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Climate Hopefulness Faces the Fire in Deep History
David Finnigan’s play starts as lecture, then takes a turn.
He’ll narrate the experience of six individuals during six crises for humanity, ranging as far back as 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, when a supervolcano eruption nearly wiped out early homo sapiens, up to the more recent challenges of colonialism and nuclear weapons. You sit there thinking Wow, and then later wonder, Hold on — are we actually going to eat?Deep History, like a lot of work that lives in the muddy space among comedy, lecture, and theater, made a stop at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Many pieces in that tradition press a similar kind of “Wait, should I be saying this?” escape button, priming themselves to self-destruct — see Alex Edelman’s Just for Us(“Should I really be telling this story about Nazis?”) and Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette(“Should I really be doing comedy?”), or works that accumulated a lot more production value, like Baby Reindeer(“Should I really be encouraging my stalker?”) or even the musical Six(“Is a competition between ex-wives also kinda sexist anyway?”).
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