Ommie the otter, Ever, and Adam boldly face the future—kind of. (Photo by Matt Reznik)

You’d think that a play about the last days of the human race might have some kind of tension, some kind of stakes, but nope, not this one. In A Brief History of Human Extinction, which was created by Jordan Hall and Mind of a Snail (Jessica Gabriel and Chloé Ziner), nothing much matters—for a bunch of reasons.

For starters, the premise doesn’t make sense. We’re in the year 2178. Unleashed by climate change, a fungal plague has apparently wiped out all other forms of life on earth, except for two humans named Ever and Adam, an otter called Ommie, and the farm animals and crops that Adam tends. These surviving life forms are all sequestered in a locked-down biosphere.

Ever is determined to launch a rocket called The Ark, which will carry viable DNA from all sorts of earthly creatures—including Homo sapiens—to a distant planet, which they will then populate. When we first meet Ever, she is recording a video message for the human spawn, who will be 12 years old when they arrive on Kepler-186f. But who will have raised this unlucky band? Ever and Adam will not be accompanying them. [Read more…]