Wakka Wakka: The Immortal Jellyfish Girl

The Age of the Jellyfish Has Come!:
The Persistence of Life in Wakka Wakka’s The Immortal Jellyfish Girl

An Essay by Jesse Njus

The Immortal Jellyfish Girl is the second play in Wakka Wakka’s Animalia Trilogy, a series of performatively diverse but philosophically connected plays dissecting humanity’s unwillingness to stave off the Anthropocene. Unlike previous geological ages, which scientists define according to natural changes in the earth, the Anthropocene refers to a geological age defined by human actions—such as industrial pollution and atomic radiation—that have affected Earth at a geological level. Jellyfish is a sci-fi biotech fairytale that takes place five hundred years in the future when the Earth has become a dystopia with such high levels of radiation that hominids have only survived through modifications. The barren planet has produced an ongoing war for resources fought between the Homo Technalis (technologically enhanced) and the Homo Animalis (bio-enhanced). While this scenario may not appear to be an ideal environment for a fairytale, the moral of Jellyfish is both cautionary and aspirational: Life always finds a way but at what cost? 

A folktale requires a storyteller, and the narrator of Jellyfish is The Fantastic Mr. Fox (“The real one!” he assures spectators), who returns from the first play in the trilogy, Animal R.I.O.T., where he served as the leader of the eponymous eco-activist collective (“Animal Resurgence In Our Time!). Portrayed by Kirjan Waage—one of the writers, directors, and the company’s puppet designer—wearing a ski-style mask in the shape and color of a red-and-white fox. Mr. Fox is simultaneously an anthropomorphic fox and an anonymously masked human who functions as the viewers’ connection to an onstage wasteland in which Homo sapiens is otherwise extinct. Hooded puppeteers dressed completely in black control almost all the other characters, emphasizing puppetry’s unique ability to disrupt supposedly stable categories, such as human and nonhuman or even living and nonliving. Mr. Fox further undermines these categories when he introduces the audience to Aurelia, the titular immortal jellyfish girl. A Muppet-adjacent puppet, Aurelia is mostly human in appearance, although Mr. Fox informs onlookers that the Turtle has bioengineered Aurelia using the DNA of multiple life-forms. As Mr. Fox begins to animate her, he points out that although she is a little bit Homo sapiens, a little bit tardigrade, a little bit naked mole rat, a little bit jellyfish, and much more, she remains one hundred percent puppet. Mr. Fox’s metatheatrical assertion is both a reminder of the constructed nature of puppets and a critique of the idea that living beings might one day be fabricated the same way.

Watching a puppet be brought to life, slowly transform over the course of the performance, and finally cease to exist becomes a metaphor that encompasses Jellyfish, a saga for which birth, life, and resurrection are central. The play takes its title from the Turritopsis dohrnii, or the immortal jellyfish, a jelly that can resurrect as a polyp if it dies in its medusa stage. Aurelia is Turtle’s bioengineered variation of the invertebrate, but in a fascinating inversion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Aurelia is determined to preserve life, while Turtle has created her to become a monster who will destroy it. When polyps detach from Aurelia, they become small rod puppets that she places in water to grow into a spectacular array of organisms with which she hopes to restart life on earth. Aurelia’s encouragement ensures that the polyps under her supervision become adorable creatures, even though Turtle had previously used her polyps to create eco-terrorist bio worms. Watching the divergent beliefs of the two characters, observers are asked to reconsider their own preconceived notions of how life is defined, created, and perpetuated.

Unbeknownst to Aurelia, Turtle designed her to vanquish the Homo Technalis when she attains her evolutionary pinnacle, the medusa stage. The Technalis live in an Orwellian city ruled by the Doyenne, who personifies and manipulates the technology that controls the populace while existing solely as a disembodied head with a disconnected arm after being nearly consumed by Turtle’s bio worms. In contrast, Turtle is portrayed by a puppeteer wearing a heavy constructed full-body Turtle costume. If the Doyenne represents a leader consumed by power and vengeance, the weight of the Turtle is a sign of his immense age but also his inability to adapt, illuminating the limits of his power. While his destructive disregard for life—including his daughter’s—is unjust, his quest to win the war against a fascistic enemy might be understandable if he weren’t planning to risk the remainder of life on the planet.

Even in a bleak apocalyptic landscape riven by combat—thrillingly rendered through the use of fog, robotic sounds, and stark lighting—both love and life find ways to thrive, and the unexpected appearance of the Homo Technalis Bug causes Aurelia to mature into the next phase of her evolution. Bug is the Romeo to Aurelia’s Juliet, and he has ventured into the critically radioactive demilitarized zone outside the city so often that he suddenly sprouts insect wings which flutter beautifully (attached to rods) and enable him to fly, establishing that evolution is still occurring naturally. Bridging the divide between Technalis and Animalis, Bug’s existence proves to Aurelia that despite the earth’s toxicity, life can survive on the planet unassisted.

As the relationship between the star-crossed lovers develops, Aurelia begins to transform. When Aurelia finally rises as the Medusa, she does not have the iconic bell of the jellyfish’s medusa stage but instead has multiple polyps radiating from her and producing a striking resemblance to a certain cursed Gorgon, who had snakes instead of hair. As the Medusa, Aurelia channels massive amounts of bioelectricity, frying the circuits of the Doyenne and the Technalis and seemingly ending the war, but at a terrible price.

The subtitle of Mary Shelley’s famous novel is a reference to the Prometheus of Greek myth who fashioned humanity and later stole fire from the gods to benefit his creation. While Turtle aspires to be Dr. Frankenstein, arguably Aurelia becomes the play’s Promethean figure, begetting life and struggling to protect it and provide it with resources. In the final moments of Jellyfish, Mr. Fox optimistically suggests that Aurelia, Bug, and her creations all find their way to the ocean, and as the play ends, long columns of white plastic bags drop from the ceiling and undulate gently—“The age of the jellyfish has come!” Mr. Fox announces. Life will resurrect from the Medusa’s polyps—perhaps not the same forms of life that existed prior to the Anthropocene, but new life might offer the planet a fresh start.