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      in Television

      In ‘Extrapolations,’ Scott Z. Burns Dramatizes Some Inconvenient Truths

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      Years ago, when Scott Z. Burns was doing some uncredited script work on Steven Soderbergh’s escapist heist movie “Ocean’s Twelve” (2004), Burns made the mistake of cracking a joke about the popcorn movie they were making. Soderbergh quickly set him straight.Movies and TV shows are a transaction, Soderbergh told him. Filmmakers and showrunners tell viewers a story, and viewers give that story their time.“He told me that is a transaction that we, as storytellers, can’t afford to be cynical about,” Burns said in a recent video call. In other words, entertainment is the storyteller’s mandate.The lesson came in handy as Burns was writing, producing and directing multiple episodes of “Extrapolations,” the new limited series he created for Apple TV+, which debuts on Friday. The series, which features a large, illustrious cast — top names include Edward Norton and Meryl Streep — conjures eight hours of drama, science fiction and some occasional comedy from the subject of global warming. As subjects go, it’s a tough sell; the series could easily have come across like an urgent plea to eat your vegetables.But not if he could make it at least a little bit fun.“I don’t believe I’m going to move people or change their attitude about anything unless first I entertain them” said Burns, best known for writing the research-heavy Soderbergh movies “Contagion,” “Side Effects” and “The Informant!” (and for writing and directing the 2019 political thriller “The Report”). “That, to me, is the fun part of the job: creating entertainment that maybe sticks with somebody.”Make no mistake, it was a challenge. Telling multiple, sometimes interlocking stories that cover the years 2037 to 2070, “Extrapolations” is hugely ambitious, exploring climate change from religious, political, economic, technological and social perspectives. Each episode (with the exception of one two-parter) leaps ahead several years as the climate crisis worsens, traversing the globe from Alaska to India, much of it shot overseas. Fires rage, cities flood and famines spread but life continues, including all of the myopia, power-grabbing and need for deeper meaning that has always characterized human history.Mia Maestro and Edward Norton in a scene from Episode 4 of “Extrapolations.” The series follows multiple, often interlocking stories that track the future of climate change.Apple TV+Matthew Rhys (far left, with Heather Graham and, center and far right, Alexander Sokovikov and Noel Arthur), praised Burns’s ability to “view the world from many different perspectives.”Apple TV+It’s a series full of big ideas. But that is typical for Burns, said Matthew Rhys, who stars and has been friends with him for several years. (He also played a small but important role in “The Report.”“He is forever posing the questions that would never even cross my stratosphere,” Rhys said in a video call. “He has this expanse to his thinking and to his questioning, and also this enormous humanity and incredible sensitivity.”Born and raised just outside Minneapolis, Burns studied English literature at the University of Minnesota and originally wanted to be a journalist. His father worked in advertising, and Burns followed in his footsteps. He soon discovered that he was good at writing television commercials, which is how he met the actor and director Peter Berg. Berg was interested in directing ads in between his film and television projects. They became friends, and Berg hired Burns to write for the series “Wonderland” (2000), a drama set in a psychiatric facility modeled on Bellevue Hospital.The series lasted only one season, but the experience taught Burns two things about himself: He had a talent for writing screenplays, and he loved doing research. He would spend hours at Bellevue, immersing himself in the atmosphere and the history.“I think that’s where I became persuaded that research really is the solution to writer’s block,” he said. “That if you just continue to dig into your subject matter, it’s eventually going to reveal some cool story to you.”Kate Winslet and Larry Clark in a scene from the heavily researched Steven Soderbergh film “Contagion” (2011), which Burns wrote. Claudette Barius/Warner Bros.He takes a hands-on approach to gathering information and context, engaging experts and throwing himself into his subjects. For “Contagion,” that meant global pandemics (the film was released in 2011, nearly a decade before the Covid-19 outbreak). For “Side Effects” (2013), it was the world of antidepressants. In writing “Extrapolations” Burns consulted with the climate change experts Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill McKibben.He is also open to perspectives that diverge from his own. “I know that one of the reasons he brought me on is that he and I don’t see the world the same way,” Dorothy Fortenberry, an executive producer of “Extrapolations,” said in a video call. “We have very different lives and lifestyles. He’s agnostic, and I’m religious. We’re not a matched set, and I think he appreciated that.”Burns traces his environmental awakening to the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, in which some 11 million gallons of crude oil were spilled into Prince William Sound, Alaska. Burns took a leave from his advertising job to help clean otters affected by the spill. He soon realized that the otter center where he worked was part of a carefully planned strategy to rehabilitate Exxon’s image.“I think what I took from that was that a story, like a place that had been built to clean otters, wasn’t maybe what it looked like,” Burns said. “That was a big thing for me. I came back and I changed my relationship to advertising so I could do more work in the environmental space.”Years later, he jumped at an opportunity to work on Davis Guggenheim’s 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” joining as a producer.Al Gore, pictured in a scene from “An Inconvenient Truth.” He applauded Burns’s willingness to apply his storytelling skills to the subject of global warming. Eric Lee/Paramount ClassicsThe film, which won an Oscar for best documentary, turned an Al Gore slide show into a visually compelling and morally persuasive argument for heeding the dire signs of global warming. Viewed widely as an important moment in raising public awareness of climate change, it even spawned a sequel, 2017’s “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” with Burns as an executive producer.Gore, who has remained friends with Burns, was particularly impressed with how Burns handled the episodes of “Extrapolations” that are set in the distant future, and his ability to turn real-world crisis into compelling narrative.“The farther into the future you extrapolate, the more difficult it is to find the most accurate projection of what might happen,” Gore said by phone. “But I think that he’s really done a terrific job.”“There is kind of a cottage industry of books about how storytelling is the way we all best absorb information, so the importance of highly skilled storytellers has grown,” Gore added. “It’s great that Scott has applied that skill to this challenge.”Compared to the “Inconvenient Truth” films, the flashy, effects-heavy “Extrapolations” feels like “Ocean’s Twelve,” with a similarly star-studded cast. It includes Marion Cotillard and Forest Whitaker, who play a married couple living a contentious, futuristic “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” existence; Sienna Miller, who plays a pregnant marine biologist wondering what the future holds for her unborn child; David Schwimmer, who plays a slippery lawyer willing to grease some wheels to preserve the temple where his family worships; and Kit Harington, who plays a powerful tech mogul lording over all he sees, Elon Musk style.It makes for a lot of intellectual and artistic juggling. To that end, Rhys, who plays a craven casino mogul trying to make a fast buck in Alaska, praised Burns’s ability to “view the world from many different perspectives and approach them all with equal empathy.”Daveed Diggs, who plays a rabbi in a rapidly flooding Miami, was drawn to the scope of “Extrapolations.” “I just thought it was a really big swing,” he said, “and I like things that are big swings.” Apple TV+That enormous scope was a specific draw for Daveed Diggs (“Hamilton,” “Blindspotting”), who plays a rabbi trying to balance faith, social obligation and the reality of rapidly rising Miami sea levels in two early episodes.“I just thought it was a really big swing, and I like things that are big swings,” he said in a video call. “I wasn’t sure how it was all going to work, but the world building was so smart to me. It is trying to create something that allows us to discuss the reality of climate change in the same way that we discuss other elements of popular culture.”“Extrapolations” also fits neatly into a running Burns theme: The world is a scary place, and humans have devised all manner of ways to screw it up. But they also have the capability to fix it, and this gives him hope.“People who know me would probably say I tend to be a little darker and drier than a lot of other humans,” he said. “But I know that we have all of the solutions to all of these problems. I also recognize that the amount of change that we have to engage in is massive, and human beings don’t tend to change very rapidly.”Perhaps his latest endeavor can help push things along. And maybe even provide some entertainment along the way. More

