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Plan-B Theatre Company • World Premiere by Matthew Ivan Bennett & Elaine Jarvik • Directed by Penelope Caywood • Studio Theatre @ The Rose, Oct 2–19, 2025
Salt Lake City, UT — Great Salt Lake is done being a headline. Here, she takes the stage as a body: weak, scared, proud, yet very much alive. The opening image is plain and mythic at once: a figure in rag-blue rags, nudged by waves, pulling herself upright on a long, flat moan that the chorus answers.
“Who calls me?!” Great Salt Lake demands.
A brine shrimp pops out of the surf: “Hello, sorry, me… Your Majesty.”
Photo by Sharah Meservy | Courtesy of Plan-B Theatre Company
Co-written by Matthew Ivan Bennett and Elaine Jarvik and directed with buoyant clarity by Penelope Caywood, Just Add Water unfolds within a world elegantly designed by Janice Chan and lovingly constructed by David Knoell. The production is a whimsical cli-fi dramedy that keeps turning from joke to grief, from fable to fact, transforming our reflex to fix into an invitation to care.
As Les Roka observed in The Utah Review, “Great Salt Lake is not just a place.” In this play, she becomes what Roka calls a “majestic beauty, weak and scared but still proud.” That duality finds full expression in Latoya Cameron’s extraordinary performance. Her Great Salt Lake is alternately divine and defiant, sarcastic and sorrowful, a body of water learning to grieve itself.
Caywood’s direction keeps the production fluid and alive, blending humor and heartbreak in what Roka aptly described as “a robust blend of wisely chosen bits of science, matched by plenty of entertainment in the style of a variety or vaudeville show.” The result is as funny as it is devastating, moving seamlessly from myth to protest, from hymn to handbook.
Photo by Sharah Meservy | Courtesy of Plan-B Theatre Company
The moment reframes environmental collapse as sibling loss—a world forgetting itself.”
The Lake as Kin
Roka notes that Just Add Water springs from the idea of Great Salt Lake as our “nonhuman kinfolk,” a phrase shared by Darren Parry, a Shoshone elder whose grandmother used those very words. That understanding of kinship gives the play its emotional core: it’s not just about saving a landscape but repairing a relationship.
Nowhere is this clearer than in The Dead Arm. Long separated by the railroad causeway, Great Salt Lake meets her estranged other half, the North Arm, pink and black, part ghoul and part crone, a reflection of what happens when a body of water is written off as already dead. They have been cut off so long that one has nearly forgotten the other.
What begins as sarcasm and mockery slowly bends toward heartbreak as the North Arm, resigned to her own death, insists on giving what little she has left—hope—to her sister. The hug that follows is wrenching. It’s not sentimental but sacrificial: thunder shakes the stage as the North Arm collapses, drained by the act of transfer. Great Salt Lake mourns and straightens, carrying forward her sister’s hope.
The moment reframes environmental collapse as sibling loss, a world forgetting itself. The Lake is not a “resource” but a being in relationship with itself, split apart, one half forced into the role of ghost so the other might keep fighting. Within that realization, despair folds into tenderness: even the dying can offer lessons, and even collapse can carry a spark of resistance.
Photo by Sharah Meservy | Courtesy of Plan-B Theatre Company
The Curse of Dominion
In the above scene called The Dead Arm, we view the play’s heart, but in Dominion we view a fever dream, a vision of what severed that kinship in the first place. The theatre floods in red light, the color of dust, blood, and extinction. Three robed actors enter and begin to chant in a round:
“O let us have dominion… let us dom-dominate… and them domesticate.”
Their voices overlap and echo until scripture and corporate rhetoric merge: “over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and over cattle,” forming a theology of conquest that feels both ancient and alarmingly current.
Photo by Sharah Meservy | Courtesy of Plan-B Theatre Company
Lighting Designer Emilio Casillas transforms the stage into a dying body—the Lake itself bleeding beneath the weight of belief. The chant grows hypnotic, familiar, almost comfortable, very reminiscent of Bible verses—that’s what makes it so chilling. Dominion doesn’t accuse villains; it implicates the audience, asking us to hear how deeply the mandate to control, rather than coexist, has settled into our bones.
This is not just an ecological crisis but a spiritual one. The scene exposes how domination has been normalized as progress, how faith, law, and economy have conspired to justify it. In this crimson glow, the Lake’s slow demise no longer feels distant or abstract. It feels inherited.
