Theatre Alums Bring Environmental Plays to COP Climate Conference 

Climate change has been in our cultural discourse for decades, with artists often wielding their work to bring people’s attention to the state of the environment. Director and playwright Adam Marple ’10 is taking this idea to the next level; between 2022 and 2023 Marple brought a couplet of environmental plays straight to audiences who have the power to make real global environmental change—attendees of the United Nations Climate Change Conference or COP, which is hosted annually in major cities worldwide. 

Joining Marple in creating this work was Marple’s longtime collaborator, playwright Steven Gaultney ’11. The two met at the School of the Arts during their first week of classes. Marple remembers introducing himself to his peers early on by claiming that he only liked directing classic playwrights. “I made the terrible mistake of saying that I only work with dead playwrights because I love Chekhov and Shakespeare, and every single playwright in that class just turned their heads away from me,” he said. Despite Marple's preference for classic writers, however, he found that Gaultney’s work resonated—and Marple’s aesthetics and interests aligned with Gaultney’s. 

“Steven said, ‘Hey I’ve written an adaptation of Agamemnon—would you like to take a stab at it?’ And I did take a stab at it, literally and metaphorically,” Marple recounted. “We've been working together ever since.” Gaultney is currently Resident Playwright and Dramaturg at The Theatre of Others, where Marple is Co-Artistic Director. Co-founded by Marple, The Theatre of Others is an international collective of artists, a company who “believes the play watches the audience. The audience is necessary and they are witnesses to what happens.” Their previous work includes both traditional theatre productions and audio plays. Since 2021 they have produced an annual audio play festival based around a changing theme. 

One of Marple’s first major forays into environmental theatre was with the play The Earth Turns—a piece he wrote, directed and brought to COP27, which was held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt in 2022. Some of the inspiration for the piece came from an experience Marple had with the landscape in Egypt after moving to Cairo, where he still resides and is Assistant Professor of Directing at The American University in Cairo. “I was going to the beach one day and I was driving. I had the desert on my right and I had the beach on my left and the sun was coming up, and I looked out into the desert and it was beautiful and sparkling and shiny,” said Marple. “Then I realized it wasn't sparkling sand, it was plastic bags. I drove for four hours and the desert was just covered in plastic bags. And so I started thinking, okay, how can I start to draw a little bit more attention to this?” 

The Earth Turns was recognized as an official COP27 side event, an important element of the COP conferences which allows those with limited speaking power in formal negotiations—usually artists—to reach Parties and other participants of the conference. The Earth Turns was performed in the UN-controlled Blue Zone for delegates in the Tonino Lamborghini International Conference Center in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. The play was additionally invited to perform for the public in the Peace Pavilion amphitheater of the Green Zone, and has since been released as an audio play on The Theatre of Others Podcast.

With a small cast and a fragmented, almost episodic style, Marple’s play highlights the gravity of the climate crisis, with the intention of showing audiences how the state of the environment currently impacts individuals, and the ways in which it will impact future generations. Following the success of The Earth Turns, Marple reached out to Gaultney to write another play to bring to COP28. The two knew they could work well together, but writing about the climate crisis was new to Gaultney. So was Marple’s interest in sustainable theatre, which began during the first production of The Earth Turns. “I really started thinking about sustainable theatre and then fell down the rabbit hole as you do. Now it's everything that I can think about,” said Marple. 

This philosophy was present in the creation of Bright Light Burning. Despite the piece’s conceptual newness and the challenges innate in writing a totally sustainable play, Gaultney wasn’t daunted by the project; he was excited.“There was a prompt [given by COP28], a collection of poems, and the theme of human adaptation. How are we as people going to adapt to the changing climate? That was really how it started,” Gaultney said. Adam agreed. “We knew the spaces that we would be performing in, we knew the actors that we were going to have, and as a sustainable piece, we knew the resources we were going to have. It was really just about trusting Steven to go with the script and play with it.”  

The resulting play, Bright Light Burning, is distinctly interactive in a surprising and highly theatrical style. The actors are initially hidden amongst the audience members and slowly reveal themselves as the play progresses. Set in the future, the piece explores a not-too-far-off version of planet Earth, where many people are climate refugees. A collective of travelers panic, bargain, perform, and reconcile as they travel into an uncertain future. 

Gaultney and Marple designed Bright Light Burning to be more sustainable by avoiding the use of electric light, instead relying on natural sunlight to illuminate the performances. While this kind of sustainable set design meshes perfectly with the themes of Bright Light Burning, Marple's commitment to more ecologically-conscious theatre goes well beyond his work for the climate conferences. Marple has made it a mission of his to produce solely sustainable theatre from now on—whether or not the subject matter itself directly addresses climate change. “Theater itself is an ephemeral act but it's incredibly wasteful in that ephemerality in terms of space and resources and electricity and human resources. I can't not make a sustainably-made play anymore,” said Marple. “It's a moral thing for me. It doesn't mean that every single production that we do has a sustainable focus in the dramaturgy—in the writing. These two productions did because of where we were going with COP27 and COP28.”

Following his production of The Earth Turns, Marple founded The Sustainable Theatre Network, an organization dedicated to creating sustainable models for the creation of theatre. The Sustainable Theatre Network encourages both the practice of sustainability in the theatre, as well as promoting the adoption of a philosophy of sustainability “that can be woven into every aspect of production, from script development to final performance.”

To Gaultney, sustainable theatre marks a shift in how simply plays can physically be performed. Making a play sustainable means the show can travel easily, a feature reminiscent of a Shakespearean theatre troupe or a traveling show, which in our current time feels new and has its own particular theatrical merit. “I think for years, we’ve been in search of a piece that you could just pick up and do anywhere," said Gaultney. In making this work sustainable, it's also been freeing. We're able to jump into a space, spend a couple hours kind of figuring out how to do it, and do the play.”  

Following their time at COP27 and COP28, The Theatre of Others, Marple, and Gaultney will bring updated versions of The Earth Turns and Bright Light Burning to COP29, which will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan. More information about The Theatre of Others can be found here.