In just two weeks – and just in advance of Earth Day come April – two World Premiere Wisconsin plays will make their debut on the same day: Saturday, March 25.
Art Kopischke’s You Don’t Deserve to Die, featuring a vegan co-op whose members are grappling with how to live ethically in a dying world, will receive a reading at UW Green Bay’s Weidner Theatre at 7:00 pm.
One hour later in Milwaukee (and following preview performances on Friday night and Saturday afternoon), Renaissance Theaterworks opens its WPW production of Kristin Idaszak’s Tidy. Idaskaz’s play unfolds in a dystopian future in which a onetime librarian (when there were still libraries) wonders why her wife has disappeared while she herself struggles with solastalgia: existential distress and dread induced by climate change.
True to the way the WPW festival is expanding frontiers, both plays offer opportunities for Wisconsin audiences to experience the growing body of environmentally informed theater. We’ve seen surprisingly little of it.
Many excellent recent plays about the world’s greatest existential crisis – including Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone (2016), Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children (2016) and Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs (2011), to choose just three of the more glaring omissions – remain either entirely unproduced or under-produced by Wisconsin’s professional theaters (Third Avenue
PlayWorks in Sturgeon Bay and Theatre Z in Green Bay have held readings of The Children; TAP also staged a production of Lungs in 2018).
We’re also seen little, here, of plays staged by the internationally renowned Climate Change Theatre Action, which periodically commissions environmentally themed series of five-minute plays from around the world; the plays are then made available for free readings and performances. Anthologies of plays from both 2017 and 2019 have been published.
Running from September 15 to December 21, CCTA’s 2019 festival of plays involved 200 presenting collaborators and 3,000 artists in 28 countries; the 150-plus events in the United States reached all 50 states. Performances took place in theaters and schools, parks and community centers, churches and public squares and even kayaks.
The lone Wisconsin performance? An evening at Appleton’s Lawrence University in October 2019 during which four of these microplays were read.
Not surprisingly, the problem extends beyond Wisconsin. A survey of 2019-20 world premieres among the 75 member companies comprising the League of Resident Theatres and the 32 core member companies of the National New Play Network concluded that not a single one of those premieres focused on the environment or climate change.
All of which makes Kopischke and Idaszak’s upcoming WPW plays even more exciting. Playwrights tackling climate change “take huge, complex, sometimes very abstract problems, and we humanize them,” Idaszak said in a 2022 interview. Having read both of these playwrights’ scripts, I can attest that they’ve each done so in the plays we’ll soon see.
“The real value of climate change” theater, writes playwright and environmental activist Chantal Bilodeau,” is not in helping us figure out whether to recycle more or eat less meat. The real value lies in [the] potential to dig deep and reshape the very foundation of who we are.”
While there’s still time. While we still can.
I’ll be taking time to share more with you about Kopischke and Idaszak’s plays in the weeks to come, through in-depth profiles of each playwright. But in the interim, get your tickets so that you can experience these world premieres for yourselves.
While there’s still time. While you still can.
Sponsored by UW-Green Bay’s Theatre and Dance Department, the March 25 reading of You Don’t Deserve to Die begins at 7:00 pm at the Jean Weidner Theatre, 2350 Weidner Center Drive, Green Bay. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/you-dont-deserve-to-die/.
Renaissance Theaterworks’ production of Tidy runs from March 24 through April 16 at 255 S. Water St., Milwaukee. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/tidy-2/.
