The Entire World in One Body

For the last couple of decades, I have been asking myself: How do you put a community on stage? How do you convey interconnectedness and reciprocity? How do you show that individual happiness, health, and resilience are functions of community? In our hyper-individualistic society, it is easy to focus inward and forget that we are mere nodes in an intricate, living, breathing web of relationships.

One approach might involve working directly with communities and having them perform their own stories, as Cornerstone Theater Company often does with great success. Another is to have casts large enough to represent a community. A recent, beautiful example of this is Abe Koogler’s Deep Blue Sounds, produced by Clubbed Thumb, which dramatizes the struggles of a Pacific Northwest island community. But given the economics of producing theatre in the United States, only the rare few companies can afford such huge undertakings.

How about using the magic of theatre to hold the entire world in one body?

In addition, when I say “community,” I mean more than just us humans. In a community, at least the way I understand it, there are all kinds of beings and entities, all kinds of forces and spirits, all kinds of overlapping systems that are definitely not people yet contribute, maybe to a greater extent than we do, to the shape and feeling and function of what we call “community.” I want these more-than-human presences on stage too. I want them represented and acknowledged. Loved and honored. I want to explore and understand how we can be better—not just a little better but hugely better, existentially better—at taking care of each other.

Since cast size is often prohibitive, many artists take up this challenge by going in the opposite direction. Can’t have ten to twelve actors and elaborate puppets? Then how about one actor? How about using the magic of theatre to hold the entire world in one body?

Love them or hate them, solo performances have been around for a long time. When I look back at the ones I have seen over the years, several stand out: Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, Nilaja Sun’s No Child…, Derek Delgaudio’s In & Of Itself [sic], Silvia Milo’s The Other Mozart, Heidi Shrek’s What the Constitution Means to Me (I know, it has a second actor but at its heart it’s really a solo performance). I have always loved the tour de force involved in a single performer carrying an entire show, often creating elaborate worlds and playing multiple characters. I also appreciate the vulnerability of the creators who write and sometimes perform these deeply personal shows, even opting to break the fourth wall to give more of themselves to the audience.

I am not a performer—I would be terrified to make myself that vulnerable. Still, a few years ago, after writing two plays that relied on large casts to bring a community of humans and more-than-humans to life, I decided to give myself the challenge of writing a solo performance (for someone else to perform). I suspected that this paring down would allow me to access something more personal. In a way, I wanted to get smaller in order to go bigger.

No More Harveys premiered at Cyrano’s Theatre Company in Anchorage, Alaska in 2022. It is the third play in my Arctic Cycle—a series of eight plays that look at the social and environmental changes facing the eight Arctic countries. It features a woman on a journey from New York to Alaska who is trying to work out the difference between fleeing and migrating, between being a victim and a survivor. We don’t know her name—only that it is not Renee—but we do know that her world is full of Harveys: hurricanes, Hollywood producers, husbands, and others, all of whom are untrustworthy and extremely dangerous.

Not-Renee is a specific woman, but she is also every woman who has ever suffered physical or emotional abuse. According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, more than one in three women in the United States experience physical violence, and nearly half experience psychological aggression. In addition, Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network, International states that “women are disproportionately impacted by climate change and environmental degradation, and Indigenous women, women of color, women from low-income communities bear a heavier burden from the impacts of climate change.” Born out of these chilling statistics, Not-Renee is caught in a patriarchal system that denies her the right to safety and equality. She, like the climate crisis, is another symptom of blatant, systemic, and unchecked abuse of people and resources at the hands of power-hungry billionaires. But Not-Renee has something that cannot be taken away from her: a whale. “The whale from fifty million years ago,” as she calls her, is guiding her on her journey:

 … whales used to be land animals. Fifty million years ago, they had four legs and huge teeth. Then the ice sheets melted, the oceans rose, and when it became clear there wasn’t going to be enough land for everyone, the big mamas were like: 'We’re outta here.' And they migrated. To the ocean! How’s that for a winning strategy? 'Shrink those legs and grow some fins, bitches! We’re diving in!'

Solo performances are great at embodying our current fractured age because they are, by default, singular and plural, the one body standing in for a community, an ecosystem, a species.

To Not-Renee, the whale is the perfect spiritual guide: imposing, confident, but also loving and connected to her pod. She longs for the whale’s pluck and adaptation skills, which have allowed her not only to survive but to thrive despite the massive changes that have reshaped our planet over the last fifty million years.

Throughout the play, Not-Renee is almost always herself in the sense that she doesn’t embody other characters for more than a couple of lines. But she does switch back and forth between three realities: the theatre, where she is talking to the audience; the road between New York and Alaska—her physical journey; and her imagination, where she tries to work out how one can survive the destructive power of the Harveys. (I was in touch with someone from the creative team recently, and we reflected on how in 2022, when the play premiered, we felt that perhaps we had reached peak Harveys. Little did we know…) In each reality, Not-Renee evokes entire worlds full of sensory stimuli. In the theatre, storytelling equals connection and salvation. When she is on the road, danger lurks in every corner, though chance encounters sometimes prove transformative, and nature is a balm. When she retreats to her imagination and enters the mysterious underwater world of the whale, foreign sensations envelop her body and mind.

