STAGING THE CLIMATE CRISIS - A conversation with Molly Anne Sweeney

I'm Molly Anini. I'm a playwright, a theater facilitator, and I co-run a theater company called Wise Ram Theater. Sophia Bagay is my colleague and we both run the company. So I do a lot of admin at the last minute. I've written our first production, 'Decommissioned.' I'm at the beginning process of co-writing a new project with Sophia, which is inspired by the Victorian poem 'Goblin Market' about food and the climate crisis. We also run workshops that we run together, so we run regular workshops at the Glitch in Waterloo and also workshops in the community with children, young people, and students at universities about climate theater.

We started running these workshops at the Glitch in September 2022, I think, exploring different aspects of climate theater. We've had workshops about design, sustainable production, characters. Today's workshop was about how we visually represent the climate crisis and the idea of a climate aesthetic or an environmental aesthetic, and the ways we tell stories using pictures. I'm a writer, so I often do writing-focused workshops, but we also do ones that are really playful and use a lot of games. We've had a drama game called Zip, Zap, Boing where you throw a ball of energy around the room, an invisible ball, and we do that but using climate terms. We've done a game where we adapted different projects, like the 'Fast and the Furious' movies, which are about road racing, and people adapted those so that all the characters were on bikes instead of cars. So we do all sorts of random stuff, but basically every month people can come to Waterloo and they don't have to be professional theater makers or climate activists; they just have to be interested in the ideas.

We've had really interesting people. We've had some people who are just vaguely interested in theater. We had one person who was a photographer really interested in getting involved in climate photography, and he walked in and we were playing a drama game, and he looked a little bit like he wanted to walk out, but he got around to it in the end. We've had some climate theater makers who are doing really amazing, inspiring work, or people who think—someone came who taught Sophia on her master's, so that was great and lovely. We tend to have a mixture of people making fringe theater and people who are sort of interested in it from a professional point of view in terms of their climate work. So we've had someone from the local council, from local government, come and talk about wanting to use theater to communicate about climate change. I think that's something we really love about it. We often think in terms of marketing it might be better if it was aimed at writers or theater makers, but instead we just like that it's for everyone.

I don't want to speak for Sophia, but it feels like we weren't people who were like climate activists at all before this process. We didn't know that the theater company was going to be a climate theater company when we were talking about setting it up. So we definitely don't come from a point of view of people who know everything or were inspired to be activists from an early age. It's more that through making the show we started to learn more about things, become more aware, and also slightly out of a sense of embarrassment to begin with. Certainly from my side, for our early work-in-progress performance of 'Decommissioned,' I bought two items of set from IKEA that were very cheap, just two very cheap IKEA stools, and I thought, 'Oh God, I'm doing a play about climate change and I've just done that.' So I ended up thinking we should think more about sustainability. I still have and use those stools, and we have used them in other versions of the production, like they're talismans. But I think there is a real benefit to that because we're very open and relaxed and willing to hear people at the beginning of their journey, and we can talk about going on a journey of sustainability. When we tell climate stories, when we make climate theater, we start from a place of curiosity and playfulness, wanting to try out all sorts of different stories and write a romantic comedy or a thriller or something really weird and funny and slightly out there, rather than focusing on a message, which is harder to engage with.

This is interesting. Generally, I think there's often a lot of enthusiasm, there is a lot of desire to program theater about climate change, but we have also had people say, 'Well, I don't think that's of interest.' No one has said it's because it's about climate change. Maybe it's because the play we're touring is for young adults, people in their 20s, and that isn't always of interest to theater programmers in different parts of the country, which makes sense. It's a relatively smaller scale show, so there are those kinds of things. So I couldn't say they didn't want to get away with your climate change nonsense. I think often there's a lot of ideas that climate work is for children, and that's a real sense of that. Often a lot of the work you see is child-focused, very often for young ages about recycling, really lovely beautiful stories. And we kind of want to make work that doesn't—we feel like that audience is really well served, especially the under-sevens. So we're kind of wanting to make a fantasy story about climate change that is a bit more out there and not so obviously moralistic. I think there's something there that people tend to have an idea of what a climate story is, climate theater is something really earnest and worthy, something that's very—maybe you're going to go home and feel really bad about yourself. And people are often surprised at how funny it is. I mean, I'm talking about my own play, but I've heard people say, 'I'm so surprised how funny it is and how many slightly stupid jokes there are and how many things there are that you're getting swept along with the story and the jokes and the romance rather than sitting down and having the IPCC report read out.'

One thing we did with the play 'Decommissioned' is it opens with a character who is a teacher teaching a class of ten-year-olds about climate change. I chose that—it's a long story of how it began with that opening—but I think I was very anxious about the idea of an audience being told off or lectured, so I begin with an audience being lectured and told off by a teacher because it immediately plays with the fact that you're in that zone. So the audience is cast as children who are misbehaving, suddenly in this world where they have to hear these facts about how to prepare for a flood. So that was one thing we brought in. And then also there is a couple: a woman who is a climate activist and researcher, and her partner who is a teacher and works with children, and they're kind of battling over how best to interact with and communicate about the climate crisis, and what's the most effective way. She's a very committed character who gets very—she doesn't drive even though they live in a rural area, and he does, so there's a kind of tension between that. But I think their relationship was the beginning; they have a big argument about climate change, but it's actually about their relationship, so you're always putting it in the situation. And I suppose there's also jokes based on your own experience. You might have heard of the book 'The Uninhabitable Earth,' which begins with 'It is worse, much worse, than you think,' and that's as cheerful as it gets. One of the main characters, Gwen, who's a climate activist, wants to lend that book to a ten-year-old boy, so playing with those kinds of things. So that's a very long answer, but to sum it up, I would say that being a human is about making jokes and being silly or stupid or making mistakes and laughing at them and being laughed at and playing around. And climate change is about humans, so you can't not have those things in there.

I think having a space for people to be playful or make mistakes or try out different ideas, and we'd really love it if there were just a few ideas that went forward, and maybe for all sorts of different people who do theater professionally or as a hobby just to bring a little bit of climate in. Rather than only talking to all the people who are making the climate show, it's the idea that you would just bring a little bit of that into your work, or maybe you're just thinking that way. So beginning to really just share ideas and meet people. We've met so many interesting people who are making such great work, and I do find them really fun. I think we both find them really fun.

Travel to London from wherever you are was very important. I would say follow the things that you really like and are really interested in. So if you want to make a climate show but you're someone who really loves absurdist theater, make that. If you're an anime person, make an anime about climate change. Or if you're a romantic comedy person and it's about two Arctic researchers who fall in love over disagreements, definitely don't hold back from the things that you really love as a creator because it's about climate change. And yeah, tell the story you really want to tell that is about the things you love rather than thinking it has to be serious or dark or grown up. Thank you very much.