By: Karissa Ketter, News Editor
With ever-increasing concern for our planet, longtime Canadian environmental activist duo David Suzuki and Tara Cullis are trying a new way to get people’s attention. They hit the stage February 13–17 to star in What You Won’t Do For Love alongside actors and theatre-makers, Miriam Fernandes and Sturla Alvsvaag.
What You Won’t Do For Love is a love story where humans are “not the centre of the story [ . . . ] Nature is,” as Fernandes said in the show. In this play, these four folks gather around a cozy kitchen table to share stories about the love they share for each other and planet Earth.
The show is based on a real experience these two couples experienced together. When Fernandes originally approached Suzuki to act in the play over six years ago, Suzuki was wary about acting. Under the guidance of artistic director Ravi Jain, Fernandes and Alvsvaag decided to sit down with Suzuki and Cullis to write a play about their own life stories.
Amid the group’s light-hearted and humorous banter, the show is divided into seven distinct scenes that each explore a key theme of Suzuki and Cullis’ ethos on environmentalism. In their conversation on Suzuki’s time as a young student studying genetics, he proclaimed it was “the sense of wonder” that made him fall in love with science. However, throughout his career as a scientist, that sense of wonder was restricted: “If I write a paper that is full of that wonder [ . . . ] it would never get published,” or be taken seriously in academia. For Suzuki, this is one of the great failings in the field. “Science is presented as an objective exercise, so we scrub the emotion out of it, yet it’s that emotion and the joy of discovering nature that attracts us to science in the first place,” said Suzuki.
Fernandes, a long-time actor and director, agreed, “For me, art is a way of making visible what is invisible. In the same way you do, David, when you look into a microscope.” This scene was a way to make clear that to understand science, we need a balance between our right and left brains — the logical and imaginative. Suzuki concluded, “The environmental crisis is not just a scientific, logical issue we’re confronting. We’ve got to touch people’s hearts.”
The four agreed the lack of emotional love we have for our planet is often why environmental movements ultimately fail. Together, Suzuki and Cullis share a story of their activism from the 1990s: together with a Kayapó Chief, they attempted to stop a hydroelectric dam from being built in the Amazon Rainforest and subsequently flooding Indigenous Kayapó territory in Brazil. Yet, 30 years after their hard-earned success, the dam was built.
The Peak was able to sit down with Suzuki and Cullis to learn more about the show. Cullis noted getting a stage was a real step from their usual environmental action. While Suzuki has often written books, been on TV, or given lectures, Cullis noted, “We haven’t really achieved a turnaround in society with those. So, it seemed to me it would be sensible to try the arts to use the other side of our brains and see if we could communicate better that way.”
For Suzuki, the theme of love resonated with him because his “message all along is that we have to love nature — we have to love the world that makes us possible.” He described the potential love we could share for Mother Earth as a “powerful force that makes us act the right way.”
Throughout the interview and the show, it was clear Suzuki’s love for Cullis is what kept him going throughout his long career as a scientist and activist. “When you go to the play, you’ll see that Tara is really the star of this whole thing,” said Suzuki. “I am who I am because of her.” Cullis added, “David and I are different, we’re very different. That’s, I think, what makes us strong, we’re like two sides of an arch that couldn’t stand alone.”
In the show, Suzuki and Cullis retell their first meeting to Fernandes and Alvsvaag. At a graduate party at Carleton University, Suzuki approached Cullis, asking her to dance, “and then he took off” without hearing her response, according to Cullis. After a hearty audience laugh, Suzuki and Cullis stand up to slow-dance on the stage. In the interview with Cullis, she recalls this is her favourite part of the show. “It’s just a very romantic moment [which is] the last thing you’d expect: being intimate when you’re standing in front of 200 people. That, for me, was my favourite part.”
Suzuki concluded the interview with a message for university students. The “importance of young people [is] they don’t have a vested interest in that status quo,” said Suzuki. “They can see that their future is really at stake, and they don’t have to go on protecting the institutions that already exist.”
The transcript of What You Won’t Do For Love: A Conversation is available for purchase at Massy Books.
