A scene: Two women walking through north Sugar House streets, pre-dawn, on cold winter mornings. Usual topics: the declining water levels of Great Salt Lake, what a lost flamingo and a seagull might have in common, the toxicity of lakebed dust, and how to write plays about all of this.

On our walks, the smarter woman, playwright Elaine Jarvik, recounts progress on the script she’s writing with Matthew Ivan Bennett about Great Salt Lake. She’s gotten a crazy idea for the plot: What if the lake were a woman, who sets off on a heroine’s journey to explore the effects of her decline on her namesake city? And as two journalist-types, we had interesting conversations about the kind of questions a reporter might ask if she were to interview a lake.

Hearing the backstories of scripts as they are taking shape is just one of the pleasures of my regular walks with my friend Elaine. Last winter, I heard about Elaine and Matt’s interviews with scientists that provided gravitas for their plot. I heard about their attendance at Save the Lake rallies at the Utah Capitol, where a simple slogan on a sign—Just Add Water—offered the perfect title for their play.

Transition: Cut to the stage of Plan-B Theatre Company’s Studio Theatre, where the production of Just Add Water, directed by Penelope Caywood, will open on Oct. 2. The run continues through Oct. 19, with Thursday through Sunday shows.

From left: Latoya Cameron, Alec Kalled, and Amona Faatau in Plan-B Theatre Company’s production of Just Add Water. Image by Sharah Meservy.

Just Add Water is Elaine’s second play about the lake. She’s also the author of Eb & Flo, which Plan-B Theatre will tour to more than 100 elementary schools in the upcoming school year. It’s the story of a fantastic flamingo and a sensible seagull, who become friends while learning about brine shrimp, brine flies, and decreasing lake water levels. And they sing! (Free ticket reservations here. Request a performance of the play at your school here.)

Both Plan-B plays are part of a dozen temporary installations by local, national, and international artists commissioned for Salt Lake City Arts Council’s Wake the Great Salt Lake initiative (see here). Like other Wake the Great Salt Lake installations, the story of “Just Add Water” is grounded in facts. The play addresses an urgent issue and tells a personal story, says Caywood, the director. “It’s a piece that asks the audience to imagine with us and to imagine differently,” she said of the show’s minimalist “Big Cheap Theatre” presentation style.

Actor Latoya Cameron embodies Great Salt Lake in Just Add Water, a new play by Elaine Jarvik and Matthew Ivan Bennett, directed by Penelope Caywood for Plan-B Theatre Company. Image by Sharah Meservy.

Actor Latoya Cameron has been charged with creating the human persona of the lake. “She can hold power and vulnerability in the same breath,” Caywood says. “We’ve talked about leaning into those contradictions and she’s managed to make the lake both mythic and deeply human. She’s a force—both the actor and the lake.”

Walking into the play, theatergoers should feel confident that the story is based on deep care and research, enriched by whimsical humor. “Matthew and Elaine have built a script packed with real scientific detail and lived history,” the director says. “I hope people walk out having laughed, having felt something, and [will be] thinking about what Great Salt Lake needs and what role they can play in her future.”

In an interview, I asked the playwrights how they came to embody the lake as the story’s main character, as well as the art of collaboration and the complications of writing a play with “ripped-from-the-headlines” urgency.

When in the writing did Great Salt Lake become more of “a nature spirit in human form” rather than just a clever idea for a character?

MATTHEW: Early on, we wanted Great Salt Lake to have a voice in the play, and I wrote an early monologue for the lake that was rewritten (and rewritten) to appear in the final draft—but it was Elaine who suggested a hero’s journey track for GSL. We got together and gamed it out, coming up with possibilities within the structure of the Campbellian monomyth. It was clear in that planning session that it was more than a clever idea, and that it could become the backbone of the play (which it did!)

ELAINE: I credit Matt, who has a more mythic bent than I do. My first attempt was a monologue from a bedraggled figure who might have been less a nature spirit and more an acerbic washed-up woman bemoaning her fate. Comedian Joan Rivers, maybe.

All theater works are collaborations, of course, but this project also included the two of you co-writing the script. What surprised you about collaborating on this story?

ELAINE: What amazed me was how well our ideas and efforts merged, even though we tend to have different writing styles. We both believe that drama needs humor, so that helped. And when it came to the lyrical sections, I just stood back and marveled at what Matt wrote. Also, from Matt, I learned to think about the lake more from the lake’s point of view instead of just my human fear of toxic dust.

