Hello friends! This week’s play has a few content warnings to consider: climate change, post-apocalyptic scenario, implication of potential starvation, and discussion of having to terminate a wanted pregnancy. If any of that is too much for you, I totally get it! Take care of yourselves.

As the school year gets closer and closer to ending, I find myself with more and more to do somehow: assistant directing the talent show/middle school play, interviews upon interviews to (hopefully) get a job before I move, figuring out some new things with FKT (announcements soon!), a virtual play performance AND a semifinalist reading…I feel a little overwhelmed, truth be told!

I’m also trying to be active in spreading the word about the NEA funding cuts and how they’re hitting both big and small companies, which is endlessly frustrating and enraging. Call your reps and tell them to support saving the NEA and to support the arts in general!!! Censorship is a hallmark of fascism, so if you think this isn’t a big deal— think again.

So, with everything going on this week, I decided to cover another short play.

I actually read about five short plays in an attempt to find one that I was moved to write about. All of them were interesting, and all of them could easily be viewed through an inquisitive and scholastic lens— i.e., I think I could definitely, and did, learn a little something from all of them. But this one in particular struck me. It’s a work I don’t think I’ll forget about any time soon.

Here is the summary from NPX of And Other Dreams We Had by Phanésia Pharel:

A couple in an attic in a coastal American city have to make a choice that will affect their relationship in the future after a climate disaster. It is love and the dreams they have that guide them.

We all know by now that I love a speculative piece of theater, but that’s not why this particular work stood out from the crowd. The truly masterful part of this work is its sense of atmosphere. Pharel creates an incredibly distinct world in which hope and hopelessness live side by side in a constant battle for supremacy. We hear about climate crises and protests, survival methods and likelihoods— and without being overly expositional, we gain not just a fact-based picture of the circumstances, but an emotional one.

Jules and Mason are a couple currently living in their attic. The play opens with Mason attempting to create a “cake” out of canned lentils and fruit to surprise Jules with when she wakes up. Jules is surprised he used “two cans”, giving us the sense that the couple does not perhaps have an endless amount of food accessible to them. Eventually, Mason asks, “Did you take it yet?” Jules tells him no. After a page or so of discussion, we find out that the “it” Mason referenced is an abortion pill.

It’s immediately clear that the couple wants the baby. If the circumstances were different, they’d be over the moon about the situation. But the situation is clearly dire. We can infer from the couple’s living in the attic that perhaps the rest of the house is unlivable due to a variety of things such as flooding. They discuss the sun burning and the water being unsafe to consume, which stacks on top of their lack of food to present a situation in which a baby would probably not survive. That is, if the baby and mother survived the birth at all without a doctor present.

Despite the situation, Mason and Jules allow themselves to dream for a little while. What would they name their baby? What gender do they think the baby would be? What would they be like?

It is sweet, and awful, because we know that it is simply not viable for Jules to have the baby.

The last few lines of the play truly gutted me:

What’s going to happen to all the things that we passed down?

Where are they going to go?

Where is our love going to go?

When we stop dreaming and I have to get out of bed and I take the pill

These are questions I think we have all avoided asking ourselves when thinking about the possibilities of climate change and how they will affect us in the near future. They’re not exactly happy things to think about! If I start wondering what will happen to human culture if and when we go extinct I think I may have, as my friends say, a “Ment-y B” (mental breakdown, for those uninitiated).

And yet, what a persuasive and relevant argument for people to care about climate change! Jules, a Black woman, asking these questions as she goes through something unfathomably heartbreaking, forces the audience to think about their humanity in connection with this thing that sometimes feels too big to understand. To me this is the definition of what Richard Price was talking about when he said: “The bigger the issue, the smaller you write…You pick the smallest manageable part of the big thing, and you work off the resonance.”

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Pharel does this phenomenally. She takes the smallest thing— an unknown and “normal” couple trying to survive what is essentially the ending of the world as we know it— and with it, shows us just how drastic the larger situation of climate change is.

I think this is a piece of writing advice that is often easier said than done, so it’s great to have such a potent example of it that is quickly and effortlessly read. With effective, purposeful language and an eye that refuses to shy away from the devastation, this piece makes the potential impact of future climate crises impossible to ignore.

Here is my official recommendation from NPX:

I will be thinking about this piece for a long time. It is incredibly devastating in a way that is impossible to describe, but is very much a possibility in a world destroyed by climate change. The characters were achingly realistic, and their relationship was very compelling. Utilizing purposeful and beautiful language, this piece makes the potential impact of future climate crises impossible to ignore.

What did you think of this play? Let me know in the comments!

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Here are three more plays I added to my NPX library this week:

• Quantum by Tara Moses

• My Aim is True by Lucy Wang

• HAPPY by Caridad Svich

Want me to read one of these plays? Or have a different suggestion for me? Let me know by responding via email or DMing me on the SubStack app!

Happy theatre-making!

~Brynn