Estranged from the darkness

Where will you be when the world as we know it ends? What will you be doing?

Will you be at home, tucked in bed and sleeping soundly with your beloved at your side? Or, like the cast of Acquainted With the Night, will you be haunted by an Antarctic explorer’s ghost at the southern tip of the globe, awaiting the fall of the international power grid in the name of one, grand look at the night sky unpolluted by artificial light?

Acquainted With the Night insists we would be lucky to be the few who hear the spirits of the dead wailing to the tune of bagpipes in the darkness. The University of San Diego’s graduate theatre program selected an obscure, contemporary play — James Velasquez directed the production, which ran April 14-17 — but the heart of the matter is as old as human inquiry. The past two thousand years have estranged us from the darkness. We live in a world with cities that never sleep, and where the brightness of ersatz day is always a flick of the switch away. The play’s big question has been brewing for some time now.

It’s a most ancient thing, staring to the stars. Those who do stand in the company of ancient mariners seeking safe passage through treacherous straits. Ptolemy stared at the stars, got it all wrong, and enjoyed a thousand years of adulation. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo gazed at those same stars, got everything right, and lived in fear that their ideas would see them branded heretics.

When the a blacklisted former government scientist, Alex (Lorenzo Landini), looks upwards in Acquainted With the Night, he remarks Orion among the constellations. In that, he joins a thousand generations who have seen the Hunter appear in the night sky as their bones ache with winter’s approach.

So, where will you be when the world ends?