By Sherrie Rose
CARLSBAD. California –Driving to Carlsbad, home to the world’s largest ranunculus flower fields, to see a play about dying bees carries its own irony. By the time you settle into your seat at the Dea Hurston New Village Arts Center, you’re already thinking about pollination, about what we stand to lose.
Kate Douglas’s The Apiary doesn’t waste time easing you into its premise. It’s 20+ years in the future. Honeybees are nearly extinct. What remains of them exist in synthetic apiaries providing palliative care to a species we’ve failed to save. No bees means no honey, no almonds, no avocados. The food chain collapses one pollinator at a time.
Director Kristianne Kurner, staging her 40th production at New Village Arts as the theatre celebrates its 25th year, has assembled an all-woman cast that brings both scientific precision and emotional weight to Douglas’s dystopian vision. Michelle Caravia plays stressed lab manager Gwen. Adelaida Martinez is hive coordinator Pilar. Milena Sellers Phillips is the new employee Zora. Nio Russell plays multiple roles. Hayden St. Clair and Maybelle Shimizu serve as swings.
The stage is clinical white, sterile as a lab, with ancillary spaces flanking the main playing area for intimate monologues. Projections of bees move across the walls. The constant buzz of their wings fills the space. You can’t forget what’s at stake.
We meet PhD-overqualified Zora on her first day at the underfunded lab, suited up in the all-white gear of beekeepers. She’s there because she loves bees, a passion shared by the delightfully optimistic Pilar, who processes bee carcasses while lip-syncing to 2000s pop. The contrast works: Pilar is the guiding light of the production, earnest to her core, training the more measured and driven Zora with unflagging cheerfulness. Above them both is Gwen, speaking in an almost monotone yell, treating everything as an imperative, keeping her head down and her budget lower so the research doesn’t get discontinued.
When an unexpected incident causes the bees to start hiving again, Zora and Pilar cross ethical and legal boundaries to sustain the impossible. They lie to Gwen. Zora spends her own money. They both refuse to accept extinction as inevitable.
The play opens with a monologue about talking to bees, an old practice, deeply personal, passed from mother to daughter. Tell them about births, deaths, marriages. The bees need to know. This human ritual stands in sharp relief against the sterile scientific method, with its hypotheses and clinical trials, that has brought us to this precipice.
The Apiary asks uncomfortable questions without providing comfortable answers. What are we willing to do to save an endangered species? What is our relationship to nature when we’ve already broken it? What is our intention? The play feels like a warning.
In 2007, prominent Jewish American conservation biologist Claire Kremen received a MacArthur “genius grant” for her research on bee colony collapse disorder. Since then, at least ten films about bees have been produced, plus four theatrical works including this one. We keep telling ourselves the story. We keep buzzing the alarm.
The question is whether anyone’s listening.
The Apiary runs until February 22nd at New Village Arts, 2787 State Street, Carlsbad, CA 92008. Tickets and information.
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