Grief (and Humor) in Climate Change Theatre

I make my living in the theatre and care about the environment, yet I have often found myself shrinking away from plays about climate change that were too intellectual, too heavy-handed. There wasn't any body in them. There was no permission to laugh. When I would watch a play about climate change, I might learn new information, but I wouldn't feel anything. That can't be good! So, I asked myself, how do you write a funny climate change play? Can you write a play about our planet that makes space for big feelings like grief? And can that play inspire any kind of collective action?

It was clear to me what environmental issue I would write about well before I ever put pen to paper. As a non-binary queer white person from the rural Midwestern United States, I wanted to present the many sides to a complex and systemic climate disaster facing my home, one that I saw no other theatre talking about: harmful algal blooms.

My play Bloom Bloom Pow celebrates queer joy and connection in the face of climate devastation as a twenty-something genderqueer protagonist attempts to hold the pieces of their life together in an increasingly chaotic world. Returning to their small rural Ohio hometown, they find an underwhelming queer scene, an overwhelming mother, childhood friends turned small-town farmers, and chatty coworkers being swallowed by late-stage capitalism. Beneath the spiraling human storylines, an ancient being rises from the deep to take its rightful place as the next inheritor of the Earth.

Algal blooms are not a sexy example of climate change, so they don’t often get a lot of attention beyond the local news. But they’re in bodies of water all over the globe. Algal blooms, scientifically called cyanobacteria, are not actually algae. They look like neon green soup on the surface of the lake, or Nickelodeon slime of 1990s television nostalgia. They’re bacterial microorganisms that were the first creatures to figure out how to use sunlight to create oxygen about 3.5 billion years ago (we think). Thanks to algal blooms/cyanobacteria, we humans can breathe and therefore exist on this planet.

Cyanobacteria feed on phosphorus and nitrogen, which are commonly found in fertilizers. When they get an excess of these nutrients (from factory farms and city waste), algal blooms become toxic to humans and most animals. Touching or drinking water with blooms in it can kill you. But algal blooms are not inherently malicious; in fact, cyanobacteria are wholly unconcerned with humanity. Millions of people in the Midwestern United States rely on the Great Lakes for our drinking water, yet we’re also over-feeding these blooms, creating a massive problem for ourselves and the Great Lakes ecosystem. The blooms feast on our pollution.

The hope is that by having the experience of collectively sitting with these big feelings, we're more ready to collectively act.

Growing up in the rural Midwestern United States, and now living in New York for the last eight years, I also haven’t seen a lot of plays that speak to the concerns of family farmers without categorizing these folks as stereotypically conservative “hicks.” This frustrates me, because I know small farmers, and they’re not a monolith. It’s a disservice to speak down to any population because we are all connected in this climate crisis. The character of Floyd in Bloom Bloom Pow is my attempt to present the kind of complex, soft, thoughtful man that you will meet in every small Midwestern town. A man thinking about the legacy of his father, the weighty grief of inheriting land at a time of climate collapse, and a man more quietly open to queerness than most narratives paint rural working-class people to be. It was important to me to not simply focus on how climate change hurts urban populations. In writing and researching for the play, I spoke with small town farmers who laid plain the complexity of this climate disaster and made clear that any solution will have to involve working together.

Bloom Bloom Pow is not explicitly political or didactic. My goal was for audiences to be able to grasp the complexity and damage that's happening to the Great Lakes on a massive scale. For ninety minutes in a theatre, the play gives them space to sit with something most of us spend huge energy ignoring just to get through a regular day. The hope is that by having the experience of collectively sitting with these big feelings, we're more ready to collectively act.

I’m not an activist, a scientist, or an expert in the study of harmful algal blooms. What I am an expert in, though, is describing how it feels to exist at a time of great destruction, great change, and great possibility. I am both expert and novice in complicated grief, through ripple effects.

First ripple: the personal. In 2018, my family was in a near fatal car accident. The truest thing I can say is “my mother died but she didn’t die.” We entered a several-year period of reliving the traumatic event and the way it reverberated through every major relationship in my life. My understanding of linear time was blown apart. Time became a circular track, with a terrifying point we returned to again and again. Sometimes the circle was tiny, and we spun around it in minutes. Sometimes the track took months to run, but we always seemed to return to this hellish still-point, the accident, the inciting incident, the moment when one life died and another life began. I needed to write a story that captured this impossible, contradictory grief. A story that focused on how it feels to exist in this way, not on what is literally happening.

Second ripple: the political. In 2014, a harmful algal bloom rose from the bottom of Lake Erie and grew directly over the pipes which the greater Toledo, Ohio area uses to deliver fresh drinking water. For several days that summer, over four hundred thousand people were without access to safe water. The city alerted people not to drink the contaminated water, not to bathe in it, make baby formula with it, or give it to your dogs. Most ominous of all was an alert that “boiling the algal blooms only makes them stronger.”

