Last Ship to Proxima Centauri
Description
The Earth has become uninhabitable. The last escape ship from Earth (Seattle, to be exact) arrives to its new home planet centuries after all the others. The pilots are not prepared for what they find there. LAST SHIP TO PROXIMA CENTAURI asks us to examine 21st-century America through the lens of futurist neo-colonialism, 2,000 years after the end of Must See TV.
Production Info
Full Length Dark Comedy (about 110 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
Press Quotes
“Mr Spock likely would have raised an eyebrow and proclaimed [this] play ‘fascinating.’ LAST SHIP TO PROXIMA CENTAURI zips issues of immigration, race, gender, ethnicity, genetics, demographics, history, politics and economics, to name just a few, into space suits for a dark comedy set in a not-so-appealing future. There’s definitely a lot to think about in this highly imaginative and sometimes quite biting work. The titular ship is one of several launched on a mission to save thousands of humans from a planet Earth that’s no longer inhabitable. Rotating crews, who are otherwise suspended in a life-extending ‘stasis,’ take the con as millennia pass. After an unexpected delay, the last ship gets a signal from planet Proxima Centauri, and the two on-duty crew members celebrate madly. Not so fast. In author Lam’s Clauder Competition–winning creation, the current inhabitants of the planet have several rather probing questions they’d like to ask before their ‘committee’ decides if the new arrivals will be welcomed. For example, why is this ship from America populated mostly by privileged white people while the new world of Proxima Centauri is in the hands of people who came from more diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds? Who takes on the role of ‘outsiders’ in this new world? The planetary tables have been turned. But is the new order on Proxima any better? The author relentlessly pulls on these threads while the action of a hard landing on a distant planet plays out.” —Steve Feeny, Portland Press Herald
“… Greg Lam’s dark-comic sci-fi drama LAST SHIP TO PROXIMA CENTAURI. A Clauder Competition winner, this [is a] pointed and very entertaining show … Like all good science fiction, LAST SHIP provides a fantasy world of cultural inversions and alternatives, the better for us to consider our own reality. In this case, Lam gives us an opportunity to rethink American culture by watching what happens when white Euro-Americans show up as refugees in a society that wasn’t settled by white people, a society whose historical memory of white America includes some Frasier but a lot more colonialist violence. LAST SHIP channels classic sci-fi tropes to pose challenging questions about race, immigration ethics and politics, the legacy of hegemony, and the plasticity of historical narrative … In his storytelling, Lam deepens these genre hijinks with his rich world-building of the new planet, which is multicultural…but definitely not utopian — kind of like Hawaii under the rule of Chairman Mao … LAST SHIP TO PROXIMA CENTAURI continues the sci-fi tradition of letting the last frontier take us back, however uncomfortably, to our own home — to seeing how it might look from a distance, and from the outside.” —Megan Grumbling, Portland Phoenix
Author
Greg LamGreg Lam is a playwright, screenwriter, and board game designer who lives in the Bay Area. He is the co-founder of the Asian-American Playwright Collective and a member of The Pulp Stage Writer's Room and the Pear Theatre's Playwright Guild. His full-length epic LAST SHIP TO PROXIMA CENTAURI premiered digitally at Kitchen Dog Theater in March 2021 and onstage at Portland Stage Co. in March 2022 after winning the Clauder Competition. His full-length play REPOSSESSED received its world premiere at Theatre Conspiracy in 2018. His serial play series TREACHERY ISLAND will premiere at The Pulp Stage in 2022. In 2019, he was named a fellow in the Dramatic Arts by the Mass Cultural Council and the inaugural Pao Fellow of the Company One PlayLab. Greg was a member of the 2016 Company One PlayLab Unit for the development of Boston area playwrights. His works have been produced by Company One, Fresh Ink Theatre, Pork Filled Productions, The Depot, The Boston Theatre Marathon, Open Theatre Project, Post Meridian Radio Theatre, Other World Theatre Paragon Festival, theatre@first, Navigators Theater, Fantastic.Z, Project Y, The Hive Collective, Culture Park, Silverthorne Theatre, The Pulp Stage, Ixion Theatre Ensemble, Eagle and Beaver Ensemble, 4th Street Theatre, Midwest Dramatists Conference, Last Frontier Theatre Conference, Tiny Theatre, Pear Theatre, Wishing Wind Creations, Revolution Shakespeare, The Best of All Possible Podcast, Baldwin Wallace University, and others. In 2021 he curated a 39 play series called Sci-Fi Summer Shorts by Tiny Theatre. You can see works of his that have been filmed at https://tinyurl.com/greglam. Greg writes, largely, full-length epics which combine grinding moral quandaries with science fiction, short plays that are comic romps, and one-minute plays which are incredibly depressing. Greg is the co-creator of the "Boston Podcast Players" podcast (bostonpodcastplayers.com) Boston's virtual podcast stage for new works by local playwrights.
Book Information
| Publisher | BPPI |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 7/28/2023 |
| Pages | 100 |
| ISBN | 9780881459821 |
Special Notes
Translations by Jecenia Isis Figueroa, Kayodè Soyemi, and Livian Yeh
Theatrical World Premiere Production:
PORTLAND STAGE COMPANY
Anita Stewart, Executive & Artistic Director
Streaming Digital World Premiere:
KITCHEN DOG THEATER, Dallas, TX
Christopher Carlos & Tina Parker, Artistic Directors; Tim Johnson, Managing Director
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypublishing.com
