Reusable Straws and Other Things I’m Carrying Around.
By Caitlin Nasema Cassidy
For the last three months, I’ve been carrying around a reusable straw in my purse. It’s a happy neon-green, which almost allows me to forget the grim reason I’ve come to tote it around. I’ve started to say things like: Did you know that millions of tons of plastic enter the ocean each year — that’s the equivalent of emptying a garbage truck filled with plastic into the oceans every minute?At any opportunity, in increasingly high and desperate tones, I’m spewing the most recent climate-related information I’ve come across, hoping to inspire, I suppose, the same kind of fear I’ve been carrying around since reading Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction.
My friend Robert recently pointed out that every time climate change comes up in conversation, he finds people go straight for “the facts.” They sigh, shake their heads, and offer a few fragments of second-hand data before the conversation inevitably grinds to a halt. And therein, Robert posits, and I’d agree, lies the problem. This behavior — the way we respond to climate crisis in conversation with one another — is deeply connected to our failure to address it. Whenever the environment comes up, I myself feel an urgent need to quantify climate crisis (“millions of tons of plastic enter the ocean each year”) and attempt to make that information relatable to my audience (the image of garbage trucks spilling waste into our water, for example). While I’m not yet throwing my hands up, I recognize that the more I learn about the precarious state of our world, the more helpless I feel. The more inclined I am to wonder if my little green straw is more a symptom of my own (and our collective) failure to respond meaningfully than a part of the solution.
For me, the behavior I’ve observed around climate crisis conversation reveals something about our inability to be vulnerable in the face of climate change — to speak personally and intimately about it and its effect on everyday life. It’s no wonder this is difficult. The massive and various scales on which climate change occurs makes it nearly impossible for most people to relate to most of the time.
But then I think about the land my parents recently cleared in order to install a swimming pool — a solution to the ever-hotter, ever-longer Boston summers. I think about arriving home to find the crab apple tree I loved and spent much of my childhood under gone — a strange system of buzzing pool tanks in its place. Suddenly, I am moved. I’m an emotional wreck, determined to do something (though I have no idea what that something is beyond purchasing a reusable straw and smugly imposing my veganism on others). And soon another problem arises: Dealing with climate change begins to feel like coping with loss. It begins to feel utterly inseparable from a feeling of mourning. And who wants to exist in that state for long?
These are a few of the things I’m grappling with as I embark on a new season of work alongside LubDub Theatre Company in response to the precarious state of our environment. An exploration of the Anthropocene, or the present-day epoch during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment, will be at the heart of our next major phase of work. Over the course of the next three years, we will research, develop, and produce a series of local and globally-focused, interactive happenings highlighting the impacts of ecological change on everyday objects and in everyday events.
In January 2018, we began work with new collaborators Leigh Fondakowski (Director, Member of Tectonic Theatre Project), Alexander Borinsky (Playwright), and Whitney Mosery (Director) to investigate the relationship between people and place with an emphasis on the impacts of climate change on this relationship. We are wrestling with the following questions:
+ What are our personal relationships to the natural world?
+ In what ways do physical structures that modify land and water affect our bodies?
+ How do we put a hyperobject (which philosopher Timothy Morton has defined as “an entity of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place”) on stage?
+ How do we engage diverse audiences in civic dialogue around climate change?
+ How do we welcome the scientific and other new communities into our work?
+ How can the work we do in the rehearsal room and in performance reverberate into how we build and run our company? How can we carry the value of sustainability and our growing environmental consciousness into the administration of our organization?
We are especially excited about the challenges of focusing on the impact of environmental change on the simple, everyday things that we all know and love in order to better understand what we stand to lose. We look forward to immersing ourselves in nature (we’re also trying to do away with the idea that we are actually ever outside of nature) and to conversations with STEM field professionals, activists, artists, and students who are already grappling with these and other questions.
My hope is that through this process, I will come to better understand how my own and other cultures perceive their responsibilities to the earth and that LubDub’s work will contribute meaningful to an ongoing dialogue about how we can collectively re-envision our relationship to the earth. I hope I will develop meaningful ways of responding on a deeply personal level to our changing planet. That I will find a way to balance the spiritual work and healing that I believe is a critical part of dealing with climate crisis with my desire for outwardaction and global impact. My hope is that the straw I’m carrying around will stand to remind me ultimately that these two things are connected — that the work I do at the individual level is capable of radiating outward to become part of the larger-scale change I seek.
Caitlin Nasema Cassidy was born in a suburb of Boston and raised between there and the Arab world. She is the daughter of seven-sea-sailing hippies Tom Cassidy Jr., the eldest of a large Irish Catholic family, and Joan Kelley, the youngest of a Lebanese and Syrian family. Caitlin fell in love with the performing arts early in life, and grew up studying acting, piano, voice, and dance after school. She received her BA from Georgetown in government and Arabic, and was a recipient of the Theatre and Performance Studies Department award for Excellence Across the Performing Arts. Upon graduating from GU, she journeyed to London, where she earned a master’s degree in acting from East 15 and completed a residency at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Caitlin has designed and implemented theatre-based curricula in Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Puerto Rico, served as Language and Culture Fellow with AMIDEAST, and devised performance for UNESCO’s World Theatre Conference as well as India’s International Theatre Festival. Caitlin has performed at Williamstown, Chautauqua, Berkshire Playwright’s Lab, Disney World, Lincoln Center, The Lark, and Playwrights Horizons, as well as with Epic Theatre Ensemble, Pig Iron, The Civilians, Synetic, and Noor. She is Co-Artistic Director of LubDub.Theatre Company.