Set designer Janice Chan and Costume Designer Victoria Bird extend that symbolism through fabric. The Lake’s rag-blue shimmer like evaporated sky, while the robed figures of Dominion move like shadows of doctrine. The palette blurs ritual and ruin—always beautiful, always endangered. Following Dominion’s vision of conquest, Just Add Water answers with creation: a vision of care through craft.
Photo by Sharah Meservy | Courtesy of Plan-B Theatre Company
Theatre of Imagination
The production revels in the ethos of Big Cheap Theater, the 1990s movement coined by Erik Ehn to describe high-concept, low-cost performance. A white binder becomes a bird. White handkerchiefs ripple like fragile bodies. In one of the evening’s most enchanting transformations—created by Arika Schockmel and Sharah Meservy, under the direction of of Penelope Caywood—a snow cone cup slipped over the fingers becomes a swan’s beak, the long white glove its body, and the handkerchief its wings. The effect is tender and tactile: flight evoked not through spectacle but through care, while seagull calls and the hush of Cheryl Ann Cluff’s soundscape blur the edges between imagination and environment. The moment is both theatrical and ecological—a quiet reminder that imagination, not material, is the theater’s most renewable resource.
Photo by Sharah Meservy | Courtesy of Plan-B Theatre Company
Actor Highlights
Latoya Cameron anchors the ensemble of actors as the personification of Great Salt Lake with immense emotional gravity. She captures what Les Roka called the Lake’s “majestic beauty, weak and scared but still proud,” infusing it with wit, rage, and aching humanity. Cameron’s voice carries the weight of centuries; when she whispers “I feel a little more saved.” It takes a strong actor to embody all that Great Salt Lake signifies and Cameron met that challenge head on.
Amona Faatau brings irresistible warmth and physical comedy to Brien, the ever-loyal brine shrimp who coaxes the Lake toward leaving her home. Faatau’s buoyancy keeps the play’s ecological grief from collapsing into despair. Their movement work—equal parts grace and grit—turns the shrimp into something between court jester and conscience. Faatau is both endearing and versatile in every role they inhabit: Brien, Announcer, Angry Slam Poet, Activist, Freddie, and Drought.
As the play’s shapeshifters, Alec Kalled and Isabella Reeder inhabit an astonishing range of characters, from farmer and legislator to journalist, activist, and apparition. Each transformation is crisp, embodied, and distinct.
Kalled moves fluidly between roles—Driver, Tundra, Swan, Bar-Goer, Scientist, Farmer, Bob, Bulldozer, Mr. Representative, and Development—grounding even the most surreal moments in recognizable humanity. Kalled’s comic precision makes the absurd feel plausible and the political feel personal.
Reeder, meanwhile, gives the play its moral heartbeat. Whether as Swan, Journalist, North Arm, or Apathy, she is both a witness and a warning. Reeder’s North Arm, in particular, is devastating: weary, wry, and full of quiet grace.
Under Caywood’s direction, the ensemble functions like an ecosystem—each performer vital, responsive, and in relation. Together they sustain the play’s impossible balance of tragedy and laughter, myth and urgency, satire and sincerity.
Photo by Sharah Meservy | Courtesy of Plan-B Theatre Company
Everyday Entanglements: Hamburgers, Lawns, and Leaf Blowers
From the mythic to the mundane, Just Add Water spares no illusions about what is draining the Lake. In one of the play’s sharpest scenes, an alfalfa farmer proudly explains that his fields feed cows raised only to be eaten, a moment that exposes Utah’s paradoxical water economy. The script reminds us, with quiet precision, that a single hamburger takes roughly 150 gallons of water to produce. It is not a condemnation of one farmer, one consumer, or one habit; it is an invitation to see how personal comfort and cultural norms flow together into ecological consequence.
Then come the lawns: a 1950s jingle exalting green grass in the desert, and the whine of leaf blowers, mentioned almost offhandedly yet resonating as a perfect metaphor for noise without progress. These are not villains but emblems of habit, of inherited ideals about beauty, productivity, and order. Just Add Water doesn’t ask us to assign blame; it asks us to recognize relationship—between water and desire, convenience and consequence.