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      in Movies

      Cautionary Climate Tales That Give People Pause When They Press Play

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      The India-born director Joshua Ashish Dawson builds digital worlds that ruminate on the future shock of environmental destruction in the real world.This article is part of our Design special section on how the recent push for diversity is changing the way the world looks.A young woman is distressed. She seems unwell. Her body was “never designed to cope with the extremes of a shifting climate,” a soothing voice informs us. As a dreamy soundtrack plays in the background, she arrives at “Spa Sybarite,” where futuristic stone treatment pods hover on stilts above a desert landscape.“Spa Sybarite” is a three-minute film by Joshua Ashish Dawson, a 32-year-old Angeleno who describes himself as a “world builder” and much of his work as “speculative climate futures.” Trained as an architect, he uses digital design tools and the language of cinema to create environments and scenarios that, he said, “ask viewers to question their assumptions about the world they live in.”At “Spa Sybarite,” the voice-over goes on, guests are offered “an assortment of scientifically tested customized treatments to help your body condition itself to the environmental despair that faces our planet.” Soaking in an outdoor tub rinses skin “of the deposits of wildfire ash,” and healthy meals are “customized to your prior nutritional accessibility.” There is also “solastalgia therapy,” where digital visualization artists create an immersive 3-D simulation of your wildfire-destroyed home for you to visit.A character in “Spa Sybarite” rinses in a tub that’s meant to cleanse her of wildfire ash. Both hyper-realistic and satirical, this film probes how people might shift their wellness rituals to cope with extreme climate change.Joshua DawsonThe conceit for “Spa Sybarite” is both slightly absurd and eminently believable. Elements almost feel like satire, something Mr. Dawson plays with, but his ultimate aim is for a kind of “hyper-realism,” he said of the film, noting that the idea of a climate spa is not very far from reality. “Wellness is a multi-trillion-dollar industry,” he said, “and it’s only a matter of time before someone takes the obvious opportunity to market wellness as the solution to climate-based illness, the biggest global health threat of our time.”Having grown up in Bangalore, India, he is sensitive to how climate change disproportionally affects low-income communities and communities of color. His invention of a white, presumably wealthy protagonist in “Spa Sybarite” raises the question of who has access to wellness, not to mention basic heath care. He sees the luxury spa as a product of disaster capitalism, “where these infrastructures of care are used to make a profit off of a crisis.”Mr. Dawson has made three other films, ranging from four to seven minutes, with related themes: In “Cáustico,” it is the politics of water privatization; in “Loa’s Promise,” the ecological and human impacts of unregulated resource extraction; and in “Denervation,” the threats posed by counterfeiting in an unscrupulous pharmaceutical industry. Concern with the environment and health underlie everything.He traces his career path to his childhood in India in the 1990s, when two of his loves were Lego and movies. His father is an English-speaking Protestant Christian who works as an interior designer, and his mother is a Hindu civil engineer whose first language is Marathi. The family spoke English at home, and both Mr. Dawson and his sister attended convent schools that had been established by the British.“The influx of Hollywood at that point in time in Bangalore really was something that we grabbed onto and were excited about,” he recounted. Even today, he said, movies are a big part of how his family connects.“I never had a road map set by someone who looked like me,” said Mr. Dawson. Here, he sits inside the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles where he plans to shoot his next project: a feature film.Tanveer Badal for The New York TimesHe went on to study at the RV College of Architecture in Bangalore, where he received a bachelor’s degree in architecture. While in school, he interned for several months in the Ahmedabad office of Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi, India’s first Pritzker Prize-winning architect.Doshi, who died in January, worked with Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, two influential figures in modern architecture, and he was known for adapting the International Style to a community-minded modernist approach and regional focus that reflected India’s culture and climate.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.“I learned a lot from him in terms of how he used mythmaking and storytelling very much in his design process,” Mr. Dawson said. “And it was the start of something that was sort of going off in my head.”After graduating from architecture school, he received his license to practice in India. But he lacked experience with digital tools used for design and fabrication. That led him to enroll in the master’s program in advanced architectural studies at the University of Southern California, where he met another key mentor, Alex McDowell.Mr. McDowell is a Hollywood film production designer with credits on “Fight Club,” “Minority Report” and “Man of Steel,” among others. His studio, Experimental Design, creates future-gazing story worlds for corporate clients, educational institutions and cultural organizations. He is also on the faculty of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and is the director of the school’s World Building Media Lab, where students collaborate on immersive storytelling.