MATTHEW: I was pleasantly surprised to learn how ready Elaine was to rework. If something wasn’t gelling, she said so immediately and without hedging. I loved that. And we never took each other’s feedback personally. We just rolled up our sleeves and cut, added, changed. We dropped whole scenes. We left behind monologues. And it wasn’t painful.

What did you learn from your collaborations with director Penny Caywood and with the cast, including Latoya Cameron playing the lake?

MATTHEW: Penny isn’t just a talented director, but a thoughtful collaborator. She never criticized a scene without giving us good ideas about how to improve it. She helped us troubleshoot a scene that had given headaches from the beginning. That input was crucial, but she wasn’t thinking textually, or in terms of all the ideas we were balancing, but thinking in a visual/directorial way, and that viewpoint is what helped the best version of the scene get written.

ELAINE: I think Matt and I have created a sometimes serious, sometimes poignant, mostly over-the-top play—and Penny ran with that, making it more of a romp than I had ever envisioned. I can’t wait for audiences to see the playful way the props are used, how the play flows magically from scene to scene, and how each of the four actors embody their roles as humans, birds, shrimp, dust and on and on. Latoya, as Great Salt Lake herself, is even more regal, baffled, indignant and tragically hopeful than I could have ever wished for. Just to see her stare at herself in a mirror is worth the price of admission.

What are the pleasures—and complications—of writing a satirical “whimsical, cli-fi dramedy” that’s ripped from local headlines about the place where you live?

ELAINE: So many headlines. And lectures, and TV broadcasts and RadioWest segments. So of course we knew we had to come up with something that offered audiences more than just facts. That was the pleasure part. As for complications: Even though not enough has been done to save the lake, facts about the lake keep updating weekly. At some point we had to stop adding lines.

MATTHEW: The obvious complication is that, now, a few days from opening, we’d love to update the script with the latest news—but that’s not how theater works: The actors need the script to be locked at some point. The obvious pleasure, for me, has been seeing the director, designers, and actors really embrace the surrealist-whimsical style through the beauty of their creative individuality.

How, in the writing, did you help the audience be anchored through the absurdity of a lake and a brine shrimp (named Brien) walking into a bar? What are some of the narrative footholds layered into the story?

MATTHEW: The biggest foothold is the very familiar structure of the hero’s journey—which appears in a lot of Hollywood films. So even if the audience doesn’t know the technical stages of that form, they’ll recognize it. On a finer level, I’d say we tried to give people a foothold through humor. If you can make people laugh, then you can get them to care.

ELAINE: I think audiences will suspend disbelief from the very first moments. And then will want to follow GSL on her journey looking for help.

More than most plays, this kind of “Big Cheap Theatre-esque” play has to find tangible form in rehearsal. Is there one particular moment that stands out for you in making the story come alive?

ELAINE: So many moments. But let’s say the lake and the brine shrimp hitchhiking on I-80 as trucks roar by.

MATTHEW: Ha! The other night, in the first dress rehearsal, Isabella Reeder tried out a new funny voice for the scene we call “Dust: Part 2.” It was hands-down hysterical and partially made by her dust costume, which is basically a sack on her head.

Is there one particular scene or line that you hope might resonate with the audience? 

MATTHEW: I hope the audience can see themselves in the spat between a farmer character (a sort of stand-in for conservatives in general) and a slam poet character (a sort of stand-in for liberals). The thing is, they both make good and bad arguments at the same time. The Great Salt Lake issue is so complicated that you really must transcend binary, and certainly partisan, thinking.

ELAINE: Utahns could be the first people on Earth to save a saline lake.

In summary, is there anything you’d like to add about what potential theatergoers should know before they walk into the world of “Just Add Water?”

ELAINE: Three of the actors—Isabella Reeder, Amona Faatau, and Alec Kalled—play multiple roles and are brilliant in each.

MATTHEW: I want them to know that it’s a fun, warm play-world, occasionally angry but never far from humor, with as many questions as answers.

Just Add Water, Plan-B Theatre, Salt Lake City, October 2-19.

Ellen Weist

Ellen Fagg Weist, a former arts and theater reporter, promotes Utah culture as the public information officer for the Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement. She is the editor of a collection of fiction,“The Way We Live: Stories by Utah Women.”