Photo by Sharah Meservy | Courtesy of Plan-B Theatre Company
Dramaturgy and Care
The dramaturgy by Heather May, in collaboration with Great Salt Lake Collaborative, gives Just Add Water its remarkable balance of fact and feeling. The play’s humor and heartbreak rest on rigorous research — the science of dust storms, the economics of alfalfa, the ethics of stewardship — but May ensures that none of this ever feels didactic. The facts move through the story like currents, shaping it from beneath.
That same spirit of inquiry and empathy flows through the rest of the production team. Scenic Designer Janice Chan creates an environment that feels both elemental and metaphoric — a landscape built from objects that could have washed ashore, evoking the Lake’s memory of itself. Lighting Designer Emilio Casillas sculpts the space in pulses of color and shadow, turning red into warning, blue into breath. Sound Designer Cheryl Ann Cluff extends the dramaturgy through the ear: a subtle layering of cooing seagulls, distant highway hum, and the faint lap of water that blurs the line between theatre and world.
Costume Designer Victoria Bird threads the play’s research into texture and tone, from the rag-blue of the Lake’s robes to the austere garments of “Dominion.” Even the smallest choices — a swath of fabric, a shift in hue — seem to carry ecological meaning. The props, imagined by Arika Schockmel and Sharah Meservy, complete the dramaturgical circle by transforming the disposable into the sacred.
Together, these collaborators create what might be called embodied dramaturgy — research made material, ethics made aesthetic. Their collective care allows Just Add Water to extend beyond the stage, inviting the audience to breathe with the Lake and listen in a new way.
It’s not just about saving a landscape but repairing a relationship.
Photo by Sharah Meservy | Courtesy of Plan-B Theatre Company
“A Little More Saved”
The play ends not with triumph but with trembling grace. After all the satire, ritual, and reckoning, Great Salt Lake, embodied with luminous vulnerability by Cameron, stands at the water’s edge and admits, “I… feel seen. And I would say that I see more clearly.” When she extends her hand to the journalist, asking simply to feel a human hand before she returns to the waves, the gesture is both intimate and monumental. It is not a plea for pity or worship but for relationship.
Cameron’s performance is the tide that carries Just Add Water. Her final words, “I feel a little more saved,” are not naïve. They are conditional, contingent, and painfully honest. The Lake may feel “a little more saved,” but only if we take her hand.
In the end, Just Add Water does not ask for miracles, only for care: the kind that begins in imagination, flows through policy, and settles quietly into the choices we make every day.
Just Add Water transforms fact into feeling and collapse into kinship—where science becomes sorrow, and sorrow becomes care that stirs to action.
Photo by Sharah Meservy | Courtesy of Plan-B Theatre Company
Coda: From Abstraction to Embodiment
In an article for The Rhetorical Review, I wrote about how our most urgent environmental crises are often buried beneath data—how numbers can numb us even as they reveal catastrophe. Just Add Water lifts those same facts out of abstraction and into breath. When Great Salt Lake herself becomes the one to speak, the statistics don’t just inform; they resonate. They ache.
What I tried to express through argument, Just Add Water renders through embodiment. It transforms fact into feeling, statistic into sound, collapse into kinship. In that alchemy, science becomes sorrow—and sorrow becomes a form of care.
Show Details
Plan-B Theatre Company presents
Just Add Water
A World Premiere by Matthew Ivan Bennett & Elaine Jarvik
Directed by Penelope Caywood
📍 Studio Theatre @ The Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center
50 W 200 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84101
🗓️ October 2 – 19, 2025
🕒 Performance Schedule
- Thursdays @ 7 PM
- Fridays @ 7 PM
- Saturdays @ 4 PM
- Sundays @ 2 PM
🎭 Accessibility Performances
- Sensory-Friendly Performance: Saturday, October 4, 2025 @ 4 PM
- ASL-Interpreted Performance: Saturday, October 11, 2025 @ 4 PM
🎟️ Tickets
- General Admission: $29 ($25 ticket + $4 fees)
- Student Admission: $19 ($15 ticket + $4 fees)
- Runtime: 90 minutes | No intermission | No late seating
- Recommended for ages 14+ (no infants or lap seating)
🚗 Parking Tip: Parking at the Rose Wagner can be tricky — arrive early and plan to pay for parking. Street spots fill quickly, and nearby garages may charge evening rates.
