Twin sisters Cassie (Zoë Winters) and Stella (Emmy Rossum) contemplate the future of humanity in Walden (photo © Joan Marcus)
WALDEN
Second Stage Theater
Tony Kiser Theater
305 West Forty-Third St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 24, $52-$92
2st.com/shows
One of the best plays of the pandemic was TheaterWorks Hartford’s August 2021 hybrid production of Amy Berryman’s Walden. The play, which explores the dangers of climate change and the future of the planet as seen through the eyes of twin sisters, made its world premiere in May 2021 at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London; TheaterWorks Hartford recast it and staged it in a specially constructed wood-and-glass cabin on the edge of the woods by the Connecticut River, at a location appropriately known as Riverfront Recapture. It doesn’t get much more Thoreau-like than that.
In a March 1845 letter to his close friend Henry David Thoreau, American Transcendentalist poet William Ellery Channing wrote, “Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.” A few months later, on July 4, Thoreau moved into a hut in a forest by Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, living off the land for two years.
In his 1854 book, Walden; or Life in the Woods, Thoreau explained, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
Cassie (Zoë Winters), Bryan (Motell Foster), and Stella (Emmy Rossum) are at odds in tense Amy Berryman play at Second Stage (photo © Joan Marcus)
The play, continuing at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater through November 24, is inspired by but not based on Thoreau’s experience. It takes place on Matt Saunders’s large-scale, one-story aluminum shed, with solar panels and a sustainable vegetable garden. Bryan (Motell Foster) and Stella (Emmy Rossum) live together in this wilderness; he is a staunch EA (Earth Advocate), a radical movement that believes the government must exhaust all possibilities of saving the planet before considering establishing habitats on the moon or Mars. Stella is a former prominent NASA architect who is adapting to her more private life with Bryan; although Bryan refuses to look at screens, Stella follows the news on a portable device. Bryan recently lost his beloved brother, while Stella’s estranged twin sister, Cassie (Zoë Winters), is visiting them after having spent a year in space as part of the Moon Habitat Team. Their father, James Ryan, was a famous astronaut who wanted his daughters to follow in his footsteps; it’s no coincidence he named one Stella, which means “star,” and the other Cassiopeia, after the constellation.
There’s a mega-tsunami crossing America, and more than a million people are believed to be missing or dead. While Bryan, with Stella’s support, wants to stay and fight climate change on Earth, Cassie insists the only path for survival is on Mars, where NASA wants her to lead a critical mission.
Cassie explains, “Here we are, at a precipice, our population is in grave danger, and the EA movement isn’t what’s going to save us; investing in a place far away is what will save us. And it’s the next step — it’s about innovation, it’s about adventure, and learning —”
Bryan argues, “Adventure? NASA finally was able to sucker our politicians into the palm of their hands, completely changed the course of our future, put all that money into ‘habitation’ — is that the word they want you to use? — put all that money into habitation when it could be spent — I don’t know — solving the water crisis? But no, let’s colonize for the ‘adventure’ of it — are you kidding me?”
As they fight over their personal futures and that of human civilization itself, the characters dig up long-held resentments that threaten to tear apart their relationships as the tsunami gets closer.
Stella (Emmy Rossum) and Cassie (Zoë Winters) share a rare laugh in New York premiere of climate change play (photo © Joan Marcus)
Berryman (Alien Girls, The Whole of You) smartly dances around preachy didacticism in making her points while leaving the fate of our big blue marble up in the air. The play is sharply directed by Tony winner Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, On Sugarland), taking no sides as the three characters engage in psychological battle. Lee Kinney’s sound design immerses the audience in the tonal diversity of nature, from the lively songs of insects and animals to a torrential storm.
Foster (Othello,) is a commanding presence as Bryan, a strong, proud man dealing with extreme grief, determined to push on as his brother would have wanted him to. The consistently excellent Winters (Heroes of the Fourth Turning, 4000 Miles) is superb as Cassie, a woman who has sacrificed her personal life for the welfare of the human race, and Rossum (Shameless, The Phantom of the Opera) makes a sparkling debut as Stella, a deeply conflicted woman who is vulnerable but perhaps not as fragile as one might think as she contemplates bringing a child into this endangered planet.
Defending Bryan, Stella tells Cassie, “EAs believe small actions add up,” to which her sister replies, “Not enough to turn things around.”
Is it too little, too late?
As Thoreau wrote in Walden, “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]