David Finnigan Photo by Joan Marcus

This is a play about history. Not just any history, but our history as human beings. More specifically, it's about the relationship between human history and climate change. Finnigan serves as lecturer, raconteur, and guide through a 70-minute journey that covers some 75,000 years, a long view of what is seen by many as a rather more recent and ongoing series of catastrophic events that may possibly lead to the near extinction of human life in the not-too-distant future.

Finnigan, who is a theatre-maker and the son of an actual climate scientist, hails from a region of Australia where out-of-control brush fires leading to horrendous air pollution are all too common. If you are a New Yorker, I am here to remind you of when the air turned brown a year ago from smoke emanating from Canadian fires. That's the kind of thing he's talking about.

The purpose of Deep History, which runs 70 minutes and is presented as a kind of audience-friendly lecture, is not to raise the alarm, which has been raised with consistent frequency by others. Instead, Finnigan takes us on a quick journey through time in order to give us a different perspective, notably that climate change is not of recent making, but has deep roots in the past that make it more like a geologic age. We were born into it, he says, and it will be continuing for a very long time after we're gone, causing devastation until and unless we or those who follow us are able to put on the brakes.

Like any good playwright, Finnigan has invented a character to serve as our guide, a woman who first appears in the story some 75,000 years ago, at a time when the human population (and that of other mammals) was experiencing a sudden and rapid loss of lives, possibly from a massive volcano. This is the first stop along a path that takes detours at various stages of history, at 68,000 years ago, then 27,000 years, then 11,000, as humans and nature began to collide more and more. Our imagined guide, continuously reincarnated, takes us along with her on this journey through time.

There is not a lot of traditional theatricality to Deep History. Finnigan relies on his skills as a storyteller as he jumps between the far distant past and current times. The only "visual aids" are some projections from his laptop computer and a length of brown paper on which he highlights his points. This may not be a must-see work for anyone seeking a typical dramatic presentation, but the reality is plenty dramatic for anyone interested in the geologic scale of climate change, and in gaining a different perspective on what the future may hold for us,