📞 Box Office: ArtTix (801) 355-2787 | 📧 arttix@slco.org
🔗 Tickets & Info: 👉 Click here: planbtheatre.org/justaddwater
Cast & Creative
Playwrights — Matthew Ivan Bennett & Elaine Jarvik
Director — Penelope Caywood
Actors — Latoya Cameron, Amona Faatau, Alec Kalled, Isabella Reeder
Costume Designer — Victoria Bird
Dramaturg — Heather May + Great Salt Lake Collaborative
Scenic Designer — Janice Chan
Lighting Designer — Emilio Casillas
Sound Designer — Cheryl Ann Cluff
Props Designer — Arika Schockmel
Assistant Props Designer + Education Coordinator + Photographer — Sharah Meservy
Graphic Designer — Alisha Jones
Intimacy Director — Liz Whittaker
Great Salt Lake Consultants — Jaimi Butler (Biologist) & Darren Parry (Elder, Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation)
Education Liaison — Aliyah Bacca
Scenic Builder + Electrician — David Knoell
Service Learning Intern — Ren Lasher
Stage Manager — Maisie Bunker Nelson
About the Playwrights
Matthew Ivan Bennett has been the Resident Playwright of Plan-B Theatre since 2007, where he has premiered numerous stage and radio plays. His work spans theatre, film, and poetry—marked by a distinctive blend of lyricism, humor, and social insight. A recent fellow at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico (Fall 2024), Bennett is currently training as a Certified Actor with the National Michael Chekhov Association.
His adaptation of Frankenstein won the Best Feature Program award from the Utah Broadcasters Association, and his one-person play Eric(a) earned Best Drama at the United Solo Festival in New York. A Version of Events (Stage Rights) and Different=Amazing (Leicester Bay Theatricals) are published works that reflect his sharp eye for empathy and justice. His comedy A Night with the Family ran at the Omaha Community Playhouse, while his film The Whole Lot was an official selection at the Philadelphia and Kansas City Independent Film Festivals.
Bennett’s plays have been recognized by the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference (Let Down Your Hair, Finalist; Art & Class, Semifinalist) and the Great Plains Theatre Commons (Holland New Voices Award, 2014). His short plays have been produced across North America, and his poetry has appeared in Sugar House Review, Western Humanities, Utah Life, and unearthed. An alum of Southern Utah University and Futurescapes, Bennett is a longtime member of the Dramatists Guild.
Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City–based playwright and journalist whose work spans intimate family dramas, social satires, and youth-centered ecological plays. Before turning to theatre, she worked as a reporter and feature writer for The Salt Lake Tribune, where her storytelling often balanced rigor with compassion—qualities that infuse her playwriting.
Her longstanding relationship with Plan-B Theatre has produced a number of premieres, including Two Stories (an exploration of journalism and truth-telling), Marry Christmas (a holiday comedy with sharp social edges), River.Swamp.Cave.Mountain. (a children’s play created for Plan-B’s FEST program), and The Coming Ice Age. With River.Swamp.Cave.Mountain. and the traveling school production about Great Salt Lake, Eb & Flo. Jarvik has contributed directly to FEST’s mission of creating new work for Utah elementary students, bringing professional theatre into schools across the state at no cost.
Across genres and audiences, Jarvik is known for blending humor with urgency, crafting stories that invite reflection on how personal lives intersect with broader cultural and ecological crises.
Together, Bennett and Jarvik bring craft and conscience to Just Add Water, uniting research, imagination, and care in a story that listens as much as it teaches.
Further Reading & Resources
About the Play & Production
- Plan-B Theatre Company: Just Add Water Official Page
- The Utah Review – “A Great Salt Lake Play” by Les Roka
- Wake the Great Salt Lake Project – Salt Lake City Arts Council
- Great Salt Lake Collaborative
- PBS Future of the Great Salt Lake Documentary
Environmental Context
- Utah Division of Water Resources – Great Salt Lake Hydrology & Updates
- Utah State University Water Check: Alfalfa, Agriculture, and Water Use
- National Geographic – “What’s drying up the Great Salt Lake?”climate-change-global-warming-drought
- The Rhetorical Review – “The Large-Scale Meat Problem in America” by Keolanani Kinghorn
Educational & Dramaturgical Materials
- Plan-B Theatre Study Guide for Just Add Water / Large Print Script for Accessibility – Plan-B Theatre /A Week With a Play: Plan-B’s Education Program
Further Reading on Art, Kinship, and Ecology
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