annie Iverson (Susan Hogan) as she enters a massive storm to rescue her son (Sebastien Kroon) from his environmentalist girlfriend (Marisa Smith).

Hall discusses why she chose to take on the issue, the place of the arts in the climate change discussion, and how keeping a sense of humour helped her along. 

Q: How does Kayak approach climate change?

A: In a word: Personally. I think the only way we ever really connect to issues is when we can feel as well as understand the arguments being made. I wanted to tell a story that would evoke the complicated snarl of emotions I experienced every time I saw clashes happening around environmental issues: And so Annie, Peter, and Julie emerged from my fellow-feeling and hope around other activists; my confusion and frustration around the general public's perceived apathy and our lack of political leadership; my exhaustion around trying to change my lifestyle and not being supported or falling short or being looked down on for the things I'd given up.

Q: Why did you choose to write about environmental issues?

A: Environmental issues were and still are the single most important problem facing humans as a species. In climate change, we are facing what I see as a species-wide test of our intelligence, adaptability, and ethical capability. And we're failing it.

So I guess you could say it's been on my mind a little.

Q: Did you start with the issues or the story?

A: It's almost always a bit of both for me. I think you need something you want to push at– call it an issue, a moral or intellectual question– in any project. But trying to just start with concept, with no organic creative impulse? Would be like starting a dry engine. Or maybe like not having one at all.

With Kayak, the seed of the play began in a playwriting master class with Brian Quirt at the Tarragon (I can't recommend Brian's classes highly enough): I started hearing this woman explaining why she just didn’t think climate change was so bad, really. Why she hadn't seen it coming.

I was fascinated by the way she was making excuses for herself. There was so much narrative, it seemed, in the way she was trying so hard not to feel guilty about it. The issue, which I felt really strongly about, was inextricably intertwined with what was happening to her. So maybe what I really began with was character?

Then again, she was also really funny, and I have a hard time resisting the opportunity to crack a joke.

Q: Why do you think it’s important to make environmental issues personal?

A: Because we already do, essentially. In developed nations like Canada, engaging effectively with climate change is about changing our lifestyles and our expectations, both of which late model capitalism has really ratcheted-up material-wise.

Eating only locally, giving up a car, or seeing the price of gas go up to subsidize a shift towards renewable energy—all these things have an effect on the texture of your day-to-day life. How can you not take it personally? How can you find the impetus to change if you don't feel that need personally?

Q: What kind of challenges did you face trying to connect the issues with a personal story?

A: I'm always a little surprised by the way we seem to think the personal and the political are or can be separated in our lives. I'm kinda with Thomas Mann on that one: "Everything is politics." It's just a question of whether the implications of the expressed politics are significant.

Where Kayak was concerned, the challenge was drilling down, as much as possible, to where that combined personal-political was at the heart of the character conflicts, and in pushing for the most intelligent, most realistic representation of the arguments that get used by the various factions in these kinds of conflicts.

Q: What do you think of the state of the current conversation around climate change in Canada?

A: It's terrifying. Hopeful. Frustrating. Terrifying because we seem to be electing leaders who are ideologues, who have no interest in engaging with the very clear scientific consensus of what we are doing to our climate right now. Hopeful because so much of the scientific community, and so many intellectuals, activists and artists are devoting themselves and their work to environmental causes. Frustrating because the gap between these two discourses is one we really need to address, and despite our best efforts, we don't seem to be closing it.

Q: What do you think is the role of artists in the current discussion surrounding climate change?

A: The problem with humans is that—with the exception of statisticians—we're terrible statisticians. Selection bias means we all secretly think that we'll be the exception, the ones who'll end up unaffected by problems, until we're actually being affected by them. This means we tend not to respond to anything until after it's started making us uncomfortable.

I think one of the functions of an artist, especially around issues like climate change, is to be a kind of prophet, or maybe just a canary in the coalmine. To keep looking forward at the problems we don't want to engage with and to show us what that means, both intellectually and emotionally. To use our capacity for empathy to correct the bad math of human risk calculations.

And to crack as many jokes as possible. Never miss a chance for a joke.

Q: Humour seems really important to you. How do you think humour works when discussing such a serious issue?

A: Despite my jokes about jokes, (Ha! Meta-jokes!) Humour is one of the most sophisticated and effective tools in the writer's kit. It can give us critical distance, elucidate inconsistencies in arguments, draw us closer to characters, help us find common ground, and–just occasionally– it can engage an audience so they don't tune out of your full-length play about environmental activism ten-minutes in.

That's the dream, anyway. 

Kayak is running until May 26 at The Cultch in Vancouver as a part of the rEvolver Festival, with a special post-show panel discussion on Sunday, May 19.

Image Credit: Chena San Martin via Alley Theatre