Circumnavigating TACIT’s Earth Data: The Musical — A Retrospective
Cast of Earth Data, from left to right: Kathryn Bikle, Ellis Spickermann, Cai Tong Ng, Jocelyn Argueta, Joony Kim, Anya Janowski, Armin Kleinboehl, the author, Maria Azcona Baez, Eric Smith, Joey Jefferson, Julian Wagner, Solvin Sigurdson, Jessica Kilgore, Josef Svoboda, Leslie Maxfield, Boyuan Chen, Maat Braaten. Just out of frame are Joži McKiernan and Michael Gutierrez.
“It was preposterous that we finished the show.”
So reflected Director Brian Brophy on Earth Data: The Musical, its one-weekend full run in Ramo Auditorium held on the 3rd of last November. With 20 actors, 16 musical numbers, and a sprawling crew of musicians, managers, producers, advisors, and designers, this 2-hour original musical—staged by Theater Arts at Caltech (TACIT)—was certainly no easy feat. With shows held on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, this culminated a year of workshops featuring students and staff from every corner of the Caltech/JPL community acting, singing, and ideating in concert. The musical was presented as part of Blended Worlds, Caltech/JPL’s contribution to PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a festival held in affiliation with the Getty, the city of Glendale, the Glendale Arts and Culture Commission, and the Glendale Library Arts & Culture Trust.
Fitting for its scientific subject matter, the show itself had been a research project from the outset. Brophy reflected, “In the beginning it was experimental: How can we take earth data and turn it into a musical in such a way that people care about nature? It’s a cultural experiment.” Beyond Earth Data, remarkably, the director sees all theater through a research lens. “Anything we do in the theater is an experiment. We have a hypothesis, we’re going to see if we can test it out, and then see if we can verify the results and have a run on Broadway.” What better attitude for Caltech dramaturgy?
What Earth Data became flourished from that experimental kernel, according to music director Emily Shisko. Driven originally by an affinity for alt-classical singing, namely the micropolyphony of a particular rendition of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Hollywood Bowl, Shisko shared: “The image in my head is that’s the little piece of grit that started the whole thing, and it’s been layered over with lacquer in that it has to be a narrative. It has to be something people can sing without being professionals, and that people can understand. That forms the pearl of Earth Data. But all this weird and experimental stuff was the grit at the center of the pearl, if that makes sense.”
During its improvisational beginnings, the musical lacked named characters or a clear narrative. Over time, however, contributions from the ensemble began to cohere, culminating in a first look at Act I during a beta run in April—offering everyone a much-needed opportunity to step outside themselves. “It’s very easy as an actor to get inside your own echo chamber,” said Maria Azcona Baez (ChE ‘25), who played female lead Mab. “We’re super familiar with the project: the ideas around it and how we want to execute them. … Honestly, I was looking forward to more criticism than we got.” (Baez remarked, with a Caltech audience: “We’ve slightly expanded the echo chamber, but it’s an echo chamber nonetheless.”)
Brophy felt confident about the musical at that stage: “I was pretty content with the shape of the musical, having only really comprehensively worked on it from January, February, March—three and a half months with all of that music. A full one hour of spectacle was quite an achievement. And it happened because we had a really good group of engaging and brave humans who wanted to risk the unknown for something they thought would be valuable.” Above all, the director was heartened by the sincerity of the Caltech audience’s engagement. “The most gratifying feedback is that they cared about the characters. … To get people to care about anything is quite mystifying.”
Cole Remmen, assistant director and co-writer, described the process of linking the play’s larger themes in Acts II and III. “A lot of the broad strokes of it had been, if not cemented, outlined. We knew that [the characters] were going to go to Congress, which was teased for the audience [in the beta]. … We knew that we wanted to have a scene with these scientists from the past. That was in the original pitch that Brian sent me—these ideas that were not quite yet connected. We had to find a way to coalesce them.”
In uncovering the music for those later acts, Shisko’s writing strategy involved defamiliarizing herself from what had already been done. “One of the things I did was to get through Act I with all the stuff I knew we liked and needed to keep. I treated it like it was somebody else’s music, a score that I was reviewing for the first time, and analyzed as much of it as I could, and saw what the melodic gestures were that showed up in more than one song, what harmonic relationship were happening over and over again that seemed to be what the song sounded like, and noticed what of the song was unusual and specific to one song.”
