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Song of Extinction opens with the discomfiting sound of a violist practicing scales, a timeworn indicator of household tensions. The musician is Max Forrestal (Ben Delgado), a precocious 15-year-old whose mother, Lily (Shelley Aisner), is in the hospital and near the end of an unsuccessful battle against cancer.
Max lives with his inattentive father, Ellery (Thomas Magee), who ignores his wife and his son in favor of his biology career. In his absence, Max must come to terms with his mother’s sickness and the fragility of human life. But will the adults around him rise to the occasion and guide him?
That question haunts Song of Extinction, which was written by acclaimed Oregon playwright E.M. Lewis (Magellanica) and directed by Michael Griggs and Kathleen Worley. Staged in Twilight Theater Company’s intimate venue, the 90-minute production deftly brings Lewis’ story to life—and offers a compelling meditation on the myriad ways in which life can vanish.
In Lewis’s rendering, “extinction” becomes an umbrella term encompassing all sorts of suffering—cancer, death, genocide—and it’s reflected in Ellery’s work as a biologist. He’s studying a rare insect that lives in the Bolivian jungle, but because his efforts to lobby a land developer to stop deforestation in the region have failed, that species may cease to exist.
Then there is Khim Phan (Arun Kumar), Max’s lonely biology teacher (and the play’s narrator). Phan was the only member of his family to survive the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and occasionally, memories of his past surface during direct addresses to the audience.
Max, who is failing biology, comes to Phan for help on an essay about (you guessed it) extinction. Over the course of their meetings, Phan becomes something of a surrogate father, filling the void left by Max’s absent father and dying mother.
At one point, Phan describes the murder of his family (including a 3-year-old brother) to a distraught Max, who basically tells Phan to go to hell. He’s just a kid, after all, but Phan responds dismissively to Max’s outburst, claiming that Americans struggle with the concept of extinction because they can’t imagine it happening to them.
There’s a hint of authorial voice behind Phan’s words. Elements of the play, which premiered in 2008, feel dated (like the fact that the characters see climate catastrophe not as global, but as something happening “elsewhere” in Bolivia), but Phan’s (Lewis’) warning about the American inability to conceptualize extinction is topical.
Today, we live in a country where democracy itself qualifies as an endangered species and fundamental human rights have been completely wiped out. Yet the play’s best scenes offer an escape to a more optimistic world.
In the final third of Song of Extinction, the disparate strands of the story are interwoven in scenes that abandon the strict realism Lewis employs earlier. Characters who have not previously shared the stage meet for the first time in a dreamlike Bolivian rain forest, which might exist in Lily’s imagination, or in a liminal space between life and death. It’s the most lyrical—and enjoyable—part of the story.
When Max finally turns in his assignment, it bears the same title as the play. Like the healing power of music, it helps ferry Max to safer emotional ground, emerging not as a thesis-driven essay, but a humanizing reflection on his family.
Given its subject matter, Song of Extinction could have left audiences despondent, but an uplifting ending suggests that the future is bright for its characters. Despite being a play about life ending, it reminds us that all life—human or otherwise—is worth preserving.
SEE IT: Song of Extinction plays at Twilight Theater Company, 7515 N Brandon Ave., 503-847-9838, twilighttheatercompany.org. 8 pm Friday-Saturday, 3 pm Sunday, and 8 pm Thursday, July 28, through July 31. $23.