The Dead Horse is a kind of guide who helps living human beings in the audience see themselves as part of a narrative of this planet that is longer than the Anthropocene era.

As a writer, I was immediately drawn to the drama of these alerts and of this seemingly villainous character of the Algal Bloom. However, it soon became clear that there are no clear villains in a story that pits rural farmers against urban pollutants—least of all the algal blooms themselves, which are both billions of years old and also recreating more of themselves every second, and which could literally not care less about what humans do.

I wrote the first pages of Bloom Bloom Pow in early 2019, and a group of generous actors read those early pages aloud in a windowless rehearsal room at Simple Studios in Manhattan. Those forty pages were the first sign that this piece spoke to a kind of collective grief, to feelings our English language doesn’t have words for, but that our bodies carry and recognize in each other. One of the actors suggested this theme somewhat casually, and their insight validated the connection between the car accident, the large-scale growth and decay of algal blooms in the Great Lakes, the panicked despair of working in late-stage capitalism, and visions of creatures and dead horses rising from the water with warnings.

There is a crowd-favorite character in the play called A Dead Horse At The Bottom Of The East River In New York City Circa 1832. If Bloom Bloom Pow has a narrator, the Dead Horse is as close as we get, but the Dead Horse is really there as a foil to the rest of the action. Unlike the other characters, the Dead Horse talks directly to the audience; they immediately see and recognize us as their kin. The Dead Horse is a kind of guide who helps living human beings in the audience see themselves as part of a narrative of this planet that is longer than the Anthropocene era.

As we did further readings and workshops of the script through 2020 and 2021, it also became clear that the play was stubbornly hilarious. It’s the kind of humor that surprises you, perhaps inappropriate, like laughing at a funeral or farting during sex. The kind of humor that is alive, and messy. After all, we do laugh at the funeral. There’s no singular way to behave in the face of loss.

The show leaned into humor as catharsis. Most of all I wanted to give audiences the chance to laugh in a room full of people whose bodies are carrying the anxiety and grief and impending-doom-feeling of being alive at the (potential) end of the Anthropocene.

It turns out it’s very easy to make a climate change play funny. You just lean into the absurdity of existing on our planet at this moment. Release the realism and go with how it feels to be alive on any given Tuesday.

The visceral quality of Bloom Bloom Pow became the fulcrum point that allowed us to swing wildly from grief to humor and back. The play is a celebration of liquids: the many bodies of water on our planet (lakes, rivers, oceans) and the oozing, gushing, bleeding, burping, sobbing, sneezing, drooling liquids of our own human bodies. Bloom Bloom Pow revels in the similarities between our human bodies and the bodies of water on this planet. Making the story as visceral as possible brought a playfulness, a delight, a horror, and a sensuality to an otherwise heady, scientific topic.

In this way, everyone onstage was complicit and connected. No one can say “I’m not the problem,” nor can one person claim to have the solution.

It is also no accident that Bloom Bloom Pow is a massively queer play. The queerness of the story is not just found in its structure, which explodes out of linear understanding into cycles, loops, and waves. Nor is it only in the identities of many of the characters, or the circumstances of the plot. The play attempts to queer our understanding of life and death itself—to dismantle the false binary of Being Alive versus Being Dead, to consider growth and decay in more complicated, joyful terms.

Grief, like life, is not linear. It’s fluid, it’s wet, it’s surprising, it’s sometimes horny, it makes mistakes, it swallows us, it makes us more deeply understand being alive. What happens when we make space for complicated grief? What happens when we have permission to sit with feelings and not have answers?

Bloom Bloom Pow asks more questions than offers answers. I don’t claim to have answers for how we rectify the harm our species has done to our planet, but I do think we build a better world by trying to solve problems together. In the world premiere production in 2022, the creative team built this belief into the world of the play by having the ensemble of actors create the worlds they played in from found objects around the space. (These thousands of trash-like objects were largely sourced from the wonderful Materials for the Arts, NYC’s Creative Reuse Center.) Not only did the actors move furniture and lights around the space, but they also used the many objects to create live foley sound onstage for each other so that the entire experience was embodied by everyone. In this way, everyone onstage was complicit and connected. No one can say “I’m not the problem,” nor can one person claim to have the solution.

The hope, from the play’s first reading to our world premiere production, was that in making space for some of that grief, in allowing people to sit with the massive scale of what human beings are doing to this planet’s ecosystems in the company of strangers and friends, we might find some release from our climate paralysis. Grief must be felt and cannot be carried alone. It is an isolating experience and the one thing that all of us have in common: one day we will die, and the people we love will die, too.

In my experience, grief made me feel deeply, viscerally alive. The experience of Bloom Bloom Pow reminds us to celebrate living, to connect more deeply, to care more fully, to see ourselves as a small part of a much larger story, and to begin to act more consciously as a connected part of the larger whole.