I, for one, am often leery when it comes to eco dramaturgies. Climate change already saturates our feeds, newspapers and daily anxieties. Bringing it to the stage makes me a little suspicious. Can theatre do justice to a discourse so often framed through statistics, forecasts and impending catastrophe? And can it preserve dramatic tension while resisting the slide into over-Brechtian didacticism?
Helplessness is part of the problem. But perhaps because media coverage so often trades in doomsday rhetoric – from rankings of cities with the worst air quality to the premature arrival of Earth Overshoot Day – theatre can offer a different and less hand-wringing point of entry.
About The Climate Commissions
Why Not Theatre’s The Climate Commissions is a fuse with the potential to spark new ways of thinking about the climate crisis. Presented at The Theatre Centre, the triple bill marks the culmination of the ThisGen Fellowship, a professional development program dedicated to BIPOC artists (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour).
That frame matters because climate discourse often separates humanity and nature into opposing, neatly divided categories, such as oppressor and oppressed, or agent and victim. Seen through historically marginalised voices, however, the climate emergency becomes inseparable from the power logics and the political forces that determine who is most exposed to its consequences. As Rob Nixon writes, “it is those people lacking resources who are the principal casualties of slow violence” (Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2011, 4). That intersection is the ground on which all three pieces stand.
In Tara Beagan’s Matriate, directed by Cheyenne Scott with dramaturgy by Brefny Caribou, a parking lot is discovered to be a burial site containing the half-a-millennium-old bones of an Indigenous woman. In an attempt to stop the bulldozers threatening to raze the area, Bon, a black woman, has kept vigil there for five days, starving and dehydrated.
Sabrina Mahfouz’s Many Waters – directed by Michelle Mohammed with dramaturgy by Keavy Lynch – focuses on two estranged sisters who also stand as opposing ethical poles. Both are lawyers, but Khadija fights on the side of environmental protection, while Amina represents corporate interests. Their mother’s death forces them to look back towards their roots: to Guyana, their ancestral homeland; to the childhood stories their mother used to tell them; and to the strained bond between the two of them.
Finally comes Rituals of Return. Created by the American duo Ta-Nia (Talia Paulette Oliveras and Nia Farrell) and directed by Adonis Critter King with dramaturgy by Mya Wong, this play is a piece of Afrofuturism. Three black women from the past reach out to Emaya, a black woman living in 2047, urging her to resist and carry forward their struggle.
Appreciating these works-in-progress
At the beginning of the evening, Why Not Theatre’s co-artistic director Miriam Fernandes pointed out that the plays presented are works-in-progress produced by processes that are designed to test new methods and open up new perspectives.
The goal of writing about such a creative laboratory is not to critique: it’s to appreciate the threads, perspectives and lines of thought shaping these artists’ work. So let’s search for those threads.
Violence. In Matriate, there is a bulldozer threatening to flatten not only land, but memory. In Many Waters, there is the memory of a childhood story, in which a pregnant woman is assaulted by a hairy man. In Rituals of Return, there is the echo of a past marked by segregation, exploitation, and the long afterlife of racial violence. In all of these stories, violence is not simply a catastrophe. It is a method: a cultural habit of arranging bodies, land, and power – through sexism, racism, abuse, or disposability. If domination is the modus operandi of our social order, how can we expect the natural world to be spared from the same logic?
Ritual. Following the traces of the Indigenous woman’s spirit, Bon, in the first play, repeatedly drags one foot through the sand to draw circles, and then cuts the air with her arms, as if swept into a dance with the wind. In the second, Khadija and Amina scatter their mother’s ashes onto the land in a farewell that distills the final moment of togetherness. Meanwhile, the third production, starts with one of Emaya’s ancestors ringing a small bell, as if casting a spell over everyone in the room, herself included. Ritual in all cases refuses the easy opposition of symbol vs concrete action. Symbols are not evasions of reality, but codes through which reality is organised. If we do not question the symbols, how can we change the thinking behind them?
Sharing. In Matriate, it starts with Bon following the spirit’s traces; then another woman follows Bon’s; soon, the act passes from one body to another. Sharing can take different forms: in Many Waters , we see it in the grief of a death, the burden of an inheritance, and the weight of a past the two sisters do not understand in the same way. In Rituals of Return, it takes the form of a prayer, as women sing together across time, their voices gathering into something larger than individual testimony. If helplessness prevents political action – since we know too well that one person alone cannot make the difference – can alliance become a method?
Land. To find a skeleton buried in the ground is to ask who stood there before we did. To return to one’s motherland is to ask what roots mean. For communities historically forced to yield land to dominant powers, property and responsibility go hand in hand. Does engaging with the land also mean questioning what you owe it?
Future. Faith in the future is fraught: it trembles. Is it presumptuous to believe we are not too late? Is it catastrophic to surrender? Is it naive to care?
Producing real-world effects
What makes The Climate Commissions political is the way these works challenge us to approach climate in new ways. The environmental emergency is no longer held at a distance, as a matter of specialist knowledge assumed to belong exclusively to scientists and experts. Instead, the triple bill returns to bodies, histories, and shared land, giving physical weight to a topic that is too often treated as an abstraction.
As Lisa Woynarski writes in Ecodramaturgies (2020), theatre’s ecological power lies in its potential to produce effects. Not quantitative, measurable data, perhaps, but qualitative shifts, such as:
-
linking social inequalities and environmental catastrophe
-
inviting non-anthropocentric ways of thinking; and
-
creating new values and forms through which we tell stories, and understand ourselves within them.
So the most powerful thing ecotheatre can do may not be to alert us. After all, we receive plenty of alerts every day. It may be to let us breathe together once again: to register the physicality of the challenge, to restore a utopian belief in change, and to foster the communal will to pursue it.
The Climate Commissions ran at The Theatre Centre (1115 Queen St. W, Toronto) from June 4 to June 6, 2026. Read more information about it here.
© Alessandro Stracuzzi, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
