If you were going to try and start a religion for under 5 dollars, I would suggest you buy a flashlight.

Keep your iGizmos and your 3-D IMAXIMUM picture shows; at the end of the day, nothing is more primal, or more compelling, than a little bit of good old-fashioned radiance.  Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer, a new one-man show imported from Australia, uses this principal to tremendous effect as it chronicles a lonely widower’s quest to save a drowned planet from utter extinction.  Or at least in theory.  Alvin really dons his one-size-fits-all planet-saving suit to follow the light, which is the embodiment of his wife’s departed soul, or companionship, or meaning, or hope.

The last of these things is in very short supply.  The disastrous global flood destroyed billions of lives and millennia of technological progress, leaving seemingly nothing behind but a plaintive ukulele, a Monty Python-esque sergeant recruiting heroes, and the sea-dwelling behemoths that were here long before humans ever set to their puny work melting the polar ice caps.

Incidentally, if you were going to try and survive in a barren post-apocalyptic aquascape, I would suggest you call Tim Watts.

Tim Watts, the writer/deviser/director/performer/puppeteer/animator from Perth, Western Australia has engineered an astonishing multi-media world out of the odds and ends with a McGuyver’s ingenuity; sea monsters are made out of little more than crumpled plastic bags, and every single sound and light effect is cued by Mr. Watts himself from a master remote rigged up on his Nintendo Wii.  Alvin’s body is a white glove, and his head is, appropriately, a slightly weathered buoy.  The overall effect is a child’s world, sad and sweet as a message in a bottle.  The odds are slim to none that anybody will ever set eyes on the sunken skyscraper or the drowned disco ball, but they’re still there, sitting in the impenetrable darkness, waiting for Alvin to flash his light on them for one moment before they fade back into obscurity.  This is an apocalypse of nostalgia, far more potent than fire or ice.

It’s not all depressing; Tim Watts is a deft enough artist to pull moments of fabulous bathos out of the gloom.  There are cheeky pop songs to offer commentary on the action, and Alvin’s funky disco dance is made all the funkier when you realize that it is in fact Watts’ white-gloved right hand doing the moonwalk (Michael Jackson would have been proud).

Mr. Watts accompanies himself on the ukulele, runs the projector, performs sound effects, operates the puppets, and does live animation, all right before your eyes. It would be a gross understatement to say that he is a talent to watch.

Though the show flies by at under an hour, the climax is almost painfully satisfying, as unlikely hero Alvin makes the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of humankind’s future.  Everything comes together in a beautiful rush of sound, and water, and, yes, light.

So if you were going to spend an evening at the theater, hoping for a show that was funny and poignant and moving and wholly original, I would suggest you see Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer.

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Here’s an interview with Tim from the New York Times.

Here’s a YouTube montage of the show: