boom

“Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's very funny BOOM is an ingenious fable as biological history diorama. It is also America's most popular new play. It is easy to see why ... crisp, irreverent and provocative.”
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“As is often the case in a comedy, especially an apocalyptic one, things go very badly for all concerned, but for the audience it could hardly go better. As catastrophic extinction events go, this BOOM is a blast.”
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“Marin's own playwright, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, has audiences rolling in the aisles ... the exceptionally talented actors, frequently seen in Bay Area theaters, serve Nachtrieb's highly fertile imagination.”
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“Director Ryan Rilette seamlessly keeps the pace steady (somewhere near hectic), the timing exquisite and the freeze-frame cinematic lighting perfect ... The play seems destined to be a smash - not unlike, let's say, the impact of a comet hitting earth."”
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Evolution vs Creationism

By Margot Melcon

BOOM

Evolution vs Creationism
Biological evolution is descent with modification. This definition encompasses small-scale evolution (changes in gene frequency in a population from one generation to the next) and large-scale evolution (the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations). Evolution‘s helps understand the history of life.

Biological evolution is not simply a matter of change over time. Lots of things change over time: trees lose their leaves, mountain ranges rise and erode, but they aren't examples of biological evolution because they don't involve descent through genetic inheritance.

The central idea of biological evolution is that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor. Through the process of descent with modification, the common ancestor of life on Earth gave rise to the fantastic diversity that we see documented in the fossil record. Evolution means that we're all distant cousins: humans and oak trees, hummingbirds and whales.

Mechanisms of change
Mutation: A mutation could cause parents with genes for bright green coloration to have offspring with a gene for brown coloration. That would make the genes for brown beetles more frequent in the population.

Migration: Some individuals from a population of brown beetles might have joined a population of green beetles. That would make the genes for brown beetles more frequent in the green beetle population.

Genetic drift: Imagine that in one generation, two brown beetles happened to have four offspring survive to reproduce. Several green beetles were killed when someone stepped on them and had no offspring. The next generation would have a few more brown beetles than the previous generation — but just by chance. These chance changes from generation to generation are known as genetic drift.

Natural selection
Imagine that green beetles are easier for birds to spot (and hence, eat). Brown beetles are a little more likely to survive to produce offspring. They pass their genes for brown coloration on to their offspring. So in the next generation, brown beetles are more common than in the previous generation. All of these mechanisms can cause changes in the frequencies of genes in populations, and so all of them are mechanisms of evolutionary change. However, natural selection and genetic drift cannot operate unless there is genetic variation — that is, unless some individuals are genetically different from others.

Genetic Variation
Without genetic variation, some of the basic mechanisms of evolutionary change cannot operate. There are three primary sources of genetic variation:

• Mutations are changes in the DNA. A single mutation can have a large effect, but in many cases, evolutionary change is based on the accumulation of many mutations.
• Gene flow is any movement of genes from one population to another and is an important source of genetic variation.
• Sex can introduce new gene combinations into a population. This genetic shuffling is another important source of genetic variation.

Creationism refers to the religious belief that humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe were created in some form by a supernatural being or beings, commonly a single deity. However the term is more commonly used to refer to religiously motivated rejection of natural biological processes, in particular evolution, as an explanation accounting for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth. In Christian sects such creationism is usually based on a literal reading of Genesis 1-2 but other religions have deity-led creation myths which are quite different.

In many countries, belief in creationism has decreased as scientific theories have been presented that support more naturalistic explanations for the universe and for life. While some have tried to refute these theories, others believe in types of creationism that do not exclude all of these theories. When mainstream scientific research produces conclusions which contradict a strict creationist interpretation of scripture, creationists will reject the conclusions of the research and/or its underlying scientific theories and/or its methodology. Both creation science and intelligent design have been characterized as pseudoscience by the mainstream scientific community. The most notable disputes concern the effects of evolution on the development of living organisms, the idea of common descent, the geologic history of the Earth, the formation of the solar system, and the origin of the universe.

Meet the Playwright

By Margot Melcon

Dramaturg Margot Melcon interviews Playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb

The scene opens on a coffee shop in San Francisco's Mission District. It is early on a Monday morning, before rehearsals have started for the Marin Theatre Company production of Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's hit comedy boom, and Peter is looking across the table into the interviewers' gaze. The whirl of the coffee grinder echoes in the background. And then . . .

What happened next was civilized, real life, normal human behavior. Oatmeal and scones were enjoyed over discussion of Peter's hilarious body of work, the circuitous path that returned him to the Bay Area, and his inevitable future as one of America's up-and-coming playwrights.

But if this scene were in one of Peter's plays, anything could have happened. A conspiracy, uncovered! Best friends tear each other apart, figuratively and literally! Or, of course, a massive comet hits the earth, destroying mankind!

Peter Nachtrieb has a gift for extremity. He has mastered the fundamental rule of comedy-anything becomes funny if pushed far enough-which he dexterously demonstrates in all of his plays. A Mill Valley native, he has made the Bay Area his home, and has taken inspiration from the sometimes eccentric and often impossibly bizarre behavior of the locals.

