The Big One: A New Play Dramatizes the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
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The Big One, a new play running through September 27 in Anchorage, Alaska, chronicles the missteps leading up to one of the greatest manmade ecological disasters in history and its aftermath: the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Fittingly, Riki Ott—scientist, longtime activist for the victims of the spill, and author of Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill—is represented as a central figure in the drama.
From the Anchorage Daily News:
The title of Dick Reichman’s new play summarizes the topic neatly: “The Big One: A Chronicle of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.”
In the 20 years since the disaster spread petroleum along a huge swath of Alaska’s Pacific coastline, many writers have produced detailed histories of it and the notion of corporate villains creating ecological chaos in pursuit of profits has become a stock plot line in novels and movies. A number of these accounts - both fictional and non - have been eye-glazing dull.
That’s not the case with “The Big One.” Running about two hours, Reichman’s play necessarily compresses the details and tightens the action. Despite the fact that we know how this ends, from start to finish the theatricality is tautly dramatic, even melodramatic; on the other hand, any accurate depiction of the spill must reflect the extreme emotions and frantic horror that spread as people realized the scope of the problem. People really were shouting on the phones like this. In fact several parts of the dialogue appear to be transcripts of actual communications and interviews.
The first act takes us to the point that the tanker has hulled onto Bligh Reef and oil is spreading across the water. Our attention is fixed on the chain of incidents leading to the spill, from cost-cutting decisions made in Houston or Washington, D.C., to the famous pre-sailing drinks, to scant seconds of inattention at critical moments. At any number of junctures, different decisions might have meant the accident was avoided.
The second act tallies missteps taken in the aftermath, from the lack of on-site resources to contain the spill, to failing to deploy the one chemical (itself a toxin) that had a chance of dispersing the crude, to the poisoning of cleanup workers. Dialogue and acted scenes are regularly accompanied by short narratives, describing court findings, science or curiosities like the fact that, unlike other ships, tankers tend to be referred to as “he.”
But the real beauty of “The Big One” (apparently the term was in use before the spill by people who felt that it was inevitable) is not that it makes history entertaining, but that it makes the people involved in history real humans.
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