Great Salt Lake and a brine shrimp walk into a bar…

by Matthew Ivan Bennett

In JUST ADD WATER by Matthew Ivan Bennett and co-writer Elaine Jarvik, Great Salt Lake takes human form and heads into the city on a quest to understand what is happening to her and what she can do about it: a whimsical, cli-fi dramedy about nature spirits, open mics, mic drops, humans, dust, and hope.

When I can’t fall asleep, I visualize myself on Great Salt Lake, paddling a canoe into the sunset. I used to sail there with my dad, and I know just what the twilit water looks like — those swells of uncanny light, turquoise and salmon. That image of the lake has talismanic power for me, representing love, ease, and the creative mind itself.

I wish it weren’t so, but the lake is dying. It’s simple: more water is evaporating from the lake’s surface every year than is flowing into the lake. In a fairy tale, a hero would leave her village and find out where the water went. She’d confront the greedy giant or sorcerer. She’d fight him, or trick him, and the water would flow again.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a fairy tale. In real life, the hero and giant are the same: they’re human civilization along the Wasatch Front. The “giant” part of us is polylithic: it’s consumerism, it’s commercial agriculture, mineral extraction, municipalities, pro-growth policies at every level; it’s the real estate sector and the fifth-acre-per-family zoning of the American Dream.

I wish I could write a fairy tale about the lake, but what we need is a levelheaded but hopeful piece, one in the playful mold of Maria Irene Fornés. We need a dramatization that grapples with the hyperobject that is our lake in peril while featuring the fantastic reporting of the Great Salt Lake Collaborative. We need to help Utahns and others understand the science, the politics, the economics, and the spiritual costs of the lake in peril and recovery.

Salt Lake City is my hometown. The air quality is personal to me. Seeing the exposed lake bed and the tannish dots on my windshield is personal to me. I don’t want to be a climate refugee. I don’t want to have to leave here. I don’t want to stop imagining myself on the lake as I’m falling to sleep because no one canoes there anymore. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, we’re now experiencing 15 dust events per year. That number could easily rise if we — as journalists, as scientists, as artists, as citizens — don’t demand collective action to save the lake. Sometimes I feel like there’s so little I can do, but in this case, I knew exactly what I could do: write. Write the most passionate and informed play possible — JUST ADD WATER — about how we save the lake. Draw on the work of scientists, journalists, and activists and inspire people by showing them what we can and must do in defense of our home.

JUST ADD WATER by Matthew Ivan Bennett & Elaine Jarvik receives its world premiere, directed by Penelope Caywood, October 2-19 in the Studio Theatre @ The Rose. Details and tickets at planbtheatre.org/justaddwater