Despite its name and original mission, Second Stage Theater, founded in 1979, has in recent years expanded its reach to include many new works by early-career playwrights.
The latest beneficiary of that expansion is Amy Berryman, who makes her professional New York debut with “Walden,” the promising but unconvincing story of twin astronaut sisters on opposite sides of a philosophical divide in a devastating climate dystopia. It opened Thursday at Second Stage’s Off Broadway space, the Tony Kiser Theater in Midtown Manhattan.
The promising part of the play is the new angle it offers on an old sci-fi setup. In Berryman’s vision of the near future, Earth has reached what the sisters call P.O.N.R., for “point of no return.” NASA, having (like Second Stage) expanded its original mission, decides to accelerate plans to build habitations on Mars. But unlike movies with a similar premise, the prime movers here are women.
That makes for fresh takes on the usual questions of home and hearth and the fate of humanity. It’s nice to see that, at least at first, Cassie (Zoë Winters) is a gung-ho adventurer. Having just returned from a year on the moon, where she became the first person to “grow something from nothing” on its inhospitable surface, she has now been asked to lead an epochal mission to Mars.
Not that Earth’s surface is much more hospitable, with violent weather and rising tides killing millions and causing wars. In response, Cassie’s skittish sister, Stella, has retreated to the American interior to nest in a corrugated but strangely chic wilderness cabin. Stella (Emmy Rossum) is also an astronaut — or was. Though she left NASA under mysterious circumstances, her design for a new habitation called Walden will be the one used on Mars. Cassie will likely live there for the rest of her life.
On the weekend before she begins training for that future, Cassie visits Stella after a long estrangement. Inevitably, a debate breaks out between them about whether to prioritize saving the planet (as Stella favors) or preparing an escape route (as Cassie does). Encouraging Stella’s view is her boyfriend, Bryan (Motell Foster), a so-called Earth Advocate for whom expanding the reach of human depravity to virgin new worlds is a poor excuse for not cleaning up the old one.
However cosmological that seems, the debate is mostly domestic. There may not be any other way to do it. As several recent plays have shown, it’s hard to dramatize climate disaster except through survivors’ adjustments to it, emotionally and otherwise.
Berryman resorts to an unfortunate love-triangle approach; to support it, all three characters are contorted. Cassie and Stella mush toward the conventional middle — though both Winters (on “Succession”) and Rossum (on “Shameless”) have shown they are good at extremes. And Bryan, despite his convictions, must somehow be moderate enough to appeal to Cassie, yet also, naturally, hunky and chill. Worse, Berryman uses him as a dramaturgical road sign, saying things like “She didn’t tell you?” and “It’ll be good!” to remind you that it will not.
Despite the hat tip to Thoreau in its title, “Walden” eventually goes full soap opera. Its crisis isn’t so much about forcing Stella to choose between Mars and Earth as about forcing her to choose between Cassie and Bryan. The performances often lean overbroad too, laboriously alternating between breeziness and dudgeon. Only Winters, always an expert at making contradictions emulsify, is convincing — if not overall, then moment by moment.
Though the Second Stage production, directed stiffly by Whitney White, is the play’s first in New York, “Walden” had its world premiere in London in May, 2021, and its American premiere two months later in a cabin on the banks of the Connecticut River. My colleague Alexis Soloski named that environmental staging, from TheaterWorks Hartford, a Critic’s Pick, though instead of the live performance, she saw a streaming version. Perhaps the soap opera elements of “Walden” felt more at home in a flat-screen format.
But despite the typically handsome Second Stage production — sets by Matt Saunders, costumes by Qween Jean, lighting by Adam Honoré, sound by Lee Kinney — the play feels shallow in a regular theater.
And yet it’s not quite right to call the Kiser a regular theater. As retrofitted into the shell of a 1920s bank by the architect Rem Koolhaas — the box office is in the former vault — it is an almost ideal Off Broadway space: chic and quirky, with hard foam seats but glamorous grommeted draperies. At 296 seats, it’s big enough to let a hit show expand yet small enough to give embryonic work like “Walden” a shot.
Alas, “Walden” is Second Stage’s final show at the Kiser. After 87 productions in 25 years, including Broadway-bound musicals and riveting niche plays, the theater can no longer afford the rent. I just hope that when this crucial company lands in a hospitable new Off Broadway home, it won’t be on Mars.
The post ‘Walden’ Review: My Sister! My Twin! My Astronaut! appeared first on New York Times.