“What’s exciting is when students come in from completely different disciplines with this very open-minded approach to storytelling,” Mr. McDowell said. “And Joshua was one of relatively few who really pushed against the edges of his discipline. He came into class as an architect, very open and excited, I think, by the idea of entertainment media. He came in ready to break down the walls.”Mr. Dawson’s graduation project was his first short, “Cáustico.” Set in the year 2036, in a computer-generated city of anonymous steel-and-glass structures, the film envisions a future where dwindling fresh water supplies are controlled by a fictional company called Turquoise, whose depletion of underground aquifers causes massive sinkholes, while some of the most privileged citizens start moving into a subterranean lower city to be closer to the water. For the audio, Mr. Dawson used snippets of actual news reports on climate and water issues from 2014 and 2015, reminding us that such a future might not be so far away.In “Cáustico,” Mr. Dawson conceptualizes the politics of water privatization. Eventually, he’d like to create real-world spaces but for now is focused on continuing to explore experimental, design-based projects.Joshua DawsonSince then, he has turned out films at a measured pace while working day jobs. He spent four and a half years as a designer at Price Architects and HKS (the two firms merged in 2019), and for the past two years, he has been a narrative visualization specialist at IBI Group, producing dynamic 3-D models that help planners study the impact potential infrastructure and development projects will have on future urban environments.Mr. Dawson said he eventually wants to create real-world spaces. For now, he remains focused on the films he thinks of as a critical design practice, taking inspiration from ’60s and ’70s radical architecture collectives like Superstudio and Archigram, which rejected building in favor of exploring experimental concepts in films, artworks and manifestoes that challenged the status quo.Funded with grants and his own savings, each short film has involved a handful of partners. Some he has known since his days at USC, like Ashton Rae, a cinematographer, who described Mr. Dawson as “an incredibly collaborative director” with “a clear and punctuated vision.” She noted that in addition to making films “about real-world issues that affect marginalized individuals,” Mr. Dawson prioritizes having a diverse crew on set and for postproduction work.Mr. Dawson said his own identity as an immigrant of color is an asset in his work, giving him “a different perspective on issues that locals can’t see or see in biased ways.” As a Christian and the product of an interfaith marriage in India, he described himself as a micro-minority who “always felt like an outsider.”Familiar with the religious, gender and caste-based discrimination that is widespread in India, he is still learning about racism in the U.S., where he said immigrants are often expected to feel grateful just for being here. Based on his name, people often assume he is white before they meet him, which can cut both ways.“Since the killing of George Floyd, there definitely has been an increase in the kind of space making for people of color to be given a place at the table,” he said. “But it can be a little bit like a quota, like tokenism, with one spot or two spots that all the marginalized groups of people within their discipline have to compete for.”His hope is to see more people like him doing the kind of work he loves. “I never had a road map set by someone who looked like me, who paved this sort of interdisciplinary path like the one I’m trying to forge,” he said.A conceptual image of Mr. Dawson’s upcoming project where he reimagines the Bradbury Building as an ancient Indian stepwell. He plans for it to serve as a backdrop for a full-length murder-mystery movie.Joshua DawsonHis next project is a feature film that will incorporate cultural references tied to his identity as an India-born designer. It started as a visual thought experiment, a reimagining of the historic Bradbury Building in Los Angeles — specifically its soaring interior court with a glass ceiling and ornate Victorian ironwork — as an ancient Indian stepwell. The fictional hybrid structure will serve as a setting for a story about an Indian American detective who threads through its spaces as she investigates a murder.While Mr. Dawson was working on the screenplay this winter, drought-stricken Los Angeles was being battered by heavy storms, with most of the rainfall washing into the ocean because of insufficient drainage and catchment infrastructure. His project is a provocation to city planners to look to India’s stepwells — subterranean structures that are admired as aesthetic as well as engineering marvels, which for centuries provided reserves of clean water for drinking and bathing — for creative inspiration, if not literal solutions.“The past can teach us a lot, not just in terms of how water histories are written but also how water is controlled by the state,” Mr. Dawson said.He attributed his decision to weave his cultural background into his work to finding his voice as a designer and storyteller, but he added that it probably also has something to do with an increased openness to diverse cultural narratives.“Personally,” he said, “I like to roll with this idea that it’s a beautiful synchronization between the two.” More

