Science Fiction Comes To Portland Stage With LAST SHIP TO PROXIMA CENTAURI

In an unprecedented season presenting five new works in its six-show subscription season, the theatrical world-premiere, science fiction play Last Ship to Proxima CentauriI opened Friday, March 4, and will be on stage through March 20. A digital-on-demand production (a limited number of tickets on sale now) will be available from March 16 through April 3.

Last Ship to Proxima Centauri written by Greg Lam, won the grand prize in the 2020 Clauder Competition for New England Playwrights. The grand prize guarantees a full production at Portland Stage with a professional director, designers, and actors. Portland Stage also funded the Mandarin and Spanish translations for this multilingual script. English supertitles are displayed on a screen above the stage.

Greg Lam uses science fiction to examine the contentious issues of the day through the lens of an otherworldly situation, exploring themes of imperialism, systemic racism, and injustice in a faraway world that echoes our own. The play begins on a ship delivering 100,000 cryogenically frozen Seattleites to their new home planet, Proxima Centauri b, after leaving planet Earth uninhabitable. They arrive 160 years late, directed by pilot Morris Emerson and Captain Adelaide Russell, to find a new colony with a radically different social structure descended from the people of non-European countries. Remembering episodes from Earth's history, the planet's residents view the ship full of Americans with suspicion.

The dark comedy has many moments of reverence for American pop culture as Tunde, a security guard and amateur US historian on Proxima Centauri, and his hard-hitting associate Paz give the audience ample opportunity to both laugh and wince. Last Ship to Proxima Centauri asks as many questions as it answers with nuanced characters with no clearly defined good or evil characters. Even the Japanese-American Henry Hirano, whose ability to code-switch in White society affords him more freedom in the new colony than his White peers, gets questioned about his ancestors' treatment of the Chinese. The writing and the genre give viewers room for reflection and discussion.

Learn more at https://www.portlandstage.org/show/last-ship-to-proxima-centauri-2022/.