If you’re in the New York metropolitan region, I encourage you to see “Extreme Whether,” an pioneering and brave effort by playwright and director Karen Malpede to use theater to explore the clashing passions around human-driven global warming and our fossil fuel fixation. There are a few more performances in the play’s initial run at Theater for the New City, many with an invited guest discussing the climate challenge after the show (see the list at the end of this post).
I recently saw the play and spoke afterward. You can see excerpts from my conversation with the audience (and mini concert) below.
“Extreme Whether” is a refreshing experiment in bringing the emerging fictional genre called “cli-fi” to a theatrical stage. (Another example is “2071,” coming next month at the Royal Court Theatre in London.)
Malpede’s play is laced with darkness and humor, even in the double meaning of the word “whether” in the title — which I found nicely reflects the deep uncertainty that still surrounds the worst-case outcomes from the continuing buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The play centers on a fractured family that is a stand-in for the human family writ large. John Bjornson, a crusading climate scientist modeled closely on the retired NASA scientist Jim Hansen, is muzzled by political appointees and betrayed by his twin sister and brother in law — both of whom are blinded to looming environmental danger by their investments in fossil fuels. His foes conspire to drill for gas on a shared family estate. Bjornson, a widower, is buoyed by a student who’s become an important Arctic expert (and his lover), and his nature-loving daughter and an elderly uncle who is the estate caretaker take up arms against the gas-drilling plan.
Survivors grapple with overwhelming heat in an epilogue, but with hints of an alternative future in projected images of wind turbines.
Here are some excerpts: