Princeton University’s High Meadows Environmental Institute and Lewis Center for the Arts and The Civilians, a New York City-based theater company, announce the 2025-26 artists of their collaborative initiative, The Next Forever: playwright Gloria Majule and the theater collective Lightning Rod Special. 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 artists will spend time on the Princeton University campus, engage with faculty and students across disciplines, and participate in an ongoing series of public events and performances over the course of a year-long residency and two-year commissioning agreement. They join artists from the first two years of the program, Kareem Fahmy, AriDy Nox, Kate Douglas and Kate Tarker, who are continuing to develop the works they began during their residencies.
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, 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.
Gloria Majule. Photo credit: Candace Photography
Gloria Majule is a storyteller born and raised in Dodoma, Tanzania. She writes for and about Africans and the African diaspora. Majule has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship and commissions by Audible, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, and Atlantic Theater Company. Her work includes My Father Was Shot in the Back of the Head (Relentless Award finalist), Culture Shock (Leah Ryan Prize winner), Uhuru (Alley All New Festival), and Fifteen Hundred (Blue Ink Award finalist). A three-time Eugene O’Neill Theater Center National Playwrights Conference finalist and five-time Susan Smith Blackburn Prize nominee, Majule has been awarded residencies by Yaddo, Art Omi, The New Harmony Project, and New York Stage and Film. Her work has been supported by The American Playwriting Foundation, The Alley Theatre, Vassar’s Powerhouse Theater, and The New Group among others. Majule was the first African woman to receive an M.F.A. in Playwriting from Yale School of Drama.
During her residency, Majule will develop a new play set in a post-apocalyptic world where Africa is the only surviving continent. A team of African scientists develop a time machine to travel back in time and warn humanity of the impending doom that lies ahead. Their mission is to change the course of history—or, at the very least, delay the devastation and give humanity a fighting chance.
Lightning Rod Special is an award-winning Philadelphia-based company that “makes genre-defying original theater from the ground up.” Its work explores complex and controversial questions with precision and play. Since 2012, the company has created eight full-length works and audio series and has toured its productions to 16 cities in five countries. The company has a history of creating performances around contested American topics. Recent works include SPEECH, a poisonous love letter to cancel culture; The Appointment, a musical satire singing and dancing through the American abortion debate, named “Best Theater in 2023” in The New Yorker and “Best Theater in 2019” in The New York Times; and Underground Railroad Game, a time-traveling fever dream about American race relations, recipient of the 2017 Obie Award for “Best New American Theater Work” and named one of the “top 25 shows in the past 25 years” by The New York Times.
Members of Lightning Rod Special (left to right) Alex Bechtel photo by Kate Raines, Plate 3 Photography; photo courtesy of Alice Yorke; photo courtesy of Mason Rosenthal; and Scott Sheppard photo by Ben Arons.
The company’s play-in-development, Untitled Climate Change Sex Farce, takes place on the eve of the wedding of two wealthy young Americans at a seaside resort. As the high-octane human drama unfolds—with secret lovers cropping up like wildfires, and last-minute pleas to break off the wedding shaking the set like earthquakes—the drama of the natural world threatens the proceedings indoors with increasing urgency. At the play’s conclusion, while the characters remain willfully ignorant of the looming climate-crisis, the elements overtake the resort, and everyone dies. Using Lightning Rod Special’s brand of acerbic political satire, the company notes that Untitled Climate Change Sex Farce unveils the absurdity of humanity’s self-obsession and its persistent disregard for mounting environmental catastrophe.
“The Lewis Center is thrilled to continue this collaboration with The Civilians and the High Meadows Environmental Institute,” said Stacy Wolf, interim chair of the Lewis Center. “Our new artists come to Princeton with phenomenal track records of creating innovative and powerful work. We’re eager to experience how they take the most pressing environmental issues of our day—issues that affect our everyday lives and the future existence of the planet—and transform them into performance. Gloria Majule and Lighting Rod Special are remarkable artists whose new work will move and enlighten us. These commissions enact one of the Lewis Center’s key missions: to connect the arts to science.”
“We are delighted to welcome these artists to Princeton,” said Gabriel Vecchi, director of the High Meadows Environmental Institute. “At HMEI, we regard the humanities as essential to environmental studies. Through their residencies, our Next Forever fellows engage with climate scientists like me, to mutual benefit. This collaborative dialogue yields new ways of understanding the urgent environmental challenges that confront society today. The resulting work can help shape how audiences comprehend our future—literally our Next Forever.”
Majule started her residency in September and Lightning Rod Special will visit campus this month.
The 2023-24 inaugural artists, Kareem Fahmy and AriDy Nox, presented an evening of artist discussions and in-process excerpts of their new work last April. 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?”
2024-25 artists Kate Douglas and Kate Tarker have continued development of their respective plays begun last year based on their ongoing research. Douglas’ new work, If I Forget Thee, O Earth, is a full-length play that puts the cosmic and the terrestrial in the context of mass extinction events (present and past) through the lens of astrobiology. Tarker’s play, Topia, is a metafictional journey through optimism, pessimism, and two possible climate futures for Providence, Rhode Island.
The Next Forever builds on the partnership between The Civilians and Princeton that began in 2009 with the development of the musical, The Great Immensity, one of the first American plays to address climate change.
As part of The Next Forever, The Civilians’ Founding Artistic Director Steve Cosson co-teaches an undergraduate course at Princeton each spring. Cross-listed between the Program in Theater and Music Theater and the Program in Environmental Studies, “Investigative Theater for a Changing Climate” is taught by Cosson and theater director and arts-based researcher Khristián Méndez Aguirre. The course, which is open to undergraduates from all disciplines, explores how dramatic storytelling shapes responses to environmental issues, blending documentary-based theater and eco-dramaturgical approaches to create narratives that stage environmental injustice. The Next Forever artists are guest speakers in the course.
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 to break into the territory of the unknown or under-explored.
About The Civilians
Founded in 2001, The Civilians is a New York City company that creates exuberant “investigative theater” using interviews, research, and up-close collaborations to dive into the lives of others. Through developmental programs such as The R&D Group, and the Next Forever, the company nurtures the work of leading, emerging and established playwrights, and composers and other theater makers. Celebrated productions include The Great Immensity (a globe-crossing adventure on the climate crisis), In the Footprint (multiple top-10 lists), and Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (fourth-best play of the past 25 years according to The New York Times). The company originated Lucas Hnath’s Dana H., recently on Broadway and included in Top 10 of 2021 lists by The New York Times and Time magazine. The Civilians was the creative home of composer Michael Friedman from 2001 until his passing in 2017. The company was Artist-in-Residence at WNYC’s The Greene Space and previously at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This fall, The Civilians join The Vineyard Theatre to co-produce the world premiere of Anne Washburn’s The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire. Top critics have called The Civilians “endlessly inventive,” and “groundbreaking.” Led by Founding Artistic Director Steve Cosson, The Civilians continues to reinvent theater for a world on the edge.
