Review: Deep History Offers a Distinctly Personal Look at Climate Change

Give David Finnigan credit for this: He’s a much more engaging climate-change activist than Al Gore. In the Australian playwright’s solo show Deep History, making its North American premiere at the Public Theater, Finnigan comes off as warm and genial but also thoughtful and self-aware, all qualities that Gore displayed intermittently at best in the much-acclaimed 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Of course, Gore had a litany of facts, figures, and charts on his side, and his slideshow presentation exuded the passion, however simmering, of making a plea for taking climate change seriously. Finnigan, however, begins his own presentation under the assumption that we are already knee-deep in what he calls the “climate era,” and we now have to figure out how best to go forward. That turns out to be merely the starting point for a heady 70 minutes.

To be sure, Finnigan is interested in educating us, at least a little. Many Americans will likely be less familiar with one of the catalysts for this particular show: a particularly brutal fire season in Australia during the summer of 2019-20. There were larger-than-usual bushfires and hazardous smoke conditions throughout the country that put many of his friends’ lives back in his Canberra hometown in danger. (The photos he presents and the anecdotes he recounts easily dwarf those few days of hazardous air quality from Canadian wildfires New Yorkers experienced in the summer of 2023.)

But, as Finnigan argues, this is merely an inevitable boiling point of a global climate crisis that has gripped us all through centuries. Thus, he goes through 75,000 years of human history, denoting the most earth-shattering shifts in global climate and how humans and animals either adapted to them or simply died out.

Though Finnigan is interested in the science of climate change, he is an artist at heart, so in Deep History, he mingles the intimate with the scientific. He offers a harrowing account of his best friend Jack’s attempt to flee with his family from a vacation spot before the raging fires force all roads to be shut down in the area.

But he also talks at length about his father, a climate scientist who suffered a life-changing rock-climbing accident in the Alps, and his research. As Finnigan recounts it, while recuperating from surgery in 2019, his father asked him to work up a rough draft of a paper he was working on, in which he picked out six key moments in history in which humanity dealt with a global climate crisis from which he believed lessons for our own survival could be gleaned.

Finnigan’s deep dive into his father’s notes becomes the “drama” of Deep History. The conclusions he draws, however, aren’t just scientific. Early in the show, he gives us a brief glimpse into how he became interested not just in theater, but in making theater out of climate science. Finnigan also foregrounds his attempts at the latter by adopting the perspective of a female protagonist reincarnated through each era, using sugar and a funnel on a tabletop to illustrate the booming world population (captured on an iPhone camera, projected on a screen behind him as part of Hayley Egan’s video design). But as the sheer import of the climate crisis starts to truly hit home for him, he begins to doubt just how adequate theater, maybe even art in general, is to come to terms with this epochal moment in scientific and human history.

That sense of an artist spiraling in on himself allows Deep History to transcend its glorified TED Talk nature and become something that is — if not profound — still affecting. Whether the show might have been even more effective without the directly personal elements is still a question; an element of navel-gazing insularity creeps into the show that threatens to obscure the arguably more important issues he’s trying to raise. But Finnigan is a charismatic performer, and the show’s trim length dictates it won’t overstay its welcome. If only all calls to action were this breezy and personable.