NEW YORK (AP) — V, the playwright previously Eve Ensler, is hoping her new piece of theater can do for local weather change what her “The Vagina Monologues” did for girls’s rights.
“We’re living in a period where we’re so disconnected,” she says. “What we all have to do is connect — connect to the Earth and connect to each other.”
She hopes to provide audiences a street map on the one-night-only staging of “Dear Everything,” with actors and activists Jane Fonda and Rosario Dawson chatting with the group. It can play Manhattan’s Terminal 5 on Jan. 30.
“At a time when our planet is burning from the influence of world warming and human-made local weather disaster, ‘Dear Everything’ is a robust musical rebellion,” Fonda mentioned in an electronic mail.
The concert-musical hybrid has songs by Justin Tranter, Caroline Pennell and Eren Cannata, choreography by Christiana Hunte and route by Tony Award-winner Diane Paulus.
V will play the narrator for the story she wrote with 10 singers in addition to a youth choir. The present would not spell out a single prescription for local weather change however hopes to encourage collective motion.
“It’s not necessarily about the politics of solution. It’s about the politics of connection,” says V. “I think it’s imaginative. I think it’s really calling on all of us to use our imaginations because that’s the greatest thing we have to really see a way out of where we are.”
“Dear Everything” had an earlier run at Harvard College’s American Repertory Theater. Again then, it was known as “WILD,” and its run was lower brief by the pandemic.
“I was trying to find a way to create a story, to create pop music, that could really generate an awakening in people. Not by pounding them over the head, but by saying, ‘Listen to the kids. Listen to young people. They really have a vision of what’s coming because they can feel it in their bodies and they want a life.’”
V hopes “Dear Everything” could be produced elsewhere. It isn’t costly and would not want fancy units or lighting, a bit like her “The Vagina Monologues,” a sequence of sly, lyrical, incisive first-person vignettes based mostly on her interviews with a whole lot of ladies.
V describes the Earth as a lady and sees her activism in opposition to local weather change as a part of her general battle to guard and honor girls.
“We made the mission to end violence against women, girls and trans and non-binary people and the Earth because it was all part of the same story,” she says. “We’re still going.”
