Clearly, I’m not the only one experiencing cognitive dissonance. My relationship to the products of industry, my instinctive acceptance of capitalism’s deceptively reassuring hug, my enthusiastic gathering of all things petroleum—these aspects of life paradoxically comfort and disturb me in equal measure.
Claren Grosz gets it. She knows how and why we cling to our limited resources, understands how painful it is to imagine the lifestyle disruption necessary to pivot away from our current course, but she acknowledges how dismal our collective fate is if we don’t. In her whimsical and informative I love the smell of gasoline, a Pencil Kit Production presented by Nightwood Theatre (in association with Aluna Theatre), she gives us lots of numbers and factoids, but frames them in a heartfelt narrative that is both cosmic and intimate.
Celebrating her Albertan roots, she invites us in to meet her family and witness their strong ties to the oil and gas industry. Growing up with rigs and pipelines, we understand her connection to them as an aspect of home. As a Left-leaning adult with a healthy dose of climate awareness, she tries to reconcile her conflicted feelings and draws us into her fraught headspace.
The low-tech aesthetic is enchanting and clever. With a set of three overhead projectors operated in tandem, she conjures environments and punctuates key ideas with charming, crafty visuals that feel disarmingly crude yet offer genuine spectacle. In one particularly resonant image: a black liquid relentlessly closes in on her, the darkness at the edges of the spotlight threatening to blot her out, barely held off with constant scrapping.
She shares the stage with a few oil drums. Designer Echo Zhou even suspends one from the rafters with a cascade of plastic bags spilling out from it. This sense of mess, of stuff closing in, extends to the exposed tech of the show. Each of the overhead projectionists are immersed in their own collection of transparencies and bric-a-brac, the raw materials of their manufactured magic.
Grosz wrestles with the complex dynamics of industrial expansion, climate activism, and the familiar experience of individuals struggling their way through a life entrenched in a vast network of systems. She and co-director William Dao maintain a delightful balance throughout—providing an innovative presentation of stats and graphs, an emotional connection to them, all while drawing our attention to the mechanics of the production itself.
From the creation of the universe to our own current, small lives within it, many of the details Grosz examines hit surprisingly close to home. I, too, love the smell of gasoline and feel somewhat self-conscious about the olfactory thrill of gas station visits! More significantly, the mention of her father’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis—the specificity of it—had an unexpectedly visceral impact on me as that is the exact situation my family and I are working through.
Death is an inevitability for all of us, of course. Grosz acknowledges that the struggles of humanity—both individually and as a species—are relatively small in the grand scheme of things. The figures are terrifying though. The awful reality is closing in—an eventual end to us and, more immediately, our way of life. In daily experience, it feels both remote and uncomfortably perceptible, with definable features. Though our presence is barely a blip in the history of even this singular planet, we’re understandably invested in our tiny, temporary existence.
It’s not all fire and brimstone. She examines little pockets of adaptive, positive change that we’ve implemented throughout the globe. We can, she asserts, extend our time here and make it relatively pleasant. It’s a negotiation, one that needs to get more aggressive very soon, but she offers a legitimate case for optimism.
I love the smell of gasoline features guilt, pride, terror and hope—all wrapped up in Grosz’s endearing vibe!