The challenge with dystopian dramas is that they too often lack the all-important element of believability. Impressive as they are, these fantastical, futuristic societies can seem too far-fetched for average audience member.
The best post-apocalyptic plays—Penelope Skinner’s The Ruins of Civilization, Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children, and, currently, Amy Berryman’s compelling Walden at Second Stage off-Broadway—put authentic characters front and center, and use the world’s crumbling ecosystem as a backdrop. (Side note: Why is it that women create the top-shelf dystopian work for the stage, and men create every big-budget, overblown dystopian movie? And why are the most believable of those films the animated ones, such as WALL-E and The LEGO Movie? Discuss amongst yourselves.)
Berryman’s absorbing three-hander, which debuted on London’s West End and premiered in the U.S. at TheaterWorks Hartford, takes place sometime in the future; we don’t know precisely when, but we know climate change has wreaked complete havoc when we hear a news report about a “mega tsunami”: “The number of missing persons presumed dead has grown to almost one million as the number of those seeking Climate Refugee status continues to climb,” says a reporter. Wine sealed with a cork stopper is “really rare,” Stella (Emmy Rossum) tells her fiancé, Bryan (Motell Foster). “You know cork trees are extinct, right?” The air quality is generally so bad that Cassie (Zoë Winters), Stella’s twin sister, enters wearing a face shield. Come to think of it, all of this sounds pretty plausible.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Stella and Bryan have nestled—or hidden—themselves somewhere in the wilderness; in their corner of the world, “within a hundred miles, the air is totally safe,” Bryan explains. (Matt Saunders’ clever set, part wood-paneled cabin, part steel-sided shelter—think Quonset hut—looks both throwback and futuristic.) Bryan is what they call an Earth Advocate: “He’s anti-cloning, anti-symbiotic embryo, anti-synthetic foods.… He thinks the government should be spending all that money on saving this planet, instead of looking for somewhere else to go,” Stella tells Cassie, who has just arrived after a year on the moon toting a bag of 3D-printed candies made of superfoods.
But Walden isn’t an earth versus space debate, though Cassie and Bryan do get into a few tense, and intelligent, exchanges. It’s about two sisters struggling to reconnect. Not only are they twins, but they also both worked for NASA—Cassie as a botanist and Stella as an architect—and once dreamed of going to space together. Going to the moon didn’t put distance between Cassie and Stella; taking different paths did. In many ways, Stella can’t even talk about Cassie’s work. Bryan is the one who acknowledges its magnitude. “Not only did you walk on the Moon every day for a year, but you made something grow there,” he says, genuinely impressed. And if he had his way, no one would be planting or farming or colonizing anything on the moon.
Thanks to Rossum’s and Winters’ fearless performances, and the smooth direction of Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding), we see the distance between the siblings, but we also see the indissoluble attachment. (Hard to believe that Rossum, who spent nine seasons on the Showtime black comedy Shameless, is making her off-Broadway debut.) And hat tip to casting director Taylor Williams: Rossum and Winters actually do look like twin sisters.
Walden opened Nov. 8, 2024, at the Tony Kiser Theatre and runs through Nov. 24. Tickets and information: 2st.com
