Artistic Director Jerry Rapier on Asking Playwright Elaine Jarvik to Write About Great Salt Lake for K-3 Students
BY JERRY RAPIER
Jerry Rapier begins his 25th season as Artistic Director of Plan-B Theatre and is the first person of color to lead a professional arts organization in Utah history. He has directed many productions for the company, including nine of thirteen Free Elementary School Tours! Jerry holds and MFA in Directing from University of Idaho, is a member of Stage Directors & Choreographers Society, and is a recipient of Salt Lake City's Mayor's Artist Award in the Performing Arts.
I grew up in rural New Mexico, 10 miles outside of a town of 700 people. My world was smaller than small, which probably explains my obsession with geography that began in fourth grade (1981, pre-internet).
That Christmas, one of our family gifts was a world atlas. I pored over it, memorizing each page. I couldn’t get enough of Japan (where my birth family is from), Peru (my mom lived there in fourth grade), and Great Salt Lake (dominating the western half of the U.S. map). To a fourth grader who had never been to Utah, it was Utah.
In 1986, our family vacationed in Salt Lake City, where planes bank over the southern end of Great Salt Lake as they take off and land. I knew nothing of this banking until it happened. I was speechless: the atlas hadn’t done the scale of the lake justice. I couldn’t see the northern shore. We ended up not visiting the lake, so I moped through the vacation until I could see it again on our return flight.
Eight years later I moved to Utah and visited the lake as soon as I could.
As I drove across the causeway from the southeast shore to Antelope Island for the first time, the road sliced through the lake, water lapping its shoulders on both sides. I hiked to the back of the island, a dead ringer for the Pacific coast of Mexico: an endless expanse of sea stretching to the horizon.
That first visit changed me.
Five years later, I was working part-time for The Nature Conservancy of Utah, steward of Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve. Early one Saturday morning, I waded those wetlands with the Preserve Manager. Lying on our bellies in the shallows, deep in the reeds, we carefully observed birds who’d taken a pit stop en route from Western Canada to Western South America to rest, refuel, and breed. I saw avocets and Wilson’s phalaropes and eared grebes at eye level.
On that visit the lake became my friend.
Years later, I wanted my son Oscar to remember his first visit to Great Salt Lake, so I waited until he was five. En route, I got him excited about slicing through the lake on the way to the 2018 Spider Festival on Antelope Island (millions of completely harmless Western Spotted Orb Weavers (think Charlotte’s Web) hatch at the lake each year (think bird food)). But the waterline was about 100 yards from the road on both sides. He was not impressed.
When we visited the next year, the waterline was more than a mile from the road. Oscar was convinced I’d fabricated the slicing and lapping. “Papa. How could that be true? The water is so far away it’s a mirage!”
During the 2020 pandemic lockdown, we drove out to Saltair (a now-defunct resort on the southern shore) and walked a mile from the parking lot to the waterline.
Another mirage.
“Papa, why did we have to walk so far to get to the water?”
We drove to the marina: dry dock.
“Papa, why are we standing where the boats should be?”
I realized, in that moment, that my climate grief was manifesting in my now six-year-old. I. Was. Shook. I asked myself, “How am I going to stop this?” And then, “This would make a great play.”
But, we already had four FEST commissions in the works so it receded to the back of my mind. Then, in December of 2023, Oscar and I heard a story on KUER on the way to school about how the dust from the exposed lakebed was a direct threat to the snowpack.
I texted Elaine Jarvik: “Would you be interested in writing another Free Elementary School Tour play?" (our 2017 FEST offering was her play for K-3 students, RIVER.SWAMP.CAVE.MOUNTAIN., about two elementary-age siblings trying to make sense of the death of their grandmother).
Thirty seconds later: "Yes! Do you have something specific in mind?"
Fifteen seconds later: "Great Salt Lake!”
Five seconds later: “Absolutely!”
So...why Elaine?
We Utahns live in a world where toddlers track toxic air and our namesake lake is an ecological time bomb. Regardless of political affiliation, most of us acknowledge our collective culpability in Great Salt Lake's demise: we see it with our eyes and feel it with our lungs.
Our climate grief is communal.
Although science tells us it’s not possible to restore Great Salt Lake to what it was 40 years ago, science also tells us that perpetual, adaptive management—lake speak for stemming loss—will ensure our terminal namesake doesn't fall prey to its terminal diagnosis.
Elaine has a gift for writing about grief: it’s as though empathy is embedded in her keyboard. Although she usually writes about navigating the impact of loss, she inverts that approach with EB & FLO, extending a hopeful, joy-filled invitation to K-3 students and their adults (and their adults!) to stem the loss of Great Salt Lake.
We are advocates of perpetual, adaptive management: we can't restore the lake to what it was, but we can preserve what it is.
But first we must truly become a we.
The key is lake literacy: the more each Utahn knows, the more the lake will be present in conversation and relationships. And relationships may be the only true agent for change.
Read more from Elaine Jarvik on creating EB & FLO.
TICKETS
EB & FLO by Elaine Jarvik receives its world premiere September 2025-May 2026, serving K-3 students at 100 elementary schools statewide as our thirteenth annual Free Elementary School Tour. Please click here for details, booking information, and tickets to free public performances on Saturdays in October 2025 and February 2026.