When Cicadas Sing, Humans Listen: How Sci-Fi Theater Reveals Our Deepest Time-Trapped Selves
There’s something profoundly unsettling about cicadas. Not their bug-ness, but the way they force us to confront time itself. Every 17 years, these creatures erupt from the earth like some natural clock reminding us: You’re stuck in cycles too. This eerie temporal resonance is the beating heart of Vince Gatton’s play Chagutok, which recently swept Dayton’s FutureFest. But don’t mistake this for mere bug-inspired whimsy—Gatton’s work cuts to the core of how we navigate time, politics, and our desperate need for meaning in a world that feels increasingly unmoored.
The 17-Year Itch: Nature’s Mirror for Human Dysfunction
Let’s start with the obvious: cicadas are weird. Their synchronized, decade-spanning life cycles feel alien, even divine. Gatton leans into this strangeness, using the Chagutok Lights—a fictional aurora tied to the insects’ emergence—as a narrative Trojan horse. Personally, I think this is genius. By literalizing the idea of “swarm intelligence,” he creates a backdrop where human characters confront their own cyclical failures. The play’s 17-year framework isn’t just sci-fi window dressing; it’s a mirror. When characters yell at TVs during political nightmares, only to repeat the performance years later, it’s uncomfortably familiar. Aren’t we all trapped in our own 17-year loops of outrage and resignation?
Time Travel Without the Gimmicks: Why ‘Chagutok’ Feels Fresh
Sci-fi theater often collapses under the weight of its own ideas. Not here. Gatton avoids the genre’s clichés by grounding his time-jumping in raw human stakes—romance, friendship, existential dread. The adjudicators praised its “seamless plot,” but what fascinates me is how the play weaponizes nostalgia. Like Lost meets Our Town, it uses temporal dislocation to ask: Do we ever truly grow, or just replay old scripts with new faces? The answer, judging by the judges’ remarks about “intriguing mysteries” and “alien worlds,” seems to lie in embracing ambiguity. Life, like cicada season, is brief and noisy—but meaning emerges in the chaos.
Politics as a Periodical Plague
Here’s the part where I probably lose some readers: Gatton’s cicada-politics analogy is more incisive than most realize. When he jokes about his swarms aligning with “federal administrations I hated,” he’s tapping into a universal truth. We measure our lives in political trauma units—four-year cycles of hope and despair. The play’s genius lies in framing governance as a natural phenomenon: inevitable, overwhelming, and (let’s be honest) kind of gross. This isn’t subtle, but subtlety’s overrated. What Chagutok offers is catharsis through metaphor—letting audiences scream into the void alongside characters who’ve already made peace with the noise.
The Real Winner? Theater That Dares to Be Unperfect
The stats matter here—352 entries, five finalists, one victor—but the real story is what this win says about the future of American theater. Yes, Chagutok dazzled with its “colorful authenticity” and “mesmerizing ambiguity,” but its triumph feels like a rebuke to safe, formulaic writing. The adjudicators celebrated its “real world” feel, yet isn’t the bigger win how it weaponizes imperfection? Life doesn’t resolve neatly every 17 years, and neither does this play. That’s the point.
Beyond the Lights: What This Means for Art in an Anxious Age
As America staggers through its 250th anniversary, Chagutok offers more than escapism. It’s a manifesto for embracing chaos. The cicadas don’t care about our timelines, our grudges, or our desperate attempts to find “signs of love” in a indifferent universe. Neither does great art. What this play really suggests is that our obsession with control—over time, politics, even theater—is the real punchline. The next time periodical madness erupts, maybe we’ll stop yelling at the TV and start laughing at the absurdity. Or maybe we’ll just buy tickets to the next staged reading. Either way, the cycle continues. And honestly? That’s kind of beautiful.
