For those of you who know me, you probably are not shocked that I'm using my theatre blog to discuss my other favorite topic- climate change. Let me explain. The climate crisis (more accurate to call it that than simply "change") occupies my thoughts more or less all day, every day, and dictates how I live my life. I'm vegan because it is the single biggest thing an individual can do to lower their carbon footprint. I only buy second hand (or occasionally ethically produced) clothing because the fast fashion industry is one of the world's largest polluters and perpetrators of modern slavery. I avoid single use plastic whenever I can, which is difficult but gets easier with practice. I even have a sustainability Instagram (@sustainablysteph if you're interested) where I talk about the small steps I make in my life to be more sustainable. I'm not telling you all of this to brag or assert that I'm doing The Most when it comes to slowing the climate crisis, because I'm not, not even close. This is just to build context for what I want to write about today. Last week I participated in a short play festival at The Workshop Theater, where I am a staff dramaturg. I stepped into the role of playwright for the evening with my short play "The Specimen," about a man and woman that meet in the middle of nowhere in the aftermath of a climate apocalypse. The inspiration word for the festival of 20 minute or less two-handers was "environment," so naturally a lot of the plays had similar themes. Friday evening I saw pieces about the EPA confronting super heroes, two women resorting to murder to fertilize their degraded soil, and a conversation between a tree and an ant in the Amazon rainforest, rife with metaphor and political implications for our times. I'm not going to critique my piece or the pieces shown alongside mine- that feels wildly inappropriate. Instead, I am going to extrapolate my experience to pose a broader question: are all plays climate change plays? When I was a freshman in drama school one of the absolute first things we learned about script analysis was the given circumstances. The given circumstances are anything you can learn about the world of the play based on the text alone. According to the very tattered, water damaged, and post-it note filled script analysis textbook I still have, the given circumstances one should look for are:
So, time and place are two of the simpler given circumstances to pin down. As you move through the list, things get more difficult to ascertain and sometimes can seem absent from a script. Not all plays are explicitly political, or deal with economics or education or spirituality in a literal or outward facing way. (It will probably tell you something about me that the first example of a political play that popped into my head was The Pajama Game, everyone's favorite 1954 Tony Award Winning Best Musical that focuses on a love story that crosses the picket line of a labor strike.) Anyway, not all plays or musicals feature, for example, a main character tearing a Nazi flag in half, but have messages of equality, inclusivity, or defeating evil that could lead you to make political conclusions about the piece. However, one of the most important things I learned freshmen year about given circumstances, the single sentence that shook me to my core as a 17-year-old babe and still impacts how I approach textual analysis is this: The absence of any given circumstance can be as significant as its presence. Is your mind blown yet? Let me dive deeper. Do you have any friends or family members in your life that claim to not care about politics or choose not to get involved in political discussions? Choosing not to engage in political discourse or action is a political stance. It's a stupid political stance, but it's still a stance. In general, you can learn a lot about a person's other given circumstances through this lack of a political circumstance. For example, they're probably of a certain level of social and economic privilege that allows them to disengage because the outcome of the political sphere doesn't have an obvious or immediate impact on them. Or it could reflect the society they were raised in or their faith community (#jehovahswitnesses). Just like your friend who doesn't engage in politics, plays or musicals that don't engage in politics are taking a political stance as well. I'm not saying that every single show has to tackle a singular issue, à la The Prom, or literally be a story about politics like Hamilton, but even in Mean Girls there's a line or two about the importance of consent. As I type this I realize that the mere fact that the importance of consent is political is truly atrocious and we live in WILD times, but you get the point. The climate crisis is political, societal, economic, and contributes to the sense of time and place of a piece. It's truly the issue to end all issues because until we figure this one out nothing else really matters. Wars, famine, healthcare, inequality, and any other social or political issue you can think of are all just going to get worse as our world warms and we face natural disaster worse than any we've encountered so far. SO when I see a play or musical that exists in a magical fantasy land where the climate crisis isn't even REMOTELY addressed, I get concerned. This doesn't mean I think every single play needs to address the crisis head on. There are other stories to tell and topics to tackle in our industry, and I am not entirely opposed to pure escapism. And yet, we still can do better. For example, a few walks ago I saw Freestyle Love Supreme, a night of improvised hip hop sprung from the brain of Lin-Manuel Miranda and his collaborators that truly made every other improv show I've ever seen look like child's play. The night that I was there the team actually did improvise a rap about climate change (and it wasn't even my suggestion, I promise), but that's not why I knew that the team behind the show cared. I knew they cared because every single performer on that stage had a reusable water bottle. This, dear reader, is huge. How many