Princeton University’s High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI) and Lewis Center for the Arts and The Civilians, a New York City-based theater company, present two events sharing initial outcomes of their collaborative initiative, The Next Forever. The Next Forever is a partnership that seeks to create new stories for a changing planet, exploring how dynamic storytelling can engage vital environmental subjects and provide the vision and inspiration society needs to navigate the challenges of our planet’s future—the “next forever.” The events include a staged reading of Civilians Artistic Director Steve Cosson’s new play The Gulf on April 14 at 7 p.m. in the Berlind Rehearsal Room at McCarter Theatre Center and presentations by The Next Forever inaugural artists Kareem Fahmy and AriDy Nox on April 21 at 5 p.m. in the Drapkin Studio at the Lewis Arts complex. Both events are free and open to Princeton students, faculty and staff; no tickets are required. The two venues are fully accessible with an assistive listening system in the Drapkin. Guests in need of other access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
The Next Forever initiative asks: “What stories can we tell to find our way out of the planetary crisis we’re in?” relating to climate change, biodiversity loss, ecological collapse, and food insecurity. The initiative provides forward-thinking artists unparalleled access to a cross-disciplinary range of knowledge and ideas—of scientists, conservation psychologists, historians, and policy and communications experts, and fellow artists, among others. The program supports artists as they pursue rigorous inquiry into their subject matter alongside some of Princeton’s greatest thinkers. The Next Forever also funds a series of commissions of theatrical work that offer new visions for how humanity relates to the world around it.
Kareem Fahmy. Photo credit: Joe Mazza
The Gulf is a verbatim play, written and directed by Cosson, sharing real-life stories of 12 Gulf Coast residents fighting against devastating industrial pollution. Through their voices, and the tireless work of activist Wilma Subra, The Gulf exposes the human cost of “slow violence” in the aftermath of environmental disasters and the staggering risks in frontline communities. The play will be read by a cast of professional actors, including Jeff Biehl, Peter Gerety, Nina Hellman, Bruce McKenzie, Joshua David Robinson, Heather Alicia Simms, and Alison Weller. A conversation with Cosson and an HMEI researcher will follow the reading.
The presentations by Fahmy and Nox will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the future of environmental storytelling with the playwrights sharing discussions about their research and writing, and in-process excerpts. Fahmy’s play, Riparian States, tells the story of how a new Nile River dam has brought Egypt and Ethiopia to a geopolitical breaking point. Nox’s interactive reverse-ancestral play features young descendants with one burning question for their ancestors, Why Ya’ll Hate Earth So Bad?
AriDy Nox. Photo credit 2: Tyler Gustin
While on campus during their 2023-24 residency year, the artists met with a number of faculty, researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students from various fields relevant to climate change and related issues including scientists, hydrologists, environmentalists, alternative energy experts, international public policy makers, and historians. These encounters have led to additional introductions to similar experts around the globe, adding to the playwrights’ opportunities for research. Each has also been working on development of their new plays over the past year. In addition, Fahmy and Nox have been guests in The Next Forever-related course, “Investigative Theater for a Changing Climate,” co-taught by Cosson and theater director and arts-based researcher Khristián Méndez Aguirre. The course, cross-listed between the Program in Theater and Music Theater and the Program in Environmental Studies, is open to undergraduates from all disciplines and explores how dramatic storytelling shapes responses to environmental issues, blending documentary-based theater and eco-dramaturgical approaches to create narratives that stage environmental injustice.
Currently wrapping up their residency year is the second cohort of artists, Kate Douglas and Kate Tarker.
About High Meadows Environmental Institute
High Meadows Environmental Institute—the interdisciplinary center of environmental research, education, and outreach at Princeton University—advances understanding of the Earth as a complex system influenced by human activities and informs solutions to local and global challenges by conducting groundbreaking research across disciplines and preparing future leaders in diverse fields to impact a world increasingly shaped by climate change. More than 140 faculty, representing 30 academic disciplines, are affiliated with HMEI and contribute to the Institute’s environmental research and teaching activities.
About the Lewis Center for the Arts
The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University believes that art arises out of questions. Its classes and minors in creative writing, dance, theater and music theater, and visual arts, and in the interdisciplinary Princeton Atelier, operate on the principle that rigorous artistic practice is a form of research, innovation, discovery, and intervention. Like scholarship of any kind, rigorous artistic practice is a way of interrogating that which is accepted or understood in an attempt to break into the territory of the unknown or under-explored.
About the Civilians
Founded in 2001, The Civilians is dedicated to ambitious and exuberant new theater that creatively interrogates humanity’s lived experience; questions and tests the stories that shape the world; and awakens new thinking and perceptions. Its signature work is “investigative theater”— projects created through field research, community collaborations, and other methods of in-depth inquiry. Shows originated with The Civilians include Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, cited by The New York Times as the “4th Best Play of the Past 25 Years,” and Lucas Hnath’s Dana H., recently on Broadway and included in Top 10 of 2021 lists by The New York Times and Time magazine. Other shows include José Rivera’s Another Word for Beauty, and many works with composer Michael Friedman: Gone Missing; Pretty Filthy; Paris Commune; and more. The Civilians has participated in several Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festivals, has been produced at many major regional and off-Broadway theaters, and was the first theater company to be Artist-in-Residence at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. With Ghostlight Records, The Michael Friedman Recording Project is creating nine albums of founding member’s works. The company supports emerging and established artists each year through its new work programs, which include the R&D Group new works lab and a cabaret series of new musicals. The Civilians produces a podcast on SoundCloud; publishes Extended Play, an online journal about its work and the broader theater field; and sustains an active Education Program.
