Reliving the Big One

The Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 has all the makings of a great Hollywood action movie. You could almost picture Mark Wahlberg or Dwayne Johnson running through the downtown park strip as buildings tumble and the earth opens up in caverns of literal divide between the hero and his ex-wife or estranged son, or whatever the human interest plot point may be.

But when University of Alaska Anchorage theater decided to take on the mission of telling the story of the 1964 quake onstage, there wasn’t going to be any multi-million budget to help tell the story for them.

And with budget constraints even tighter, that meant even more thespian energy was going to be required to make an audience feel the ground shake.

“At first, it felt super-weird, but once we were able to collectively find this energy and focus on what was at hand, we truly built something that will show that sort of emotion and the feelings you have during an earthquake, even though we can’t have that movie moment,” said second-year theater student Paitton Reid, who plays June, a character driven to apply conspiracy theories to the cause of the quake. “It has to be something that brings through that sort of emotion, the truth we have to bring so everybody believes something is happening.”

But performing not only the earthquake scene but the tsunami scene that followed wasn’t even the biggest challenge in putting on Earthquake ’64, which debuts Friday night at the UAA Fine Arts Center, running through Sunday and again next weekend. The biggest challenge was probably the enormity of the research and interviews involved, and, according to the show’s director Brian Cook, keeping the voices and ideas of as many as 20 contributors in the bounds of a single story.

“We read books, watched documentaries, interviewed several people who lived in Anchorage at the time,” Cook said. “One of the professors of environmental science came to talk to us about earthquake science and we went to the Alaska Experience Theater and watched their documentary, so it was fully based in research.”

One of the chief finds came courtesy of student Angela Colavecchio, whose grandmother survived the quake and had a personal story that ingrained itself easily into the script, expressed even in a musical theme.

“We meet several people before the earthquake, we experience the event and see what happens to them afterwards,” Cook said. “I think we tried not to be too melodramatic. That story line from the grandma, nobody dies in that storyline, but what happened in the real world was she was dating a man for a long time, 3 to 4 years, and he’d never proposed. He proposed the next. That’s the core of the storyline; the shift in their lives with the upheaval of the event.”

Cook said that in the process of this ‘devised project’, the team made sure that the scientific gains learned from the great quake remained in the story.

“It’s a story about the earthquake as we’ve interpreted it,” Cook said. “There’s some lighthearted moments, some sad moments — there’s a memorial bit at the end — but it will be a very dynamic evening with lots of different kinds of storytelling — dance, movement, regular text-based storytelling… It’s a lively, fast-paced telling of events that they’ve heard about but maybe never dug down deep into.”

When it’s all over next weekend, Cook said he’d like to continue telling stories of Alaskan history on stage.

“I don’t think there’s as many plays about Alaska as maybe there should be,” Cook said. “I think audiences like to see the place they live on stage… I think it would be interesting to have a series of different plays or stories based on Alaska. You look at the interest in Arctic Entries, their experiences living in Alaska — lots of people go to them, so there is that interest in storytelling.”

The production runs February 8 - 18 with shows on Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays at 5pm. General Admission is $19.99 and tickets are available at ArtsUAA.com.