Author Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing includes one on exclamation points: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” If there is a similar rule on evil laughs, Nomadic Tempest, the shipboard theater performance about climate change currently sailing the Salish Sea (next up: Everett and Port Townsend), violated it in the first 20 minutes.

Nomadic Tempest is a 75-minute, one-act show about four monarch butterflies struggling to survive in 2040 after fossil fuel consumption fucks our climate. The cast are also the crew of the tall ship Amara Zee, which sails from port to port for performances—I caught it last Saturday in Gasworks Park, the final night of a weeklong stand.

The ship doubles as stage and set, the rigging allowing for daredevil aerialists and actors high atop the crow’s nest. It’s an ingenious, eye-catching, low-carbon way to travel, which the British Columbia-born Caravan Stage Company has been doing since 1970, when it roved from town to town via horse and wagon. (The Amara Zee set sail in 1997.)

Unfortunately, their current play is insultingly didactic.

The plot consists of Kahandra, a soothsayer of lost humanity, telling a multihued batch of children around a campfire the story of how fossil fuels destroyed our planet—and the valiant efforts of a quartet of monarchs who use their fabled butterfly effect to flap their wings and cause an alternate future in which we don’t ruin the earth. (She is accompanied by a didgeridoo player who must have spent too much time listening to the podcast bros.)

Nomadic Tempest unfolds mostly in rhyme, the worst of which is reserved for the twin SwallowWarts, who rule the roost atop the ship extolling the virtues of oil: “Mortals, we are YOUR Holy Grail… / This Earth is Our land is Your Oil! / Our Fracking Land from Shale to Shale / Saving Your lives from futile Toil!”

As they punctuate seemingly every verse with an evil villain laugh echoing over the illustrated oil derricks pumping away, I had instant flashbacks to the Captain Planet episodes I binged as a kid. The projection of an orca whale onto the screen draped over the ship that conjured up Free Willy didn’t help my bout of ’90s nostalgia.

That throwback feeling was the show’s Achilles’ heel. It may have riled up a middle schooler—and there were plenty in attendance in the all-ages, family-friend outdoor setting—but for an adult audience (and we were charged as such) the message was rammed down our throats until we were choking on coal dust.

The cartoonish villainy of the SwallowWarts may work for street theater art protests, but this wasn’t a downtown street during the last Climate March where you need simple, clear ideas to catch the attention of passersby and the media. This was a play that people voluntarily showed up and paid money to spend their evening watching. An outdoor movie screening of An Inconvenient Truth might have been more entertaining. Making good art about climate change isn’t so easy, Mad Max: Fury Road notwithstanding.

The goal of raising awareness about climate change is laudable, of course, and I confess to enviro-guilt with my car keys at my side as I looked down at the plastic takeout containers from the dinner we brought for the show. I watched the traffic stream along I-5 and wondered if we’ll ever electrify our interstate highways. I pondered the fate of the park’s namesake gasworks looming behind me—an older generation never would have imagined they’d become an oasis-like park in the city.

Then my mind snapped back to attention for another cringe-worthy couplet accompanied by the swell of a canned classical score to beat you over the head and signify HIGH DRAMA.

Amidst the mediocrity, I was captivated by the four monarchs suspended in air, who danced across the set like a DIY Cirque de Soleil. The visual spectacle of the tall ship lit up was captivating, made all the more so within the glorious setting of Gasworks Park at night, the summer smoke finally having abated to reasonably healthy levels. This would be a great show for dropping acid or some high-intensity THC. Just bring your headphones and a different soundtrack.