A New Musical Revisits the Bay Area’s Apocalyptic Orange Sky Day

On the morning of Sept. 9, 2020, Rodney Earl Jackson, Jr. woke up to the buzz of his cell phone. It was his mother, telling him to open his San Francisco apartment window and peer outside. It was late enough for the morning light to shine down on his Duboce Park neighborhood, but instead the streets were cloaked in darkness.

Where was the sun?

“Immediately I shut the window, and I said, ‘I’m not dealing with this right now,’” Jackson recalled. His mother, based a few blocks away in the Fillmore, asked if he knew what was happening.

He had no idea, he said, and tried to go back to sleep. “Because I thought I was in a dream. It felt like I hadn’t really woken up yet,” Jackson said.

More than a hundred miles north of the Bay Area, wildfires tore through towns, homes and forests. Winds carried massive amounts of smoke into the skies over the Bay Area. The pollution scattered blue-light wavelengths, leaving only reds and oranges to shine through. Not only was it dark, the sky was an eerie orange.

Jackson is an actor who’s appeared on Broadway, with deep roots in the Bay Area. He was born and raised in San Francisco before attending college on the East Coast, and returned home more than a decade ago to co-found the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company.

The Bay Area is familiar and exciting to Jackson, but on that dark day, it was frightening.

He wanted to know how others felt: did it all seem like a dream to them, too? And what meaning were they making from it? So he started interviewing people. The product of those conversations is a musical called “The Day the Sky Turned Orange,” premiering this month.

The play invites the audience back to that apocalyptic day, which crashed like a roaring wave on top of pandemic isolation and a national racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd. Jackson and his co-creators hope that revisiting a day marked by often-repressed emotions will help us process them and move forward.

“I don’t think that we’ve actually fully recovered from that moment. I know I haven’t,” playwright Julius Ernesto Rea said.

Rea said coming together in a physical space and going back in time gives the actors and the audience the opportunity to release some of their bottled-up emotions, especially those surrounding the changing climate.

“A lot of the play is trying to figure out how we grieve the future that we thought we had, so that we can invite new visions of the future,” Rea said.

One memorable song is “How Far Gone,” written by musicians Olivia Kuper Harris and David Michael Ott. It acknowledges the damage people have done to the planet and climate, and asks how long it will take to act on climate change:

What’s crazy is how I exploit you

When you give and you give I ignore you

If I could take it back, I would take it all back, I would turn the clock back

The show is an example of the belief held by Jamie Beck Alexander of Project Drawdown that “every job is a climate job,” and anyone can use their passions and skills to talk about climate.

The creative team behind the production is furthering public conversation on climate, not just through the show but through a series of post-show “talkbacks,” short conversations, which will cover topics such as how to take action on climate change and eco-anxiety.

Furthering conversations about climate change is what scientist and communicator Katharine Hayhoe argues is the most important thing an individual can do about the issue.

Research shows the majority of people care about climate change, but don’t talk about it, skewing public perception of how important the issue is. A recent global survey of 130,000 people showed that nearly 9 out of 10 want stronger action to combat climate change, but mistakenly think they are in the minority.

“What can we do to break this vicious cycle?” Hayhoe asks in a TED Talk with more than four million views. “The number one thing we can do is the exact thing that we’re not doing: talk about it.”

Sharing support for climate action could unlock a “social tipping point” and push leaders to act, the research suggests.

Jackson knows many people don’t want to read the science surrounding climate change. “But maybe I can give them another lens so they can feel it’s accessible,” Jackson said about the musical.

The show’s music is inspired by pop, R&B and hip hop, with the goal of reaching a broad audience. It’s deeply rooted in the Bay Area, with clear celebrations of its diversity and even homegrown dance moves like the Smeeze.

The play itself follows the arc of four main characters: a student, a teacher, a therapist and someone who has long COVID but doesn’t know it yet.

“The Day the Sky Turned Orange” not only tackles climate, but brings the audience back to the overlapping crises of 2020. A powerful scene comes at the end of the production, as a high school student builds a time capsule to capture the moment. One by one, actors place items in a box: a COVID test, a knitting project, an oxygen mask. It’s a cathartic moment for the characters and begs the question– what do you still need to let go of so you can move forward?

“It’s the medicine that you don’t think you need,” Rea said. The audience “walks out not realizing that they needed to talk about their feelings from the pandemic.”

One of the show’s more catchy tunes is an ode to San Francisco, invoking the city’s energy and joy. It’s called “Good Day.”

I see the Golden Gate, this is our home.

Wake up, new day in San Francisco,

Sun’s up, see my people in the Castro. 

Get up, we gotta change the world.

It’s a good day, good day. 

“The Day the Sky Turned Orange” is co-produced by the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company and Z Space, and runs at Z Space in San Francisco from Sept. 5 to Oct. 5.