Fake Lake

SWIM WHERE? Greene embarks on an aquatic journey.

Photo: Erika Dufour

In 1998, a 23 year-old Sharon Greene accepted an invitation to go camping on Utah’s Lake Powell with a group of people she didn’t know. Lake Powell, it turns out, isn’t really a lake; it’s the nation’s second-largest man-made reservoir, created in the early 1960s by damming the Colorado River and filling up Glen Canyon like a bathtub. Greene, with her new play staged in the Welles Park pool, seems to connect the two events—the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam and her own ill-advised road trip there—under the rubric of Times We Should Have Known Better.

The formation of young-adult identity these days is a fluid thing; the rigid containers that guided our parents’ and grandparents’ generations don’t seem to hold water anymore. More often than not, young people thrust into adulthood find themselves dogpaddling just to stay afloat.

Sorry. We’ll try to stop torturing Greene’s metaphor. But it is an effective one: Decisions that seem innocuous at the time, whether on scales small and personal (boozing it up in the Utah desert) or large and environmental (damming off an ecosystem), create ripples with effects that won’t be clear until years later.

The meta-theater aesthetic of the Neo-Futurists’ prime time shows can sometimes feel rote, but in lifting it out of the Neo-Futurarium and dunking it in the pool, Greene and Kays break new ground. Unlike other waterlogged plays we’ve seen, the setting doesn’t feel like a gimmick so much as a natural element of the storytelling; the aquatic drag itself tends to relax the pace in a way that’s as effective as it is affecting. Fake Lake is a clearheaded look at the constant struggle to keep one’s head above water.