Green Theatre Revolution

UMBC Theatre presents Green Theatre Revolution, directed by Susan McCully and Katie Hileman, a festival of new plays and devised works about climate justice. Student-created work will be performed alongside excerpts from Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff Tick Tock While Saraswati Saves the World by Susan McCully and Lost Waters by Nayantara Nayar. A special performance of student works will take place at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) in downtown Baltimore.

Part of Plays for Our Planet.

Performances
Friday, May 3, 8 p.m. — Opening night reception
Saturday, May 4 — IMET performance, time to be announced
Saturday, May 4, 8 p.m.
Sunday, May 5, 2 p.m. (free matinee for UMBC students), with a post-show conversation with Susan McCully and Nayantara Nayar (bios below)

Lost Waters was inspired by research from an archival project conducted by Dr. Bhavani Raman and Dr. Aditya Ramesh. Their project, ‘Archives and Maps of Water: Environmental Justice and Cartography for a Coastal City, Chennai 1800-present’ used the Tamilnadu State Archives, the British Library, and the Wellcome Trust Collection, amongst other digital archives. It was funded by a British Academy grant.

$15 general admission, $10 students and seniors. Please visit here to reserve seats.

Nayantara Nayar is a PhD Student at the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. By attaching three contemporary dramaturgies as investigative frameworks for three different water-crisis events, her thesis studies water crisis, and the potential of theatre practices to foster different water-related imaginaries. In 2023, as part of the British Academy project, ‘Reimagining the Good City from Ennore Creek’ and working with Chennai Climate Action Group, local theatre artists, and school children, she designed and delivered a six-week theatre workshop culminating in ‘The Good City Drama’. This play uses dialogic form, song, storytelling, and group discussions to lay bare the exploitative relationship between the Chennai as a good city (modern, global, industrial) and the areas of Ennore Creek, a coastal backwater that, since the 1950s has housed the city’s heavy pollution, ‘red’ industries. Earlier in 2023, she also worked as a facilitator for the Norwich Royal Theatre’s ’37 Plays- Climate Writing’ project to help artists from Norfolk produce work about climate change and the environment. Prior to her PhD, Nayantara worked as a playwright, researcher, and storyteller in Chennai, India. Her body of work includes, ‘The Lottery’ (short-listed for the Hindu Play Writing Award 2018); ‘The Body’ (commissioned by Rage Theatre and Enacte Theatre, California for the New Writing Festival, 2021); ‘Chicken Run’ (part of the Chennai Photo Biennale 2021-22, an archived version is available here); ‘The Sometimes River’ (published in early 2023); and ‘Curfew’ (created as part of Writing Without Borders 2022-23).

Susan McCully is a queer feminist theatre-maker and playwright. Over the past thirty-years, all of her professional efforts involve advocacy for intersectional feminist and queer theatre whether through her own playwriting, performing, and teaching or through creating opportunities for others as a producer and dramaturg. From 2005 to 2012, she served as artistic director and dramaturg for the GirlParts Festival of New Plays at UMBC. Beginning in 2015, her playwriting work focused on creating feminist and/or queer identified work for young actors at UMBC–Voracious (2015), Leah’s Dybbuk (2015) and Girls on a Dirt Pile (2019). Susan returned to performing in her plays including Inexcusable Fantasies (Prague and New York Fringe) and Kerrmoor (Women’s Voices Theatre Festival). In 2018, RepStage commissioned her play about Etta Cone entitled All She Must Possess. She is currently developing a play about climate justice with EnActe Arts in Silicon Valley.

The Black Box Theatre is easy to visit, with plenty of free parking. Please visit here for directions and parking information.