The Making of Things We Will Miss: Meditations on the Climate Crisis

A collage-style devised work exploring the (potential) collapse of the Anthropocene, Things We Will Miss explores the beauty and inevitability of impermanence. Born from the debris of late-stage capitalism and rooted in an intergenerational examination of the bonds between a teacher and her students, the piece features actors playing multiple characters including an amateur astronomer, a park ranger, mythological prophet Cassandra, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and, ultimately, themselves. Driven by image, light, and sound, as well as the ways experience is communicated through the body, Things We Will Miss viscerally explores the grief and beauty, the horror and hope inherent in being alive in this very moment. It premiered at the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, produced by square product theatre, the Boulder, Colorado-based theatre company for which I serve as producing artistic director.

I’ve been making and producing devised work for about two decades and have taught at colleges and universities both in the United States and internationally since 2007. I am currently an assistant professor of theatre at Hamilton College in upstate New York, but during the 2021-22 academic year I served as a visiting assistant professor at Sewanee: The University of the South, where, with the encouragement of then chair Jennifer Matthews, I developed and taught the department’s first course on devising. Though only four students enrolled in the class, we spent the semester learning and practicing different methodologies for making new work collaboratively.

The last third of the semester was dedicated to a final piece created on a theme the students chose: the climate crisis. I admit that I was initially dismayed by their choice. I feared it would be challenging to speak meaningfully about a subject so complex and enormous in the short time we had left together. I worried that we would struggle to distill our thoughts and anxieties into something we could reasonably share with an audience. The class would be a failure, and the failure would be mine. My students would walk away having gotten nothing out of the class, and it would be all my fault because I didn’t know how to approach such an emotional topic with them or even teach devising to begin with—what was I thinking?

I learned in the coming weeks, as I have many times over the course of my time teaching, that I should never underestimate my students or myself.

We got to work. We developed and workshopped material that I cobbled together into a performance score that we then shared publicly. As the academic year came to a close and I returned to Colorado, I couldn’t get the piece out of my head.

I started writing grant proposals and building a creative team. I invited two of the students from Sewanee, Nathaniel Klein and Emma Miller, to continue collaborating on the piece. We were joined by my former students and frequent collaborators from the University of Colorado Boulder, designer Jess Buttery and stage manager Rosie Glasscock; current students from Hamilton College, Juliet Davidson, Del Gonzales, and Irmak Sağir; and a young actor I had worked with the year prior, Savanna Arellano, who is a former student of Jess’s from the Denver School of the Arts. Though we created the piece together, I took on the roles of head writer and director because of my experience operating in devising spaces and because the piece originated in a course I taught. My choice to assemble a team comprised entirely of current and former students (with one grandstudent thrown in for good measure) was not intentional. I offered slots to a few young artists who I had never collaborated with before, none of whom were able to commit to the project. Ultimately, our relationships became the structural underpinning of the piece itself, and the show became, in part, a dialogue between a teacher and her students.

My role as “teacher” inevitably bled over into the process. While I teach in a way that is less hierarchical than many university spaces, I’m still their professor. I’m the “subject area expert” and the person in control of their final grade. In much of their training, questioning professors and directors is not just discouraged; it’s unthinkable. I encourage my students to point out contradictions and hypocrisies, although I, like most people, don’t always love being confronted with my own. In my classes, I have regular opportunities to model sitting with that discomfort, and it’s a privilege I don’t take lightly. For Things We Will Miss, I invited these particular artists to work with me in part because I knew that they would push me. I believed that they respected me enough to hear my perspective, to trust me as their director and co-creator, and to challenge me when they felt I was missing something. They very much understood the assignment, in this respect.

Ultimately, our relationships became the structural underpinning of the piece itself, and the show became, in part, a dialogue between a teacher and her students.

We began working over Zoom, sharing thoughts and research—bits of text, sounds, images. We read the book of Revelation; we listened to Sufjan Stevens’s Convocations; we read the thirty-six-page synthesis report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change’s sixth assessment report. We watched gameplay of Oil Barons on YouTube and read works focused on climate world building intended to give us hope that it’s not, as Rebecca Solnit insists, “too late.” We staged our own deaths as a result of consequences of climate change: drownings, wildfires, resource scarcity.

Then, we spent the summer of 2023 in Boulder developing material on our feet. Two performers were for a time uncomfortable with a section called “The End of the World Dance Party,” a short improvisational movement piece using a collaboratively created and refined gestural vocabulary. They were frustrated by my assertion as director that all we needed for the moment to be effective was bodies in space, performers committed to a simple but thorough exploration of both gesture and architecture. They didn’t believe it could be interesting enough, that they could be interesting enough. This was not the sort of work that traditional scene study had prepared them for. Stripped of text, they became vulnerable, but this also made it possible for them to be known by different means. That was scary. I, along with their castmates, convinced them to try, and we rehearsed, and they gained confidence. They performed “The End of the World Dance Party” every night, and every night it was new and different and undeniably beautiful and compelling.

As we created the script, a few members of the team approached me with concerns about the material’s lack of hope. They feared that the piece had gotten bogged down in the doom of it all and suggested we explore ways to incorporate a more hopeful perspective. Ultimately, we committed to injecting some levity, and two team members wrote an epilogue rooted in a vision of a more hopeful future. I admit their concerns initially annoyed me—I wasn’t feeling especially hopeful, personally. But when they expressed their overwhelming need to simply have hope for the future—a future they have no choice but to meet—I realized I was wrong to dismiss their legitimate anxieties. They wanted to make something that included a glimmer of hope, and who was I to tell them that couldn’t make for good theatre?

I had not intended to perform in the piece. However, in part because of these challenging moments in the collaborative process, the work became a dialogue between the younger performers and me. So I performed as myself while running sound and projection from a position adjacent to the audience. Structurally, the piece resembled a metatheatrical version of my devising classroom or rehearsal process. I asked questions, got to know the performers, and gave off-the-cuff instructions for the task at hand (“Places please for a moment of prophesy, places please for a moment of prophecy, a la Greek tragedy: enter Cassandra”).

They wanted to make something that included a glimmer of hope, and who was I to tell them that couldn’t make for good theatre?

Things We Will Miss includes a game of Truth or Dare, prompting musings on legacy, our roles as makers, and what we owe each other and our communities, all interspersed with “the show”—the disparate works we’d created together that reflected on these themes. In an early moment, the performers grow frustrated by a feeling of not knowing “what to do.” They disrupt the piece and turn to me, asking that I help solve this growing crisis. This desperate inquiry into mitigating the climate crisis subtly mirrors my management of the space, which at times feels unstructured and thus frustrating. Nobody knows “what to do,” not even the “adult” in the room. In a moment of both panic and irritation, my “character” quickly thumbs through the script, and instructs them to skip ahead to the “End of the World Dance Party.”

That scene plants a seed, and the play builds to a moment in which I have less control. While they follow “the script” dutifully for a while, a moment of carefully choreographed chaos erupts. They start recycling snippets from earlier moments in the play, like malfunctioning robots glitching out in a theatrical wasteland not of their own making. Finally, as I struggle to find a way to bring them back on track, one of them snaps and presents me with a complex question: “Truth or Dare?” I hesitate, then blurt out “Truth,” at which point they level at me a barrage of questions about the why of it all. This forces perhaps the most vulnerable and true “acting” I have ever done in live performance. I relinquish control—I confess to them that I am just as terrified and overwhelmed by these problems as they are, that I don’t have “an answer” most of the time.

I admit that my desire to make something that explores these issues is probably pointless and futile, but that I wanted to make it anyway, and I wanted to make it with them.

The tension of the moment is broken by another performer saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a professor cry before. This is jarring,” at which point they pile on, ribbing me relentlessly—also a very real reflection of my experience working with them. In this moment of vulnerability and discomfort, we see each other. It is my hope that the audience witnesses us seeing each other, recognizes a torch is being passed. When I call places for the epilogue, they’re already there—they’ve found their light. They don’t need me to tell them what to do anymore.

I admit that my desire to make something that explores these issues is probably pointless and futile, but that I wanted to make it anyway, and I wanted to make it with them.

In July, we presented a fully realized workshop production that ran for three weeks in Boulder. There were no scenic elements, save for flowers intuitively arranged and placed around the perimeter of the space, held in place by the existing architecture—a sort of collection of Ikebana arrangements that echoed the wabi-sabi vibe of the show. Projections on the black back wall added an element of surprise for the audience, and in addition to traditional theatrical lighting, we used simple but evocative handheld lighting and light sources embedded in costumes. Audience response was overwhelmingly positive. Many older audience members expressed grief about the legacy they’re leaving for younger generations. Several openly wept and spoke to us about how guilty they feel at not having done more to stop climate change, while also expressing gratitude for our willingness to tackle the subject and express our own grief, fears, and hopes for the future.

I, too, was moved by our collaboration, by what we managed to make together and the ways we allowed ourselves to see and be seen. I gauged the team’s interest in a month of continued in-person development in residence at Hamilton College and then a premiere at the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Juliet, Savanna, and Rosie were unable to continue with the project due primarily to geography and work obligations, and they were replaced by Chanel Karimkhani, a New York-based Equity actor and former student of mine; as well as Leslie De La Rosa and Mer Morales, at the time both rising seniors at Hamilton. Incorporating more students into the work opened up additional funding opportunities, and I’m happy to say that even the students working on the piece were paid a professional wage and earned their first professional credits.

Old and new members of the team met on Zoom to discuss additional research and changes we might like to make as we got the piece back up on its feet. We convened on the Hamilton College campus for rehearsal in July 2024, working for four weeks to update the script and staging. We incorporated new elements of physical research—some of it led by performer Del Gonzales, who had just returned from studying abroad at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and was newly energized about the potential of the piece—that made the piece feel more alive and embodied. We adjusted some parameters for the improvisational moments, like “The End of the World Dance Party,” and ultimately cut the run time down from seventy-five to sixty minutes to make the piece more “Fringe friendly.”

In Edinburgh we played to mostly rapt audiences in the single or low double digits, with our largest audience coming in at a whopping twenty-six. We performed the piece for fourteen days in a row in a theatre that presented us with many challenges, including no cooling elements save for a dusty standing fan that artists would turn on between performance slots. Despite the sweat, despite the frustration, we had a blast. We returned home and performed the piece to two full houses on the Hamilton College campus, where the response was again positive. Recently we shared the work in New York City as part of PhysFestNYC 2026. Juliet, who is back in New York after a stint in Chicago, resumed her role, and a new member of the team came on board—Jules Henderson, a Hamilton senior studying both theatre and computer science, served as a technical and creative assistant. We got the show back up with just ten hours of rehearsal, making slight adjustments to the text and staging, staying open to what could happen. It was as beautiful as ever.

What we created and shared stands as one of the most meaningful creative experiences of my life, largely because the entire creative team was comprised of current and former students from three separate institutions, ranging in age from twenty to thirty-six. Bringing them together to develop a piece of theatre about one of the most pressing issues of our lifetimes, in a process during which they insisted over and over that we search for some modicum of hope for the future, was powerful and incredibly moving. I am proud of the art we made together, but more so of the journey we undertook, a process that not just allowed but required us to share something real and true and personal about ourselves, our experiences, and our hopes and dreams.