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      in Music

      Climate Change Threatens Summer Stages and Outdoor Performances

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      ASHLAND, Ore. — Smoke from a raging wildfire in California prompted the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to cancel a recent performance of “The Tempest” at its open-air theater. Record flooding in St. Louis forced the cancellation of an outdoor performance of “Legally Blonde.” And after heat and smoke at an outdoor Pearl Jam concert in France damaged the throat of its lead singer, Eddie Vedder, the band canceled several shows.Around the world, rising temperatures, raging wildfires and extreme weather are imperiling whole communities. This summer, climate change is also endangering a treasured pastime: outdoor performance.Here in the Rogue Valley, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is seeing an existential threat from ever-more-common wildfires. In 2018 it canceled 25 performances because of wildfire smoke. In 2020, while the theater was shut down by the pandemic, a massive fire destroyed 2,600 local homes, including those of several staffers. When the festival reopened last year with a one-woman show about the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, wildfire smoke forced it to cancel almost every performance in August.“The problem is that in recent years there have been fires in British Columbia and in the mountains in Washington State and fires as far as Los Angeles,” said Nataki Garrett, the festival’s artistic director. “You have fire up and down the West Coast, and all of that is seeping into the valley.”Even before this year’s fire season began, the festival moved the nightly start time of its outdoor performances later because of extreme heat.Wildfires, which generate smoke that pollute air quality over long distances, have already begun burning this year in parts of Europe and the United States. In July, the Oak fire raged near Yosemite National Park.David McNew/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRecord rainfall in the St. Louis area caused flash flooding. Among the effects: The Muny, a major outdoor musical theater, had to cancel a performance of “Legally Blonde” because of flooding on its campus.Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated PressAshland is not the only outdoor theater canceling performances because of wildfires. Smoke or fire conditions have also prompted cancellations in recent years at the Butterfly Effect Theater of Colorado; the California Shakespeare Theater, known as Cal Shakes; the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival in Nevada and the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif., among others.“We are one giant ecosystem, and what happens in one place affects everywhere,” said Robert K. Meya, the general director of the Santa Fe Opera, which stages open-air productions against a striking desert backdrop each summer, and which, in an era of massive wildfires near and far, has installed sensors to gauge whether it is safe to perform.The reports of worsening conditions come from wide swaths of the country. “Last summer was the hardest summer I’ve experienced out here, because fires came early, and coupled with that were pretty severe heat indexes,” said Kevin Asselin, executive artistic director of Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, which stages free performances in rural communities in five Rocky Mountain West states, and has increasingly been forced indoors. “And the hailstorms this year have been out of control.”Road signs in Ashland, Ore., guide drivers along wildfire evacuation routes.Kristina Barker for The New York TimesIn southern Ohio, a growing number of performances of an annual history play called “Tecumseh!” have been canceled because of heavy rain. In northwest Arkansas, rising heat is afflicting “The Great Passion Play,” an annual re-enactment of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. In Texas, record heat forced the Austin Symphony Orchestra to cancel several outdoor chamber concerts. And in western Massachusetts, at Tanglewood, the bucolic summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, more shade trees have been planted on the sweeping lawn to provide relief on hot days.“Changing weather patterns with more frequent and severe storms have altered the Tanglewood landscape on a scale not previously experienced,” the orchestra said in a statement.On Sunday, the U.S. Senate voted in favor of the nation’s first major climate law, which, if enacted into law, would seek to bring about major reductions in greenhouse pollution. Arts presenters, meanwhile, are grappling with how to preserve outdoor productions, both short-term and long-term, as the planet warms.“We’re in a world that we have never been in as a species, and we’re going into a world that is completely foreign and new and will be challenging us in ways we can only dimly see right now,” said Kim Cobb, the director of the environment and society institute at Brown University.The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is an important driver of the local economy, but smoke and heat associated with climate change have become a growing challenge.Kristina Barker for The New York TimesSome venues are taking elaborate precautions. The American Players Theater in Spring Green, Wis., now requires performers to wear wicking undergarments when the heat and humidity rise, encourages actors to consume second act sports drinks, and asks costume designers to eliminate wigs, jackets and other heavy outerwear on hot days.Many outdoor performing venues say that, even as they are bracing for the effects of climate change, they are also trying to limit the ways that they contribute to it. The Santa Fe Opera is investing in solar energy; the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival is planting native meadows; and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is using electric vehicles.The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which before the pandemic had been one of the largest nonprofit theaters in the country, is, in many ways, patient zero. The theater is central to the local economy — the downtown features establishments with names like the Bard’s Inn and Salon Juliet. But the theater’s location, in the Rogue Valley of southern Oregon, has repeatedly been subject to high levels of wildfire smoke in recent years.At the Santa Fe Opera, which offers majestic desert views at sunset, concern about wildfire smoke prompted officials to install air quality sensors. Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesThe theater, like many, has installed air quality monitors — there’s one in a niche in the wall that encircles the audience in the open-air Allen Elizabethan Theater, where this summer “The Tempest” is alternating with a new musical called “Revenge Song.” The device is visible only to the keenest of eyes: a small cylindrical white gadget with lasers that count particles in the passing breeze.The theater also has a smoke team that holds a daily meeting during fire season, assessing whether to cancel or proceed. The theater’s director of production, Alys E. Holden, said that, ever since the time she opposed canceling a performance mid-show and later learned a technician had thrown up because of the air pollution, she has replaced her “show must go on” ethos with “If it’s too unsafe to play, you don’t play.”This year the festival reduced the number of outdoor performances scheduled in August — generally, but not always, the smokiest month.Air quality monitors, now in use at many Western venues including the Santa Fe Opera, can help presenters protect not only audience members but also performers. The opera is particularly concerned about its singers.Ramsay de Give for The New York Times“Actors are breathing in huge amounts of air to project out for hours — it’s not a trivial event to breathe this stuff in, and their voices are blown the next day if we blow the call,” Holden said. “So we are canceling to preserve everyone’s health, and to preserve the next show.”Wildfire-related air quality has become an issue for venues throughout the West. “It’s constantly on our mind, especially as fire season seems to start earlier and earlier,” said Ralph Flores, the senior program manager for theater and performance at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which has a 500-seat outdoor theater at the Getty Villa.Air quality concerns sometimes surprise patrons on days when pollution is present, but can’t be readily smelled or seen.“The idea that outdoor performance would be affected or disrupted by what’s happening with the Air Quality Index is still a fairly new and forward concept to a lot of people,” said Stephen Weitz, the producing artistic director at the Butterfly Effect Theater of Colorado, which stages free shows in parks and parking lots. Last summer the theater had to cancel a performance because of poor air quality caused by a faraway fire.The coronavirus pandemic also remains a concern, prompting crew members in Santa Fe to wear masks as they met before a performance of Bizet’s “Carmen.”Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesAnother theater there, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, is now working with scientists at the affiliated University of Colorado Boulder on monitoring and health protocols after a fire more than a thousand miles away in Oregon polluted the local air badly enough to force a show cancellation last summer. Tim Orr, the festival’s producing artistic director, recalled breaking the news to the audience.“The looks on their faces were surprise, and shock, but a lot of people came up and said ‘Thank you for making the right choice,’” he said. “And when I stepped offstage, I thought, ‘Is this going to be a regular part of our future?’”Planning for the future, for venues that present out of doors, now invariably means thinking about climate change.The Santa Fe Opera’s stunning outdoor location is one of its great attributes, but also makes it vulnerable to climate change.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesOskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which produces Free Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park, said that the 2021 summer season, when the theater reopened after the pandemic shutdown, was the rainiest in his two decades there. “I could imagine performing more in the fall and spring, and less in the summer,” he said.In some places, theater leaders are already envisioning a future in which performances all move indoors.“We’re not going to have outdoor theater in Boise forever — I don’t think there’s a chance of that,” said Charles Fee, who is the producing artistic director of three collaborating nonprofits: the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland. Fee has asked the Idaho board to plan for an indoor theater in Boise.“Once it’s 110 degrees at 6 o’clock at night, and we have these occasionally already, people are sick,” he said. “You can’t do the big Shakespeare fight, you can’t do the dances in ‘Mamma Mia.’ And you can’t do that to an audience.” More

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      in Television

      Baratunde Thurston Wants You to Be Part of Nature. Right Now.

