"Other than We"...
is futuristic cli-fi, harrowing yet hope-filled.
After the Deluge, the privileged live in a hermetically sealed Dome. But, the underground aquifer and food supply are running out. Outbreaks of hate are on the rise and surveillance is extreme. Two young women, an obstetrician-gynecologist and a neuroscientist, her lover, join forces with a refugee janitor who was once a physician, and an elderly renowned linguist, in an unlikely plot to create a new, post-Homo sapiens species, other than we. The fate of life on earth hangs in the balance.
Other Than We is published by Laertes Books, Egret Imprint. http://www.laertesbooks.org/egret-imprint
Earth Institute Unbroken Circle: LIVE Cli-Fi Play Reading - "Other Than We"
Join host Andy @Revkin of the Earth Institute, the ecofeminist playwright Karen Malpede and a fabulous cast in a live-streamed brunch-time reading of Malpede's play "Other Than We," which premiered at Manhattan's La Mama Theater just before the COVID-19 lockdown.
July 26, 2020
A Reflection at La Mama
Nov 19 - Dec 1 2019
Click the image above to download the program.
Every play feels like the last child I will ever have, and like each child is troublesome and remarkable in its own way. “Other Than We” was five years from conception to birth (a long time to carry a vision) and during that time, the climate crisis continues to worsen while policy remains nonexistent. Homo sapiens need a change of consciousness. Should we destroy ourselves, the world will, of course, rebound, the earth has time. But we, with our feckless cruelty will have annihilated all that is precious we have made: idea and poetry, art and imagination, our ability to sing of and interpret world. The sorrow of this looming loss beyond comprehension underlies and drives “Other Than We.” Yet, it is a play of renewal, the story of the struggle to rebirth ourselves as wiser and more compassionate.
The play was allowed just eight performances at LaMama, not enough time for a new, edgy, multi-layered work to be fully understood much less welcomed to the world, not enough for actors to settle into their complex roles. Yet, both happened. The performances started strong, and, for the most part, deepened night by night. Many in the audience “got” a whole lot. You can tell when you sit at the back as I do if the audience is leaning forward, straining, attentive; you can sense them being struck by lines and moments and hear in their applause if they really cared. The hipper the audience the better the performance. Theater is an exchange of energies and a profound coming together. For me, the greatest pleasure, as always, was working with the Theater Three Collaborative team as our shared visions were realized in what, to me, is the very friendly theater space of LaMama’s Downstairs. It’s a bare brick-walled room in a basement with a light grid, but the space creates a direct audience-actor relationship that works beautifully for poetic plays.
I wrote this play knowing the many special talents of the TTC team—designers, and lead actor with whom I have worked for decades. We looked long and hard to cast the other actors, with the help of casting director Stuart Howard. We took and gave advice to one another; we admired and critiqued. Everyone cared. We worked with great financial and time restraints; at the end, I joked that we brought in a $300,000 production for $30,000. No one got paid what they deserved. Luba Lukova designed our poster art. Catherine Greninger directed our outreach campaign. Donald Eastman’s set used found materials; his ideas about simplicity, his suggestion to use scaffolding were crucial to my understanding of how to stage this play. Tony Giovannetti’s and Miriam Crowe’s lights as always were more stunning than I could imagine, and Arthur Rosen’s music, again, as always, was funk-beautiful. Beth Graczyk choreographed a birth full of the agony, terror, effort and beauty of a real birth. As always, Sally Ann Parsons’ costume shop, Parsons-Meares donated labor and goods, while she and Carisa Kelly created pregnant bellies, fantastical newbies to be nursed and born on stage, and the owl to wow. How do you act the metamorphosis of wise man into bird of wisdom? Perhaps, you have to be George Bartenieff to do so, with his unique blend of physical and emotional dexterity, so that watching him act is akin to seeing the innermost-self made manifest. He was a man trembling on the brink of supernatural vision, then, all of a sudden, with spread wings, an owl hooting. Lisa Birnbaum, Emily Fury Daly, Tommie J. Moor, and, of course, George, worked together with the most generosity, caring, commitment and bravery of any cast I’ve ever had. In the end, I was humbled and grateful. It takes a village to create a play. And an audience to receive one.
Above: Lisa Birbaum as Michelle, Emily Fury Daly as Eve, Tommie Moore as Tenaka, George Bartenieff as Opa.
photos (c) Beatriz Schiller
WHO? WHOO! “OTHER THAN WE”
KAREN MALPEDE’S LATEST
ECO-FEMINIST PLAY AT LA MAMA
Karen Malpede’s plays scream “Pay Attention.” Thus I titled my 2001 New York Times article on I Will Bear Witness, her play based on the war diaries of Victor Klemperer, and the same is true now, almost two decades later, in thinking about Malpede’s latest work, Other Than We, a “cli-fi” play, which ended its run at La MaMa in early December 2019. Malpede is an eco-feminist, pacifist writer and director, who in collaboration with her life partner, the extraordinary performer George Bartenieff and the late Lee Nagrin, have produced activist poetic theatre under the banner of their company, Theatre Three Collaborative for the past 33 years. In this work as in Malpede’s Extreme Whether, which she also directed and produced at La MaMa, Malpede uses image-rich language and striking stage pictures to transmit an urgent call for global unity, imagination, transformation, and action, in the face of current and imminent climate catastrophes. Click here to read more.
OTHER THAN WE Described as “a cli-fi eco-feminist fable,” this new play written and directed by Karen Malpede finds four scientists concocting a bold response to the climate crisis.
For more reviews check out these links below:
Broadway World: Photo Flash: First Look at Karen Malpede's OTHER THAN WE
The Independent: “Hope Rises from Climate Disaster…”
Motherhood Later…THAN SOONER: Other Than We: Show Review by Jo Mispel
“A playful but powerful meditation on urgent philosophical questions . . . on consciousness, language, evolution, life, and death.”
Artists And Climate Change: On Late Style Ecotheatre
“There’s a wilding inside that connects to a wilding up there.”
(photos by Matthew Weinstein)
Other than We by Karen Malpede
First Reading was on December 11, 2017 at 4:30 pm - FREE
The Segal Theater, 34th St. and Fifth Ave., NYC
Other Than We had its first public reading at the Segal Theater, CUNY-Graduate Center. With: George Bartenieff, Christen Clifford, Caitlin Nasema Cassidy, Paul Pryce.
We are excited to workshop this new play in the summer and to share it with you a soon as is possible. In many ways, this strangely hopeful futuristic drama with music is a sequel to Extreme Whether.