The company of Malaprop’s Hothouse. Photo: Nir Arieli

The juxtaposition between form and content in Hothouse, a sort of pre-apocalyptic cabaret by the Irish theater company Malaprop (making its U.S. debut at the Irish Arts Center), can be hard to bear. It’s a fantasia of cruise ship entertainment, on the one hand, narrated by a captain in a subtly sparkling uniform (Peter Corboy*, steering the proceedings with a confident hand) packed with sequins and feathers, tap dances and karaoke and chanteuses, performed in front of an old-fashioned swagged curtain. On the other, each of those spangled artistes represents one or more bird species going extinct over the 50-ish years depicted in the show; they’re songbirds in both literal and metaphorical senses. (Molly O’Cathain’s set and costume design, sumptuously lit with rich, saturated color by John Gunning, feel somehow glam and melancholy at the same time; the blazing oranges and deep blues are always just a little too bright, trying a little too hard. Songs by Anna Clock and choreography by Deirdre Griffin and Paula O’Reilly likewise tread the line between saucy and sad.) 

The cruise ship captain/narrator dispatches birds one by one using hilariously arcane methods—gun, voodoo doll, poison—ticking off points on the timeline, which starts in the near future, stretches back to 1969, and moves forwards from there till the two meet in the middle on the deck of that cruise ship, the Crystal Prophecy.

It’s on a cruise to the Arctic—not even the last chance to see the Arctic ice but the last chance to see where it used to be. The end of the world as we know it is quite literally upon us—yet this is not a play interested in a didactic dialogue about the ramifications of climate change, let alone arguing about human responsibility for it. Instead, writer Carys D. Coburn (sharing credit with the company) and director Claire O’Reilly dangle the easy pleasures of music hall and farce before us, and then fill that container with ever-more-uncomfortable truths and ever-more-complicated emotions. The birds, they show us in a saucy burlesque number, are mating slightly earlier every season; it might not seem like much, but it is. The plant habitats shift a few feet at a time; it might not seem like much, but it is. We’re spectators of our collective demise, horrified but not knowing how, or if, we could intervene. As they say in a program note, “If every story is inadequate to the full scope of climate breakdown then so must every feeling be. . . . Laughter is negligibly more inappropriate than sadness. Inviting both, feeling both, rejecting both, we never forget that there’s more there to feel more about.”

And so, alongside this tongue in cheek but deadly serious revue, Coburn and O’Reilly nestle another story on a human scale about generational legacies of abuse and the possibilities of breaking destructive patterns. Like a fractal–a complex pattern that operates self-similarly at different scales–the story of Ruth (Ebby O’Toole Acheampong), her parents, and her daughter reflects and refracts on the bigger-picture story in complex ways. (The two come together when Ali, Ruth’s daughter, winds up a passenger on the Crystal Prophecy.)

When Ruth is a child in the 1970s and 80s, books are both her escape from the violence and rage in her family and her way of bonding with her father in the rare moments he’s sober and turning a benign attention toward her. Her parents, Barbara (Thommas Kane Byrne) and Dick (Bláithín Mac Gabhann), are a “good family” on paper. He’s a doctor, after all; he’s concerned about the problems of the world–he gives his daughter Silent Spring. But he’s also a violent alcoholic, and we see Ruth’s every perception get warped by trying to predict his reactions–perhaps most traumatically when she takes Rachel Carson to heart and starts trying to change her own life accordingly. And we likewise see Barbara trapped in her own inability to see a way out of catastrophe. 

Twenty years later, when Ruth has her own child, she prides herself on not actually beating her—on not being quite as much of an alcoholic as her father. Still, she places her daughter, Ali (Maeve O’Mahony), in an impossible position, left with the responsibilities of the parent and no support system of her own. So when Ali coincidentally ends up on a cruise ship at the end of the world while her mother is dying, she has nothing left to give emotionally. Powerlessness leads to panic leads to hopelessness leads to numb despair–and here we are back at the end of the world, at the paralyzing grief of not being able to imagine anything different. As the program essay says, “It’s hard to change when you only have role models for everything you want to stop doing.” Ali and Robin (Mac Gabhann), a fellow passenger she flirts with, both also acknowledge the constant temptation to suicide on a cruise ship—who wouldn’t, in this state of the world? 

The interweaving of this narrowly focused, more realistic family drama into the whole is, I think, Hothouse’s most complicated balancing act of tone and style, and one that ends up leaning heavily on Ali, the pivot between the two. The connection between O’Mahony’s Ali and Mac Gabhann’s Robin feels tentative and tender, not a cure for anything but possibly a step toward something. As Hothouse leans into this relationship, it lets the bigger picture drop for a while–and then wrenches the two back together with a shipwreck and a glimpse of an entirely different future. It’s yet another major tonal shift, one that I’m not sure entirely works. It’s hard to start an entirely new sort of worldbuilding in an epilogue–but comes very close to succeeding, under O’Reilly’s sure hand, as the ensemble drops all the bright camp and artifice to simply and quietly show us this new present.

“And that’s why we’re here, to transform, to rediscover the love under the weary hurt,” says the captain, in launching the show. Invigorating and teasing as it is, white-hot as its undercurrents of fury sometimes burn, Hothouse, in the end, allows for a glimmer of hope, an acknowledgment that out of catastrophe, the seeds of change can spring. 

* Hothouse is an ensemble piece where a company of five plays all the roles; the program does not match performers with roles, but I think I’ve got the pairings correct.