I wrote and directed A Fun Play about How Scary Climate Change Is, a devised piece about finding hope, not despair, in the face of climate change covered in Hyperallergic (!!!) and the Rockaway Wave (twice). We performed in six community waterfront spaces across the city: the Queens Botanical Garden’s Climate Arts Festival, the Amanda+James Coastlines Festival, (where they commissioned five artists to create public art about and on the coastline), Edgemere Farm, Gowanus Dredgers Community Boathouse, Hunts Point Riverside Park, and the historic La Plaza Cultural. We also made a fun mini-zine (send me an email and I’ll mail you one + stickers!!!). Along with Amanda+James, this performance is supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Brooklyn Arts Council. All performances were free, with food to remind of us of the places we performed in, zines and archival installations about climate organizing and justice around the corner, and a community talk back! The play itself follows two swamp monsters who wash up on the beach, and a Seagull (who’s been to too much therapy), grumpy writer, neurotic makeup artist, and fabulous park ranger who band to return them home to their family (with plenty of music and dancing and songs about rain along the way). There’s also a lot of Japanese synth from 1987 that I got off ebay.
Rehearsal in the Queens Botanical Garden’s parking lot (so glam). Photo by Jesse Herndon.
This play took place across seven different locations picked because of its simultaneous climate vulnerability and embedded climate organizing: the Gowanus Dredgers Community Boathouse (which is currently undergoing a rezoning contributing to extreme stormwater flooding, as well as community-based planning around environmental justice), the boardwalk and Edgemere Farm in Far Rockaway (which is the byproduct of racist urban renewal and segregated coastal storm surge risk, as well as organizing around federal climate funding), La Plaza Cultural (which is at high risk of resiliency gentrification and storm surge, as well as multi-racial organizing coalitions), and Hunts Point Riverside Park (on the famous Bronx River, which is at high risk of municipal storm overflows, as well as Bronx-based coalitional environmental justice advocacy), and the Queens Botanical Garden (next to the polluted Flushing Creek, fighting both a racist rezoning and casino redevelopment).