Produced by Killing My Lobster in San Francisco in 2006, his play Hunter Gatherers was the summer's runaway hit, extending multiple times and garnering the prestigious American Theatre Critics Association / Steinberg New Play Award. In January 2009, Encore Theatre Company brought T.I.C. (Trenchcoat in Common) to San Francisco. With still-talked-about productions of these plays living in Bay Area memory, Marin Theatre Company braces for the whirlwind funny that is the world of Peter Nachtrieb.

What is boom about?
boom is about the affects of fate versus randomness in our lives-how much of our future is left to chance and how much we are able to control or have influence on where we go. Obviously it's both, and the play is exploring how those two things happen at the same time, and how that can sometimes be frustrating.

What was your inspiration to start writing this play?
I was a theater-biology major at Brown University. I've always had a scientific world-view, looking at us, at humans, as part of a natural system. Even though we think of ourselves as separate, taking a bigger step back and realizing we're not, that in all we do, we're still organic creatures making things and creating systems. I wanted to write a play from that perspective.

You were a theater-biology major. Why did you pursue theater instead of biology?
I was always geared more towards theater than biology, but my theater advisor freshman year told me I should major in something else, that to do theater I didn't really need a degree. But theater was what I wanted to do, so he suggested I major in two things, which was smart advice.

Freshman year I took an intro biology course, the starter course for the degree, taught by an incredible professor. That was when I decided I should do both. The inclusion of biology worked really well in terms of balancing my life, not getting too sucked into the theater community.

I took a year off college between sophomore and junior year. I spent half the year at home working in a restaurant and I putting up my solo performance for two nights at [my alma mater] Marin Academy. And then I worked for a marine biologist for four months off the coast of Panama. I watched fish spawn for 90 days straight, every morning. It was a pretty incredible experience. It was just like I described it in the play, a spit of sand and an archipelago of islands, lots of little islands around with people living on them. Very short people.

At Brown, were you more of a performer or had you already started writing?
I was more of a performer, but I did start writing at Brown. My acting class sophomore year had some writing components-our final project was a solo show, and we did some other exercises that got me charged up about writing.

But you still act now, right?
Sort of. I should really take that off my website. [laughs] I do on-camera stuff, sometimes, and interactive murder mysteries, and sexual harassment training seminars. And I was in a reading at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival this summer. It's not my focus so I feel like it's weird . . . I have misgivings about hyphens.

You self-identify as a writer.
I think I was known as an actor when I first moved to San Francisco. I'd written a couple of one-acts and I was working with [San Francisco-based] Killing My Lobster writing sketch comedy shows. I took some playwriting classes here and there and eventually there was a moment when I said, I think I need to pick something. That was around the time I decided to go back to graduate school.

How would you describe your writing style?
Comedic. Slightly heightened. I don't write the way people talk. I think I'm writing truthfully to how people are, but there's a little bit of a knowledge that they're fictional or that it‘s a performance, that I'm not trying to approximate the natural rhythms and cadence of how people normally behave. It's just pushed slightly above naturalism.

Why do you write comedy? Isn't it much harder to write than tragedy?
It's more my comfort zone for sure. I was always interested in comedy as a kid, watching a lot of Monty Python and listening to comedy records. My family is a funny family; they celebrate senses of humor. I approach the world through humor, so that's my filter in writing, too.

Have you ever tried to write a tragedy?
No. [laughs] But I think all my plays have serious themes. I'm curious about approaching that dark theme and riding the line between what's funny and what's not. As I get more comfortable as a writer, I'm allowing the humor to not always come out as jokes. Each play pushes more toward character and creating vivid lives, and also having one-liners, but not being beholden to that. Maybe as I keep writing I'll have fewer and fewer actual jokes.

How does being based in the Bay Area influence your playwriting?
I think it does. The world around here seeps into all the plays. Something about the eccentricity of the city comes into the details. California is where I grew up, so that attitude is filtered in somewhere. I write characters with compassion. I don't like torturing characters or being mean. I usually make bad things happen to them but I can't just write a really bad person.

And I like the audience here. They're very smart, thoughtful, and seem to like having a good time. They're pretty open, willing to try new things. They like a little naughtiness. It's the difference between approaching a show with an open mind and being ready to be critical.

How does it feel to have your plays produced elsewhere? boom has 14 productions this year, all over the country.
Yeah, boom is the number one produced play in America this season! Woo! It's crazy. I don't really know why. I mean, I know, pragmatically: it's a well-written comedy that has three characters and one set. It's a very producible play. But it's a pretty weird play, too. It's kind of crazy that that many people want to do it. I'm really thrilled.

Do you write for a specific audience?
I hope I write for my contemporaries, but that the plays also appeal up and down from there. My age is where I start from, my generation's outlook on things. I want what I write to be accessible by lots of people. Challenging, yes, but I want lots of people to be able to take something from it.

Boom Trailer | 1:05

Boom Promotional 2 | 1:23

Boom Promotional | 1:34