From Black Box to Proscenium: How Theatre Can Address Climate Crisis
By Madeline Meyer
Like many young theatre artists, I want my work to spur action and create change. But in the face of urgent issues like the environmental crisis, it’s not always easy to see how theatre can have an impact. How can a traditionally contemplative art form spur audiences to act? How do we make a story feel honest and engaging, while also confronting some hard truths? And how do we square the resource-intensive practice of putting on a show with sustainability goals?
In an effort to grapple with these questions, I started at my home college, The Theatre School (TTS) at DePaul University. I talked with two faculty members and a TTS alum, all theatre artists, who gave me some insight on how they’re working to address the environmental crisis and incorporate sustainability into theatre.
Kristin Idaszak: “The slowness of theater is a strength.”
Kristin Idaszak is a playwright and TTS professor who teaches courses such as “Ecodrama on the Global Stage” and “Telling the Story of Climate Change.” Their work focuses on the intersection of climate change, gender, and queerness. I was fortunate to speak with them over Zoom as they are pursuing their intersectional work in Pune, India.
Idaszak told me that they came to climate-change theatre “from the larger practice of writing plays at the intersection of art and science.” In the fall of 2022, DePaul TTS staged their play Three Antarcticas, a story that explores three distinct time periods on the continent of Antarctica.
“My interest [in climate-change theater] really stems from a trip I took to Antarctica,” Idaszak said. “I knew I wanted to write a play about Antarctica before I even went there. While I was in Antarctica, I had the realization that I probably shouldn’t be there. I had a really heightened awareness of the ecological footprint I was making. It was a major paradigm shift for me.”
Idaszak’s realization mobilized them, steadily inspiring them to author a wide array of climate-change theater works that span a variety of genres and topics, including a mystery and memory play called Tidy, which ran as part of the World Premiere Wisconsin Festival in March and April.
But they are not unaware of the challenges that can come with creating this work.
As a theater-maker myself, one of the things I’m always thinking about is how to use this reflective and often slow art form to mobilize people. When I asked Idaszak about this, they offered a different, and simultaneously reassuring, answer:
“I actually think the slowness of theater is a strength and feature, not a bug. I think, paradoxically, urgency can actually work counter to wholesale transformation. This is not a problem that was created in a day or a year, and it’s not a problem that’s going to be solved in a day or even a year.”
They’re right. Climate change requires patience and persistent attention. It also requires collaboration and reflection. As Idaszak said, “Theater can create a space for people to sit together, and also with themselves, in a certain amount of discomfort, and to enter into conversations that might be difficult to have in other settings.”
Difficult conversations are imperative to change, and if theater-artists can help craft those spaces, that is a step in the right direction.
“No one play is going to speak to everyone,” Idaszak said. “This is really an all hands on deck situation.”
IDASZAK’S RECOMMENDED CLIMATE-RELATED ART PIECE: Sun & Sea at the Sydney Festival
Patrice Egleston: “You’re never going to follow your heart if it’s just your intellect that’s invested.”
Patrice Egleston is the Chair of Performance, and a movement professor at TTS. She is also the co-founder of The Sixth Festival, an arts festival that centers itself on the topic of climate change. She recently produced a short play festival, a fringe event from the main festival.
When I sat down with her to learn more, Egleston shared one of the main drivers behind the format of the festival: “[To] make it easy for people to walk in, make it so they don’t feel trapped.” She elaborated, asserting that audiences feel the suffering of the climate crisis regardless of whether it’s conscious or not. But theatergoers have to leave with at least a little bit of hope, or they will continue to shy away from action.
Echoing Idaszak, Egleston sees theatre as having an important role to play in addressing the environmental crisis:
“It’s the most ancient, primal way to communicate. So blogs, and spreadsheets, and PowerPoints — not it. It reaches only a part of the person, it reaches the intellect. You’re never going to follow your heart if it’s just your intellect that’s invested.”
Later she added, “To dismiss the art in a human being– it’s that kind of reasoning that gets us in trouble. That’s part of how we got on this road.”
Egleston had some additional advice that resonated with me: “If we don’t take action in whatever cause we’re interested in, we build up more anxiety. If we take action, we reduce anxiety and we also develop resilience. Avoiding taking action is much more stressful.”
Finally, when we take action, we can inspire others to do the same — our friends and loved ones or broader communities. “When more than 51% of the population wants to change something, it means that 3% of the population is out in the streets protesting. This is what protest groups gear themselves towards, to get 3% of the population out in the streets, because that is a tipping point,” Egelston said.
“If we could get 51% of the population, even of DePaul University, to say ‘yes, this has to be done now,’ then we get a lot closer to making something good happen.”
EGLESTON’S RECOMMENDED CLIMATE-RELATED ARTIST: Chantal Bilodeau
Alyssa Mohn: “Progress can be more of a slowing down.”
Alyssa Mohn is a graduate of The Theatre School who currently works as an ecoscenographer (someone who centers sustainability in their theatrical design practices), and a student pursuing a Master of Science in Sustainable Management at the University of Wisconsin Extended Campus. We spoke over Zoom about her sustainablility work as she prepares for tech week for a show she’s working on.
“[Creating a sustainable theatrical world requires] a reframe of thinking, so that you can start with sustainability as a priority or something that the team is thinking about at the beginning of a process, versus something that is stressful when you’re making cuts at the end of a design process,” Mohn said.
Like Egelston, Mohn stressed that people won’t act unless they feel like they have the ability to make a change. But she believes that theatre can reanimate an audience’s sense of urgency about climate change: “Theater-makers can convey urgency in a way that has a lot of energy and storytelling behind it. I think the biggest thing we don’t realize we can do is shift narratives that the public has had ingrained for a long time.” She also believes that theatre can be the spark that inspires the public to commit to policies recommended by scientists and engineers.
In an industry driven by deadlines, ticket sales, and the pursuit of the finished products, we are often on a tight schedule that can make disrupting the status quo feel hard. Mohn’s solution is not problem solving, but rather a paradigm shift:
“We have this idea that growth and progress is what we’re all about, that it’s what defines us. I think theatre as a storytelling medium is able to make the biggest impact because it can present progress in a way that’s moving toward more sustainability… Progress can be more of a slowing down, and more of a spiritual regression in a way that connects us to the land. Theatre has the ability to tell that story.”
MOHN’S RECOMMENDED CLIMATE-RELATED ARTIST — Tanja Beer
All three of these individuals echoed a unifying message — theatre-artists have much to do in the face of climate change. We can collaborate to create spaces for contemplation. We can speak to logic and emotion. We can slow down and make choices that benefit the environment from the beginning.
It was inspiring to speak with Idaszak, Egleston, and Mohn. I am reminded of how lucky I am to be among theatre-artists who are committed to addressing a variety of issues in their work, including the environmental crisis. I am reminded that each show is an opportunity to create a positive impact that can ripple out and make waves.
Madeline Meyer is a 2022–23 Student Fellow with HumanitiesX and a undergraduate student in Acting and Political Science at DePaul University.