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      The author of “How to Be Black” and host of the “How to Citizen with Baratunde” podcast wants you to experience the outdoors with a new PBS television series.In the midst of the pandemic, Baratunde Thurston decided to start a garden.It was a way for the author, podcaster and TV host to reconnect with his love of the outdoors, and process his feelings about the tumultuous state of the world.“Unfortunately, the squirrels thought I was gardening for them,” Mr. Thurston said. “In the beginning, I saw it as a battle — me versus the squirrels. Over time I realized, these squirrels are my neighbors, too. Maybe we can work something out.”Connecting with the environment, respecting wildlife and finding reverence in nature are all themes of Mr. Thurston’s new television series, “America Outdoors.” The six-part show follows him on a range of outdoor adventures, from running with ultramarathoners in Death Valley, Calif., to bird-watching in Minnesota and trekking through the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina. Viewers learn that nature can be enjoyed by everyone.“Doing a show based in the outdoors was really the right move in terms of ways to experience this country,” Mr. Thurston said. “I got to hang out with true outdoor enthusiasts and was reminded that you don’t have to be obsessive, or particularly well-resourced, to enjoy the outdoors.”“America Outdoors” premieres July 5 on PBS. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.The show is as much about outdoor destinations as it is about people. How do you define an “outdoor enthusiast?”This show is about breaking expectations. When I hear “the outdoors,” I have an extreme landscape like El Capitan in mind. I have a white guy in mind, with a beard, and he’s looking off into the distance, having just conquered something. And we did spend some time with people like that, but we also spent time with the original people on this land. It was a beautiful privilege that I got to interview people from three different Indigenous nations.We spent time with folks who have disabilities, and I got to be guided down a river, white-water rafting and piloted by a man who’s paralyzed. In Idaho, I was hanging out with refugee kids, mostly from Africa and Southeast Asia — part of the “Welcome to America” in Boise is hiking and taking nature walks and getting familiar with all the Americans, all of our neighbors, including the trees and the butterflies. I also met people just in their backyards who maybe don’t have the gear, the car rack, or a subscription to an outdoor magazine, but they know the value of putting their hands in dirt and growing food.You do a lot of really physical outdoor activities in this show — hiking, surfing, rafting, flying a plane! Which was the most challenging?The most challenging by far: sand surfing. Walking in sand, first of all, it’s not fun. That’s a great challenge. I really toned my calves and my glutes and my thighs. So I’m kind of grateful. But trying to ride a board? I don’t do skiing and snowboarding. Trying to stand on frozen water, on an incline, it just feels like … Why would you do that? So then we’re doing it on sand, and there’s no fin on the board. So there’s nothing for it to grip, and so you’re just kind of fishtailing all around. We had so many takes and when you go down a sandy hill, you have to walk back up. There’s no shortcut. It was a lot!Which destinations disrupted your expectations the most?Death Valley was full of life. It was our first shoot and pretty quickly, I was as offended as the Indigenous people by the name because it just sounds barren. The people we spent time with there, they helped me see it differently. The author of “Hiking The Pacific Crest Trail: Southern California,” Shawnté Salabert, took me on this hike to Darwin Falls and it’s just beautiful. I also went running with Mosi Smith, this ultramarathoner, and saw Death Valley through his lens. Of course, being with the Timbisha Shoshone members, who say this place should be called Timbisha, not Death Valley just because some white dude got lost. That’s disrupted expectations just because of what it’s called.There was also a shock for me on Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake Bay, with James “Ooker” Eskridge, the mayor of the community. On paper, me and this guy don’t have that much to say to each other. He was in the Trump-iest voting district in America by some measures, and he’s very, very, very conservative. But I had the luxury of spending real time and feeling his energy and experiencing his hospitality. I learned that his home is disappearing due to rising sea levels, due to climate change. He won’t quite call it climate change, but he acknowledges the waters rising and wants to do something about it. He wants sea walls, he wants federal money to be spent to save his town. We were on the coast of his island and seeing tombstones in the water. You can show data about climate change and you could watch an Al Gore presentation and see the temperature going up. But then you can wade through a graveyard. Hearing him describe having to exhume his ancestor to his own backyard; he got emotional talking about it. It made it real. I didn’t expect to have that experience at all. I definitely didn’t expect to have it with someone who’s seemingly so different from me.Climate change comes up a lot in the show. Was that your intention?Making a show about the outdoors is making a show about climate change. We can’t avoid the topic. In every location, I was witness to the effects of climate change: the dryness and lack of water in Death Valley beyond what’s expected; the firefighter training for those wildland firefighters; in Idaho, the smoke from Western fires, and the low levels of the river and the high temperatures of the river. In Minnesota, the premise of one of our segments with the Abbas family, the farming family, was trying to breed climate-resilient trees that can bear higher temperatures, because the forest we were standing in is going to disappear. And so rather than just mourn that, what kind of new forest can we create in its place? They’re engineering just through basic biology to harden the forest so that their kids have trees, too. When we were in Duluth, Minne., we could hardly breathe. Minnesota is having mad fires now. We couldn’t see Lake Superior. I had to wear an N95 mask when we weren’t shooting, because it was burning inside.Everywhere we went, we had a climate story. Sometimes it was more of a focal point of who we were talking with and the story; other times, it just affected how we could make the show.What do you hope people may learn from this show?I want people to see the outdoors as a place where we can literally experience common ground among the wide range of differences that make up this nation. Pretty much everybody should be able to see themselves in the show — we’ve got different time zones, different ecologies, different ages and body shapes and abilities. I hope we’ve reflected the diversity of the nation both in its natural state and in its human state. I want this show to be a mirror for everybody.The Indigenous people I spoke to have a culture of being a part of nature, as opposed to apart from nature. We got to relearn that. That was a really big takeaway for me, especially as the climate gets more volatile in the next decades. We should all stay connected in that way. This is not just something to use. It’s something to belong to.52 Places for a Changed WorldThe 2022 list highlights places around the globe where travelers can be part of the solution.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. More

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      This Play Is Touring Europe. But No One’s Going Anywhere.