Recounting how Act I was too eventually rewritten (or “spiffed up”), Shisko likened the development process to composing an essay: “If you start writing at the beginning and just keep going into the end, you’re going to wind up with something that doesn’t connect with the end. It’s like writing the intro of the essay and never going back to see if the intro fits. You want to make sure that everything is of a whole.”
These final stages of production brought many new faces into the fold, including stage manager Sofia Lyon, for whom* Earth Data* was a triumphant return to the theater world. “In terms of jumping back into theater, it was the best experience I could have had. It’s an original piece, and epically ambitious: a lot of technical cues, lighting cues, sound. … It was a good undertaking for me.” For Lyon, the musical was also a first exposure to the joys of joining art with science. “I didn’t grasp how big the world of science-driven art really was,” she added.
Among the other newcomers following the beta was Jocelyn Argueta, a web producer for JPL Communications, who depicted academic-turned-corporate scientist Dahlia Foxworth. (The character was originally depicted by Arabella Camuñez [ChemE ‘27].) Argueta was enthralled as soon as she learned of Earth Data’s existence: “I’d never done a musical before. I just wanted to be a part of it. I told Brian: Please just let me do whatever! … It just so happened that I ended up getting Dahlia. She was an awesome character, and I had a lot of fun playing her.”
Argueta, whose research background helped inform her performance, was especially appreciative of the show’s scientific realism. “I had never seen the science environment portrayed so faithfully, and it included so many nuances that I think scientists deal with in the field in the lab—the ethical side of it. And so when the call came out to be a part of the full stage production, I was like Yeah, I’d love to do anything involved with it.”
Joining as a main actor just months before the November run presented Argueta with a unique ordeal. “First week or so,” she related, “I was a little disoriented by What does co-creation mean? How much is set in stone? Why are certain things set in stone that way? But then it became very clear to me: the work you had been doing for a year, essentially. It was all very special. … I felt very lucky to play a part of bringing that giant co-creation life to it.”
The play’s climactic depiction of Congress proved an exceptionally challenging sequence to stage. The Earth Data writing team drew from the real-life experiences of JPL postdoc Bradley Gay, whose research on human impacts on the Alaskan permafrost—recently published in Nature’s Scientific Reports—originally inspired the show. (The work was conducted alongside his JPL colleague Kimberley Miner, who also advised for the musical.)
“The idea [of Earth Data] was to capture not only the science, but the visceral emotion that comes with these findings as well as the insight that is drawn from these discoveries,” Gay shared. Interfacing with Congress over the years too was emotionally intensive. “It was getting frustrating, and it kind of sent me down a path where I was like: What am I doing here? Am I just a talking puppet or is real change actually going to be lasting?”
Translating such complex feelings to the stage took some restraint with form. As Brophy explains: “With something like a congressional testimony, having all the senators burst into song—I don’t know how you’d do that without it feeling comedic. That’s not what we wanted to portray. It really came about because there wasn’t a good path forward in incorporating the music in a way that felt honest to the stakes that we were presenting.” Gay agreed: “I think [music] would have muddied the actual seriousness of the situation.”
The extended showdown at Congress thus unfolded almost like a straight play within a musical. For nearly 20 minutes, tensions between characters steadily build through spoken dialogue, delivered with all the dramatic sterility of a C-SPAN hearing. Only then does Earth Data return to song with a reprise of “Rising Sea” (originally from Act I), an emotional outpouring between Mab and Dahlia capturing the turmoil faced by scientists like Gay when on the congressional floor.
Leading up to the Ramo run, TACIT was invited to present Earth Data’s finale (“Science Lights the Way”) at the ALEX Theatre in Downtown Glendale, as part of a Blended Worlds show hosted by comedian Reggie Watts. “It’s always fun working with professionals because it always shows you that you’ve got a lot to learn,” said co-writer and production designer Sullivan Braun. “It also shows you that you’re doing pretty damn well.”
The performance culminated in a drumline courtesy of Crescenta Valley High School, and the zeal in the room for Earth Data was palpable. Albert “Joey” Jefferson, a JPLer who played male lead JJ, recalled the night with extraordinary fondness. “The whole energy was on level 100, and hearing people sign ‘Science Lights the Way,’ having a big smile on their face, wearing their NASA shirts, restored my faith in humanity in a lot of ways. … It was really beautiful.”