Solo performances are great at embodying our current fractured age because they are, by default, singular and plural, the one body standing in for a community, an ecosystem, a species. With no one else to physically share the stage with, the body becomes the holder of stories that are beyond its own, yet intersect, inform, and are informed by the individual’s story. On a metaphysical level, solo performances also dramatize the fact that a body contains the essence of most of what exists in the universe: water, basic chemical elements, and a high percentage of DNA (98.8 percent in the case of chimpanzees) that is shared with animals and plants. If one chooses to capitalize on this, the very form is already half of the story.

At various points in No More Harveys, Not-Renee switches between standing in for herself and standing in for the collective. For example, at a bus depot she notices that:

A woman with an infant and a toddler
is trying to manage her suitcase
a double stroller
a diaper bag
a purse
her phone
rebel hair
her mask
the toddler taking off his shoes
and eating ice cream off the floor
the infant scratching her face
while she is breastfeeding
stares from strangers
racial injustice
economic disparity
and her patience

A slice of America

An America where not every life is worth the same
where one gender is worth more than the others
where one race is worth more than the others
where one sexual orientation is better than the others
where good health is reserved for the few
where good education is reserved for the few
where disasters affect some more than others

In that moment, Not-Renee’s identity is subjugated and she is society observing itself. But a few beats later, the roles are reversed: she is abruptly pulled back into her individual identity and becomes the observed as a man directs unwelcomed attention towards her. In that short scene, she is both the predator and the prey.

Not-Renee’s relationship with the whale is another example of this interplay between the singular and the plural. While the actor never “plays” the character of the whale, she often inhabits her world, adopting the slow, fluid movements of her underwater queendom. In those moments, Not-Renee is in a state of awe, observing the whale and telling us her story, while at the same time embodying the whale who is herself standing for her entire species.

Ultimately, it takes crossing the entire country from East to West by bus, car, and ferry, experiencing a painful loss, and reuniting with the whale from fifty million years ago for Not-Renee to truly grasp the difference between fleeing and migrating. Early in the play, she is given a definition by her friend Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, that confuses her: “Migrating is a voluntary movement, a strategy that involves a destination, a vision of the future. Fleeing means to run away.” But what if one doesn’t have a destination or a vision of the future? What then? When she finally reaches Alaska and is able to connect with the whale and glimpse the world from her perspective, it suddenly clicks:

And, and
maybe it’s because of my unblinking eye
but suddenly the path is so clear!
When you travel such long distances
you don’t sweat the detours
or the current
You don’t count the minutes
or the seasons
You stay the course
Because even though you can’t see where you’re going
you know it’s there
You’re not fleeing, you’re migrating
You’re fighting for what you need to survive
And yes, maybe the vision is not entirely clear
yet
But there is a destination
And if you don’t arrive
the next generation will
or the next one
or the next one

Though the play predates current events, re-reading it now, I hear it as a renewed call to action. Despite the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) being gutted and the National Endowment for the Arts being under attack, we must continue to engage in what The Good Ancestor’s author Roman Krznaric calls “cathedral thinking.” Like our ancestors before us, who readily embarked on projects that wouldn’t be completed in their lifetime, such as the building of a cathedral, we must trust the value of investing in causes that extend beyond our lives. Because even if we don’t arrive at our destination, the next generation will. Or the next one.

I probably could have written the same play, or a very similar one, for multiple actors. I could have put the same community on stage that way. But I would have lost some of the magic. Not-Renee would be just an ordinary, socially awkward woman having psychotic episodes. Her connection to the world around her would be more mundane. With a single performer, the poetry is heightened and audiences have more room to co-create the story using their own imaginations.

We humans are so much more than we know or remember on most days.

For this Spring 2025 installment of the Theatre in the Age of Climate Change series, I wanted to hear from other artists who have also created solo performances about ecological issues. I was curious about how they approached their work and what inspired them. I am delighted to introduce four of them, all extraordinary performance makers, who drew from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds to tell their stories.

First, multidisciplinary artist Cara Hagan writes about LOAM, an exploration of time and movement through a lens of nature cycles that sets the stage for a journey into slowness and ritual. Next, Mexican interdisciplinary artist Marco Guagnelli writes about his concept of “the body as home” and the development of a performance piece titled Plantman, which involves wearing a full-body suit covered in live plants. Third, Australian physical theatre artist Jacinta Yelland reflects on the journey that led to the creation of KOAL, a climate catastrophe clown show that brings to the stage the often silenced or overlooked perspectives of the natural world. And finally, Evan Silver, also known as Tiresias, discusses the development of cryptochrome, a sonic odyssey across the animal kingdom that invites audiences to imagine themselves in the sensory worlds of other living things.

We humans are so much more than we know or remember on most days. We forget that for every choice we make, billions of unexplored possibilities continue to swirl in the ether. Perhaps our bodies are the vessels that allow these possibilities to manifest and crystalize. Perhaps it is no coincidence that we have this amazing ability to hold worlds in our bodies, to hold the entire world in one body. Now, what we do to and with it is up to us.

Let’s build that cathedral.