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      By 2024, the British director Katie Mitchell’s latest project “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” will have been shown in 10 countries. Yet neither Mitchell, nor any cast or crew, will cross a single border.The experiment is part of “Sustainable Theater?”, an initiative of the Vidy-Lausanne Theater in Lausanne, Switzerland, in conjunction with a network of 10 European producers. Mitchell has created a “touring score” — an online handbook with detailed instructions on every aspect of the production — that is handed to local artists in theaters at each stop. But those artists have creative control, too: “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” a monologue by the American playwright Miranda Rose Hall about a young theater worker reckoning with man-made damage to the environment, will have a different director and look everywhere it goes.This commitment to zero travel is part of the theater’s efforts to adapt for climate change. In recent years, a growing number of artists and venues have started to rethink their reliance on easy, yet environmentally costly, international travel.At the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, where the show opens Thursday, Mitchell’s vision has been reinterpreted by the Rome-based collective lacasadargilla. “You have the artistic freedom to make your own show,” Mitchell’s instructions read, “while working within the parameters outlined below.” Those include casting, music and technical requirements — down to a video tutorial explaining how to build a power meter.Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, a member of lacasadargilla who directed the Milan version, called Mitchell’s production, which she saw over Zoom when it was presented in Lausanne, “Model Zero.” Now, it felt as if she and Mitchell were co-directing from a distance, she said.The Rome-based theater collective lacasadargilla rehearsing  “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” at the Teatro Piccolo in Milan. All the show’s electricity is generated from stationary onstage bicycles.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesIt is an unusual production model in European theater, where directors tend to have the final word on every iteration of their work. The goal, Mitchell explained in a video interview, was to figure out new avenues for theater-making in the face of an environmental threat. “In the light of climate change, you can’t have the normal hierarchies, systems, structures, or control, because the subject is so much bigger and so much more important,” she said. “You have to relinquish artistic control.”Mitchell, who is 57 and renowned across Europe as a theater and opera director, said that she could afford to experiment with what she called “eco-dramaturgy.” “I’m at the end of my career, not at the beginning, so I don’t have anything to lose if I mess up artistically. I’d like to keep the young generation free of that, and they just get the outcome.”The “Sustainable Theater?” program started with virtual conversations. To come up with a feasible production model, Mitchell and another environmentally conscious artist, the French director and choreographer Jérôme Bel, held online meetings twice a month for nearly a year with Vincent Baudriller, the artistic director of Vidy-Lausanne Theater, and Caroline Barneaud, its director of international projects.The team also linked up with researchers from the University of Lausanne to evaluate the theater’s carbon footprint. Completing a similar self-evaluation process is a requirement for the Vidy-Lausanne’s European partners, which include theaters in Ghent, Belgium; Maribor, Slovenia; Vilnius, Lithuania; Zagreb, Croatia; Lisbon; and Stockholm. (Taiwan’s National Theater and Concert Hall has also signed up.)Production-wise, the partners signed on sight unseen: At the time, Mitchell and Bel thought they might create a single production (and script) together. Instead, each theater will get two: In addition to “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” a work by Bel, called “Jérôme Bel,” will also be restaged by participating theaters.The play is about a young theater worker reckoning with man-made damage to the environment. A tree onstage represents the only tree left on the planet.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesMitchell’s work has been responding to the climate crisis for a decade, onstage and off. She stopped flying entirely in 2012, she said, after meeting the British scientist Stephen Emmott and hearing him talk about the need for radical behavior change. The zero-travel rule for “Sustainable Theater?” was her idea — and “irritated people, definitely, to begin with,” she said. Since she is based in Britain, she directed “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” entirely over Zoom ahead of its Lausanne premiere last September (which she attended virtually).Cameras were positioned inside the theater to relay rehearsals to Mitchell, and operated by a dedicated technician. “It’s not entirely easy to read a room, and you can’t pick up the little micro-conversations that are going on. We had to have a different protocol of communication,” she said. “You could view everything as a problem. Me and my team, we chose not to.”Barneaud, from the Vidy-Lausanne, said that the experience was a positive one for the theater’s in-house team. “It gave everyone a greater sense of responsibility. The sound engineer, for instance, had to act as ‘ears’ for the composer, Paul Clark, since he wasn’t in the room.”Out of the instructions in the script that Milan’s Piccolo Teatro and other theaters received after the premiere, only a few are set in stone. One is to take performances entirely off the electrical grid. Instead, to generate electricity, Mitchell positioned stationary bikes onstage that performers ride throughout the show. Mitchell said this was about “showing the effort of electricity.” (There are tutorials in the touring score on how to build the bikes, too.)The Milan version, made for a larger stage than in Switzerland, and with more elaborate sets, employs four bikes instead of two. While climate change has been a recurring theme in lacasadargilla’s work since its inception in 2005, the show’s requirements still forced its members to rethink some habits, Ferlazzo Natoli said: “Normally, we work much more with video, but video consumes a lot, and it requires a stable quantity of energy.”Working with constraints had proved stimulating, she added. “It’s so exciting, because we discovered that we can work with devices, lights and instruments that we didn’t know before.”Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, left, a lacasadargilla member, directing the show in Milan. ”We discovered that we can work with devices, lights and instruments that we didn’t know before,” she said.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesThe artists and producers involved all stressed that the model they had developed was just one option to limit theater’s impact on global warming, rather than a one-and-done answer. “I think we’re really at the beginning of this journey,” Claudio Longhi, the director of the Teatro Piccolo, said. “This project is a way to ask questions, a provocation.”When the Italian version of “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” premieres on Thursday, Mitchell will be watching — over Zoom, of course. But there will be no notes from her afterward, she said. “It belongs to the local artists in Milan. They’re free to do whatever they want.” More

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      Can Works Like 'Don't Look Up' Get Us Out of Our Heads?

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      In the doomsday smash and Bo Burnham’s pandemic musical “Inside,” themes of climate change, digital distraction and inequality merge and hit home.An Everest-size comet is hurtling toward Earth, and in exactly six months and 14 days, the planet will be shattered to pieces, leaving every living creature to perish in a cataclysm of fire and flood. In “Don’t Look Up,” Netflix’s hit climate-apocalypse film, this news largely bounces off the American public like a rubber ball. And they return to their phones with a collective “meh” — opting to doomscroll instead of acknowledging certain doom IRL.With the hope of snapping the masses from their stupor, Jennifer Lawrence’s character, a young scientist with a Greta Thunberg-like disdain for the apathetic, screams into the camera during a live TV appearance: “You should stay up all night every night crying when we’re all, 100 percent, for sure, going to [expletive] die!” She’s swiftly dismissed as hysterical, and an image of her face is gleefully seized on for the full meme treatment. (More spoilers ahead.)What the internet has done to our minds and what our minds have done to our planet (or haven’t done to save it) are two dots that have been circling each other for some time. Now, onscreen at least, they’re colliding, resonating with audiences and tapping into a particular psyche of our moment.In “Don’t Look Up,” a satirical incision from Adam McKay with only humor as an anesthetic, these themes are lampooned in equal measure and in no uncertain terms. Though heavy with metaphors — most important, the comet signifying climate change — its message is clear and not open to interpretation: Wake up!That the movie amassed 152 million hours viewed in one week, according to Netflix, which reports its own figures, suggests a cultural trend taking shape. There’s a hunger for entertainment that favors unflinching articulation and externalization over implication and internalization — to have our greatest fears verbalized without restraint, even heavy-handedly, along with a good deal of style and wit.Learn More About ‘Don’t Look Up’In Netflix’s doomsday flick, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence are two astronomers who discover a comet headed straight for Earth.Review: It’s the end of the world, and you should not feel fine, writes the film critic Manohla Dargis.A Metaphor for Climate Change: With his apocalyptic satire, the director Adam McKay hopes to prompt the audience to action. Meryl Streep’s Presidential Turn: How the actor prepared to play a self-centered scoundrel at the helm of the United States.A Real-Life ‘Don’t Look Up’ Moment: The film revives memories of a nail-biting night in the Times newsroom two decades ago.Look at “Inside,” Bo Burnham’s pandemic comedy-musical masterpiece from Netflix last year, in which he pools themes of climate disaster with Silicon Valley’s commodification of our thoughts and feelings, and its reliance on keeping us jonesing for distraction. (In the 2020 documentary “The Social Dilemma,” tech experts who had a hand in building these structures sounded an alarm over what they’d done.)Bo Burnham skewers the internet’s effects on humanity and the planet throughout his Netflix special “Inside.” NetflixIn his sobering song “That Funny Feeling” which has more than 6.7 million views on YouTube alone, Burnham sums it up in one lyric: “The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door.”“Twenty-thousand years of this,” he goes on, “seven more to go.” Most likely a nod to the Climate Clock, which displays messages like “the Earth has a deadline.”At the start of Jim Gaffigan’s new Netflix comedy special, “Comedy Monster,” he responds to opening applause by saying, “That almost makes me forget we’re all going to be dead in a week. I’m kidding. It’ll probably be a month” — seemingly referencing both the pandemic and general vibe.And “Squid Game,” a wildly violent, rich-eat-the-poor satire from South Korea that was a global smash for Netflix last year, while not about climate change, explored many of the same themes as “Don’t Look Up” — wealth inequality, greed, desensitization and voyeurism — flicking at the same anxieties and offering a similar catharsis.As with “Squid Game, ” some critics were lukewarm about “Don’t Look Up” — for being too obvious, shallow and shouty — but many climate scientists were moved and appreciative. In therapy, we’re often told that the best way to address our demons is to speak them out loud, using words that don’t skirt the issues or make excuses for them. Otherwise, they will never seem real, thus can never be dealt with. In “Don’t Look Up,” most people don’t snap out of their daze until the comet is finally in physical view. Do the popularity of shows and movies that don’t mince messages reveal a growing readiness to bring our common dread out of the deep space of our subconscious — to see it, to say it, to hear it?We’ve long been enveloped by a 24-hour news cycle that unfurls in tandem with social media feeds that give near equal weight to all events: Clarendon-tinged vacation photos, celebrity gossip, snappy memes and motivational quotes are delivered as bite-size information flotsam that sails alongside news of political turmoil, mass shootings, social injustice and apocalyptic revelations about our planet.“Squid Game,” a global streaming sensation last year, explores themes of wealth inequality, greed and desensitization.NetflixAs Burnham, personifying the internet in his song “Welcome to the Internet,” with more than 62 million YouTube views, asks: “Could I interest you in everything all of the time?”Next month, Hulu will premiere the mini-series “Pam & Tommy,” a fictionalized account of the release of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s personal sex tape, which was stolen from their home in 1995 and sold on what was then called the “World Wide Web.” The show presents the tape as helping the web become more mainstream by appealing to base human compulsions — an on-ramp to what would lie ahead.The pandemic has sent us further down this rabbit hole in pursuit of distraction, information, connection, all the while we try to shake that sense of impending doom.At one point in “Inside,” while curled up in the fetal position on the floor under a blanket surrounded by jumbles of cords — an image worthy of a pandemic-era time capsule — Burnham, his eyes closed, ruminates on the mess we’re in.I don’t know about you guys, but, you know, I’ve been thinking recently that, you know, maybe allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit — you know, maybe that was a bad call by us. Maybe the flattening of the entire subjective human experience into a lifeless exchange of value that benefits nobody, except for, you know, a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley — maybe that as a way of life forever, maybe that’s not good.In “Don’t Look Up,” the chief “bug-eyed salamander,” a Steve Jobs-like character and the third richest man on the planet, is almost completely responsible for allowing the comet to collide with Earth; his 11th-hour attempt to plumb the rock for trillions of dollars worth of materials fails. In the end, he and a handful of haves escape on a spaceship, leaving the remaining billions of have-nots to die.Juxtaposed with Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men on Earth, launching into space on his own rocket last year — a trip back-dropped by pandemic devastation (and a passing blip on the cultural radar) — is beyond parody … almost.Near the end of “Don’t Look Up,” Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, an awkward astronomer turned media darling, delivers an emotional monologue. Staring into the camera, he implores: “What have we done to ourselves? How do we fix it?” Funny. We were just asking ourselves the same thing. More

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      ‘Burning’ Review: Pulling the Fire Alarm in Australia

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      A new documentary looks at the visceral impact of wildfires and climate change on the country, from its beleaguered people to sickly koalas.If you think what climate change portends for America is scary, wait until you hear about Australia. That’s the gist of “Burning,” which focuses on that country’s sadly familiar experiences with warming temperatures: terrifying wildfires, drill-baby-drill politicians, and activists desperately trying to save us all by pointing out the facts about the future.The big difference is that Australia’s fires are the biggest: Over 50 million acres burned during its so-called “Black Summer” (2019-20), dwarfing losses in California or the Amazon. The director, Eva Orner (“Chasing Asylum”), makes her contribution to documentaries on climate change by sticking to Australia and underlining the visceral impact on Australians. It’s hellish: red skies and dark days, fear and helplessness, pregnancy complications and death.Orner’s flood of talking heads and footage from the field (including beleaguered locals and sickly koalas) settles into a drumbeat of worry — justified, obviously, but numbing. The film also suffers by comparison with a more complex and stimulating look at climate change, Lucy Walker’s alarming “Bring Your Own Brigade.” But the young activist Daisy Jeffrey does provide this film with a smart rebel leader, versus Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, and his coal-friendly politicking.Like many environmental docs, Orner holds up a possible savior (a tech billionaire pitching a pivot to renewables) and a prelapsarian vision (the Aboriginal stewardship of the land before European arrival). Her film is ultimately another in a series of distress signals for the world, with the hope that Australia doesn’t become a continent-sized Cassandra.BurningNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      Fehinti Balogun's Call to Action Unfolds Onstage at COP26

