eyelash growth

The press release for "Wild Legacy" — a play about husband-and-wife naturalists Olaus and Mardy Murie being given a final Anchorage performance in Wendy Williamson Auditorium at 2 p.m. today — contained a few statements conducive to involuntarily raised eyebrows.

"the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has commissioned the play," it began, "as one of the offerings available during events planned for the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."

the Muries are often credited with promoting the creation of ANWR during the course of several expeditions around Alaska.

Voices of the South, a highly regarded Memphis, Tenn.-based theater company, created the work with the objective "to honor those who made possible the establishment of the Refuge and to celebrate the experiences we as contemporary Americans these 50 years later are still able to enjoy."

A southerner writing about Alaska may seem as incongruous as an Alaskan writing about barbecue. Author and Voices of the South founder Gloria Baxter, renowned for turning books and letters into viable stage pieces, acknowledged as much. "it could be seen as a kind of hubris," she’s quoted as saying.

but never mind the geographical anomaly for a moment. Also set aside the fact that enjoyment of the refuge is essentially restricted to "we’s" from a sliver of the very wealthy. the real question is: Since when did Fish and Wildlife start commissioning plays?

I asked Maureen Clark, who has the title of Arctic Refuge 50th Coordinator, USFWS, National Wildlife Refuge system — Alaska.

"To say we ‘commissioned’ the play may be overstating it a bit," she said. "(Baxter) applied for and received a $15,000 micro-grant under our Challenge Cost Share program in 2009 to adapt Margaret Murie’s ‘Two in the Far North’ so that it could be staged as part of the celebration of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge 50th anniversary celebration."

this year Baxter received another $30,000 grant from Fish and Wildlife, Clark said, to bring this work to Alaska with a troupe of five actors, one stage manager and Baxter herself as the director. They have already performed the work in Fairbanks and Homer, and held two workshops.

"the script was not ‘put out to bid’ because we were not seeking a play," Clark clarified. "We advertise the availability of the Challenge Cost Share Grants through a news release and also by posting it on grants.gov. Gloria applied for the grant on her own, at the suggestion of a member of Friends of Alaska National Wildlife Refuges."

last year these Challenge grants provided some $850,000 in funding to 59 projects ranging from educational exhibits to trail improvements to shorebird research and culture camps, Clark added.

At least one reviewer was smitten when "Wild Legacy" debuted in Memphis last month. "the show is as cinematic as any IMAX film about the Arctic," wrote Chris Davis in the alternative weekly the Memphis Flyer. He found the bare-bones narrative style "every bit as enchanting as the pristine wilderness the show’s characters describe" and called the performances by actors Jerre Dye and Alice Rainy-Berry — Olaus and Mardy — "as inviting as a roaring campfire."

in the e-mail that accompanies the press release, we’re told that the play "never addresses recent controversies over whether or not to extract oil from the refuge. Baxter, who toured the area in 2001, says she would rather create a sense of what the region is like and let people decide for themselves."

but it must be hard not to comment, at least obliquely, on feelings roused by issues of wilderness and development — the conflict that is the only reason anyone knows anything about ANWR, if the reader will indulge a little hyperbole.

in the press release itself, Voices of the South says, "the creation of that work was a pivotal moment in the life of our company, awakening us to the importance of wild places…. We care about wild places, be it in the Old Forest in the heart of our city, or this vast wilderness in Alaska that has taken on mythic proportion in our minds."

Today’s performance is free. Well, that also may be overstating things a bit. To some extent you’ve already paid for the show with your taxes, whether you ascribe to its mythology or not.

Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.

Your tax dollars at work in a play about ANWR: Arts