Following a packed weekend run of the completed musical, Earth Data quickly caught the attention of Sandra Tsing Loh (Ph ‘86), a Caltech alum known for such STEM-flavored radio exploits as NPR’s The Loh Down on Science. An abridged, sung-through showcase tracing out the narrative arc of the show via a few highlighted songs was arranged as part of a variety show at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in West Los Angeles on November 17th. Among those joining the Earth Data cast was the fellow L.A.-based Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra (TACO), as well as Leigh Purtill’s Zombie Ballet to add a touch of the post-apocalyptic.** **“We’ve already gone through a pandemic, we can celebrate being in a community, surviving, singing songs together,” remarked Tsing Loh. “That was the idea.”
For Tsing Loh, A Post-Apocalyptic Home Companion was a celebration of radical authenticity. “It wasn’t just We hired two Broadway writers to make something! It was performed by scientists who actually practice science. The idea was of putting all these people together—in a week’s notice, a crew of you showed up—and the simplicity of it. That you were singing—that many people can show up—and that you don’t have to raise half a million dollars or whatever, you can show up on music stands and give the story and the structure of the show with The Odyssey, was so funny.”
Eric Smith (MechE ‘23), Caltech alum and now JPLer who played Sterling, spoke of the curious challenge posed by Earth Data’s involvement. “It sounds like an impossible task to compress the musical into less than 1/10th of its original size. We all knew the music so well; we all knew the story so well that we were able to pick essential elements from songs and excerpts of songs to tell this ultra-miniature version of the story.” Through the power of co-creativity, such compression happened fast. “We all came up with the plan together while we were at rehearsal, and it really came together in a few hours.”
Among the cast and crew, Braun particularly relished the unique goals of Tsing Loh’s show. “The aim was not to be good, but to come together and be happy. To participate in something together when seemingly every force in our world seeks to drive people crazy, and most of the things you read online or experience in your day-to-day are a fast track to misanthropy. I think being in one of those communal spaces and sharing passion and camaraderie, regardless of the quality of the finished product, is really joyful.”
While a substantive piece of climate fiction, the fully realized Earth Data deliberately avoided didacticism. “It’s not a liberal fantasy,” Brophy explained. “I think we created a document that was serious with intention, and asking for not necessarily a resolution: a rehearsal for something new to happen. … It’s not an activist play, but it’s a play that recognizes the courage by climate scientists especially to do the work they do and how complicated it can be once they go into popular culture.”
Armin Kleinboehl, a JPLer who played Wolf, one of JJ’s climatologist colleagues, further attested to the multifarious quality of the show’s ambitions and accomplishments. “It’s not just an educational musical about climate change. It sheds light on aspects of how science is done. How people who do science interact with each other, how they interact with the public, and how they play the political playing field. … I hope we have the chance to bring [the musical] to a large audience.”
As Baez proposed, one option for doing so is to release a cast recording. “I wish to have an actual version of the musical that I can listen to,” she remarked. Fully licensing the show out to other venues, however, presents hurdles due to the uniquely Caltech nature of the play. “There’s no point-of-view character who’s not an expert who could be a standpoint for the audience. … I’d think you’d need to have a science advisor to accompany the production and have actors say I can’t say this. It was with Joony and Jessica [neither of whom work in STEM] that I’m reminded I’m in my own bubble of what these words mean.”
Despite the lab jargon, Earth Data turned out to be an eye-opening exploration of innovative scientific communication—even for seasoned researchers like Gay. “I wouldn’t say never in my wildest dreams, but I never envisioned science communication to take the form of theater,” the JPLer commented. “And I am just floored. … It cemented my vision of how art and science combine to communicate a really important message, and I never thought it would take the form of a musical. It’s opened my mind to different media formats to communicate these messages that can be fun to communicate, but are also pretty serious.”
Leslie Maxfield (Ay ‘91), the director of Caltech Academic Media Technologies (CAMT) and an alumna who played a congressional chair alongside an imagined Marie Curie, concurs. “I just love you’re not watching a short video or reading an article online or a social media feed. This is a 2-plus-hour science communication opportunity for an audience member to really reflect on these topics. … My son, who’s in grad school—he’s in aerospace at UCLA—he saw it and—he’s not a theater kid—but he was grinning ear to ear. He came to the Sunday matinée and said:* I didn’t know Caltech could pull something like this together!*”
Indeed we can, as we ought to. As Brophy told me, that which is Dionysian—emotional, spontaneous, opposite our decidedly objective logic—is indispensable to the human experience. To present such a soul-stirring story on stage within such a seemingly anti-Dionysian setting, the scientific environment, was for me Earth Data’s supreme achievement. For science is at its core a humanism, and theater may well be our most powerful means of remembering that.
So, if you’ll excuse me, I have a recording booth waiting.