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      A filmed version of Fehinti Balogun’s play about his awakening to climate issues is being shown at the COP26 summit. He is among the theater artists trying to make a difference through their work.The actor Fehinti Balogun knows that theater can mobilize people toward climate action, because that’s what it did for him.Back in 2017, while preparing for a role in “Myth,” a climate parable, he began reading books about climate change and became alarmed by the unusually warm summer he was experiencing in England. The play itself called for him and the other actors to repeatedly run through the same mundane lines, to the point of absurdity, as their environment ruptured terrifyingly around them — the walls streaking with oil, the stove catching fire, the freezer oozing water.The whole experience changed his life, Balogun said. Suddenly, nothing seemed more important than addressing the global crisis. Not even landing the lead in a West End production (a long-coveted dream) of “The Importance of Being Earnest.” His growing anxiety made him feel as if he were living a real-world version of “Myth” in which society kept repeating the same old script even as the planet descended into chaos.“Knowing all that I did made me angry at the world for not doing anything,” the 26-year-old Balogun (“Dune,” “I May Destroy You”) said in a phone interview. “I didn’t get how we weren’t revolting.”That sense of urgency is what he said he hopes to pass along to audiences in “Can I Live?,” a new play that he wrote, stars in and created with the theater company Complicité. A filmed version of the piece, which also features supporting actors and musicians and was originally conceived as a live show, was screened Monday as part of COP26, the United Nations climate meeting in Glasgow. The resulting work is as innovative as any piece of theater to emerge during the Covid-19 era: Initially it appears to be just an intimate Zoom session with Balogun but evolves into an explosive mix of spoken word, animation, hip-hop and dialogue.Balogun in “Can I Live?,” which he conceived and wrote. The play, a mix of spoken word, animation, hip-hop and dialogue, can be streamed online through Nov. 12.David HewittThe hourlong production, which the Barbican Center has made available for streaming on its website through Nov. 12, combines scientific facts about how the greenhouse effect works with the story of Balogun’s own journey into the climate movement. It also focuses on the gap between the largely white mainstream environmental groups he joined, and the experiences of his primarily Black friends and family.Throughout the show, Balogun fields phone calls from family members about issues seemingly unrelated to the central thrust of the play, asking him when he’s going to get married or why he left a bag in the hallway at home. Though at first it seems as if they are interrupting Balogun’s primary narrative about “emissions, emissions, emissions,” as he sings at one point, their interjections hammer home one of his central ideas: If the movement isn’t willing to prioritize someone like his Nigerian grandma, it’s missing the point. Climate action, in other words, is for everyday people with everyday concerns.“The goal is to make grass-roots activism accessible, and to represent people of color and working-class people,” he said. To that end, he interweaves his own story with that of the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who campaigned against destructive oil extraction on behalf of his Ogoni people. “So often we don’t talk about the global South,” Balogun said. “We don’t talk about the communities who’ve been leading this fight for years.”Though Balogun is the only theater artist on the official COP26 schedule, he is certainly not the first playwright to grapple with climate themes. Climate Change Theater Action, an initiative of the nonprofit the Arctic Cycle, was created to encourage theater-making that might draw greater attention to COP21, the U.N. climate meeting in 2015 that resulted in the landmark Paris Agreement. (The theater group has never been officially affiliated with any of the annual COP meetings.)Since its inception, the group has produced 200 works that have been performed for 40,000 people in 30 countries, said its co-founder, Chantal Bilodeau. The organization commissions plays with environmental themes, paying the writers and then providing the scripts free to theater companies, schools or any other groups that want to stage readings or productions.The first year, Bilodeau said, they ended up with a “whole lot of depressing plays.” Now they try to steer playwrights away from dystopia and toward visions of a livable future, and encourage those staging the works to pair them with programming that helps audiences get a deeper understanding of the issues.Superhero Clubhouse’s after-school program, Big Green Theater, helps produce works focusing on climate issues. One such piece, “The Mystical Jungle and Luminescence City,” being filmed above, was written by fifth-grade students in Queens and is now on YouTube.Rachel Denise AprilLanxing Fu, co-director of the nonprofit Superhero Clubhouse in New York City, spends part of her time focused on those who will be most affected by a hotter planet: the next generation. Through Superhero Clubhouse’s after-school program Big Green Theater, run in collaboration with the Bushwick Starr and the Astoria Performing Arts Center, public elementary school students in Brooklyn and Queens are taught about climate issues and write plays in response to what they’re learning.Over a decade after the program began, Fu said that what is most striking about the students’ plays is how instinctively the young writers understand a basic truth about climate that evades a lot of adults: to find long-term solutions, we’ll need to work together.“A huge element of climate resilience is in the community we build and how we come together,” she said. “That’s always really present in their stories; it’s often part of the way that something gets resolved.”The Queens-based playwright and TV writer Dorothy Fortenberry also spends plenty of time thinking about children’s roles in the movement. Her play “The Lotus Paradox,” which will have its world premiere in January at the Warehouse Theater in Greenville, S.C., asks, What happens when children are constantly receiving the message that it’s their job to save the world? Like much of Fortenberry’s work in TV (she’s a writer on “The Handmaid’s Tale”), “The Lotus Paradox” includes the subject of climate change without making it the singular focus of the story.From left, the actors DeBryant Johnson, Jason D. Johnson and Dayanari Umana during a workshop for “The Lotus Paradox,” which debuts in January at the Warehouse Theater in Greenville, S.C.Andrew Huang“If you’re making a story about anything, in any place, and you don’t have climate change in it, that’s a science-fiction story,” she said. “You have made a choice to make the story less realistic than it would have been otherwise.”That’s a sentiment also shared by Anaïs Mitchell, the musician and writer of the musical “Hadestown,” which reopened on Broadway in September. In her retelling of Greek mythology, Hades is portrayed in song as a greedy “king of oil and coal” who fuels his industrialized hell of an underworld with the “fossils of the dead.” Aboveground, the lead characters, Orpheus and Eurydice, endure food scarcity and brutal weather that’s “either blazing hot or freezing cold,” a framing that was inspired by headlines about climate refugees.It’s worth intentionally wrestling with climate narratives in the theater, not just because they make plays more believable, Mitchell said, but also because theater might just be one of best tools for handling such themes. Like Orpheus trying to put things right with a song that shows “how the world could be, in spite of the way that it is,” Mitchell sees theater as a powerful tool for helping us imagine our way into a better future.“Theater is capable of opening our hearts and our eyes to an alternate reality than the one we’re living in,” she said.That’s why Balogun — though he remarks more than once in “Can I Live?” that he’s “not a scientist” — said he believes he has just as crucial a role to play as any climatologist. “Scientists are begging for artists and theater makers to help deliver this message,” he said. “And there’s a need for it now more than ever.” More