times have you been to a reading or a panel or some other less formal presentation of a work and seen every single person on stage holding a fucking Poland Spring single use plastic water bottle??? Probably every time! And it's bullshit because everyone uses reusable water bottles nowadays! And if you, yes you, dear reader, are not currently using a reusable water bottle, what the fuck is wrong with you? They're on sale at TJ Maxx literally all the time. Buy one, let it live in your backpack, and never by a water bottle again because bottled water is literally a fucking conspiracy unless you live in Flint, Michigan, in which case obviously I am not digitally yelling at you. The rest of you though, please stop fucking around and get a water bottle. So all that is to say, thank you, Freestyle Love Supreme, for giving a shit. These are the things I pay attention to when I see theatre. Theatre is, unfortunately, an inherently wasteful industry. What makes theatre so beautiful and one of the things I love about it so much is its ephemerality, but by nature that leads to waste. Years ago I read an article (that I'm trying to find but can't which is sad because it was very good) about a new artistic director of a theatre company (I think in Seattle?) who had made her career as a scenic designer, which is super cool because usually artistic directors are directors, dramaturgs, producers, or career arts administrators. Anyway, one of the things she discussed in the article was how her own vocation, scenic design, is both the most wasteful and most unnecessary aspect of theatre. She argued that scenic design is the most culturally specific design element and often times what is achieved through a set can be achieved through light and sound (which are usually digital) in a more inclusive way. Due to the suspension of disbelief necessary for an audience to accept that they are watching people stand in front of them experiencing something genuine, we can achieve a lot by doing very little. In contrast, if you go to the movie theatre and at the top of the film are met with a black screen merely featuring the words POLAND, 1939, you're gonna be pissed off if you see so much as a digital watch at any point in the next two hours. However, if an actor walks on stage wearing a black shirt and jeans and puts a cardboard sign that says POLAND, 1939, on the edge of the stage, your imagination will fill in the blanks anyway. No further scenic design necessary. Before my scenic designer friends come for me, I'm not calling for the end of all scenic design. I have so much respect for scenic designers and the work that they do often is super important and beautiful and joyful and helpful to the creative process and to building a world for the characters to live in and for the audience to enjoy. But I am asking us, as an industry, to be more considerate of our impact. Unless you're fucking Phantom of the Opera, your set is, more or less, single use. Before you know it the pieces will be torn down and likely discarded. How can we be better? Where can we use recycled materials and how can we repurpose the materials we've used once we're done? I know there are people and institutions doing the good work on this front already, so if you're working in the scenic arts please make it a priority to find out what systems your institution has in place to cut down on your impact. If there isn't anything in place, start a Green Team! Do your part. So many people are already doing really cool and creative things with sets after a show closes. Jennifer Wheeler Kahn, a stage manager on Broadway and around the country, channeled her passion for theatre and green/ethical fashion into an amazing company called Scenery Bags, which recycles theatrical curtains and backdrops and makes them into purses. They're really beautiful pieces (not super tacky I LOVE THEATRE emblazoned Playbill patterned tote bags, don't worry), and they've kept over 16,000 pounds of material out of landfills. Additionally, they donate a portion of their proceeds to TDF so students can see Broadway shows. Amazing! P.S. You can buy bags made from the material Billy Porter used in his Tony's look. You can own that. Think about it. The mindset of reducing waste shouldn't just apply to scenic designers. Everyone has their part to play. Costume and makeup designers- is there an alternative to body glitter that doesn't mean chorus members are washing microplastics into our oceans eight post-show showers a week? Sound designers and technicians- will we ever find a way to water proof a mic pac that isn't double wrapping it in condoms? Does your theatre have a recycling program for Playbills or offer digital programs? Playwrights- is your token environmentalist and/or vegan character just the butt of a joke with no personality? Sorry, that last one was personal. It's true though! Aside from the terrifying First Reformed, starring Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried, I cannot think of a single movie or TV show where a climate activist isn't a dirty hippie or a laughing stock. I was watching The Politician on Netflix and a minor character told her mom she wanted to go vegan and her mom told her not to because she already has enough trouble making friends. I make fun of myself for being vegan all the time, because I am ridiculous, but it's 2019! Can it stop being a joke to care about the planet? This blog post ended up being a rant about waste in the industry more so than about the content of plays. But if you didn't get my point thus far, the answer to the question I posed earlier is yes, all plays are climate change plays. It is on all of us as theatre practitioners to be better in terms of the stories we tell and how we choose to tell them. Let's be better. For more info on this topic, please peruse the Howlround series, Theatre in the Age of Climate Change.
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Stephanie KaneI like reading plays, drinking lots of coffee, and holding other people's Tony Awards. Archives
August 2018
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