Maybe this shouldn’t be the focus for students who are paying to study theater. I’m just thinking out loud, here.The College Fix reports:
Drama professor says writing plays about climate change is hardThe 21st century is proving to be difficult for one playwright, due to the challenges of writing plays focused on climate change.Madeleine George, a professor at Bard College, was a featured panelist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writer’s House, where she explained that a number of issues made writing plays about climate change difficult.The event was moderated by Penn senior Samantha Friskey, “who wrote a play about sustainability for her senior thesis,” The Daily Pennsylvanian reports.George, a Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist, said that “verb tense issues, material waste created by theatrical productions, and the human-centric nature of plays” made writing plays centered on climate change very difficult.She said she started writing a play in 2010 – written in the future tense with dialogue about glaciers melting – that had become outdated by the time it was produced in 2019, when unspecified glaciers actually were melting.The speed of the effects of climate change, George said, was only one obstacle to writing about the climate in the theater, while the human aspect of plays created yet another:
George added that theatrical productions tend to focus on the “human scale part of the problem, like questions of guilt, questions of complacency, or questions of betrayal.” Plays are also not a sufficient media for crafting systemic solutions to societal problems, George added.
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