(LEFT) Kate Douglas, photo by Stephanie Crousillat (RIGHT) Kate Tarker, photo by Maura Athari
(PRINCETON, NJ) -- Princeton University's High Meadows Environmental Institute and Lewis Center for the Arts and The Civilians, a New York City-based theater company, announce the 2024-25 artists of their collaborative initiative, The Next Forever, Kate Douglas and Kate Tarker.
The Next Forever is a partnership that seeks to create new stories for a changing planet, exploring how dynamic storytelling can engage vital environmental subjects and provide the vision and inspiration society needs to navigate the challenges of our planet’s future — the “next forever.”
The two artists will spend time on the Princeton University campus as guest artists, engage with faculty and students across disciplines, and participate in an ongoing series of public events and performances over the course of a year-long residency and two-year commissioning agreement. They join last year’s inaugural artists Kareem Fahmy and AriDy Nox, who are continuing to develop the works they began during their residencies last year.
The Next Forever initiative asks: “What stories can we tell to find our way out of the planetary crisis we’re in?” relating to climate change, biodiversity loss, ecological collapse, and food insecurity. The initiative provides forward-thinking artists unparalleled access to a cross-disciplinary range of knowledge and ideas—of scientists, conservation psychologists, historians, and policy and communications experts, and fellow artists, among others. The program supports artists as they pursue rigorous inquiry into their subject matter alongside some of Princeton’s greatest thinkers. The Next Forever also funds a series of commissions of theatrical work that offer new visions for how humanity relates to the world around it.
Douglas is a writer, performer and composer. Her recent work includes The Apiary, nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award; Tulipa through New York Stage and Film; and hag with co-writer Grace McLean through The New Group. She has been awarded residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm, Swale House on Governors Island, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, Millay Arts, and Goodspeed Musicals, among others. She is an alumnus of the Dramatists Guild Fellows Program, Colt Coeur, The Civilians R&D Group, GTG Speakers Corner, and The Orchard Project Greenhouse. Her performance credits include Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, where she also held the title of associate artist; Liz Phair's 30th Anniversary Tour of her seminal album Exile in Guyville; Fernando Rubio’s Everything by my side; Third Rail’s The Grand Paradise; and Kansas City Choir Boy, starring Todd Almond and Courtney Love. Her upcoming projects include Centuries starring opposite her co-writers Matthew Dean Marsh and Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez at Ancram Center for the Arts. She holds a certificate in sustainable garden design from New York Botanical Garden.
During her residency, Douglas is conducting further research and developing her new work, If I Forget Thee, O Earth, a full-length play that puts the cosmic and the terrestrial in the context of mass extinction events (present and past) through the lens of astrobiology. In the play, an astronaut and a robot are rehearsing a mission to Mars in the Utah desert that is interrupted by the discovery of fossils. When a paleontologist arrives to assess their significance, it sparks a conflict around the question of habitability and sustainability on Earth and Mars: in this age of mass extinction, whose work is more vital, the futurists’ or the historians’?
Tarker is an American playwright who grew up bilingually in Germany. Her plays include Montag and THUNDERBODIES performed at Soho Rep, Dionysus Was Such a Nice Man at The Wilma Theater and FoolsFURY Theater, and Laura and the Sea at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble.
During her residency, Tarker is conducting further research and developing her new play, Topia, a metafictional journey through optimism, pessimism, and two possible climate futures for Providence, Rhode Island. In the play’s rapidly changing city, two very different women imagine their way into each other’s lives and accidentally open Pandora’s box along the way.
“The Lewis Center is excited to collaborate with the High Meadows Environmental Institute, The Civilians, and our new cohort of The Next Forever partners in creating new visions of – and for – our collective futures,” said Judith Hamera, chair of the Lewis Center. “These artists bring remarkable projects that explore the realities of resource extraction, climate impacts on familiar places, and the expanses of deep time, equipping our imaginations to confront the existential urgencies and realities of climate change. The Next Forever exemplifies the ways interdisciplinary connections between artists and environmental scientists can sharpen our thinking about, and challenge complacency and pessimism around, one of the central challenges of our time.”
“We are delighted to welcome Kate Douglas and Kate Tarker as this year’s guest artists,” said Gabriel Vecchi, director of the High Meadows Environmental Institute. “At HMEI, we embrace the humanities as essential to a comprehensive exploration of environmental topics. Through their residencies at Princeton, our Next Forever guests are engaging with climate scientists, geochronologists, astrophysicists, ethicists, and political scientists—to inform their works. And we scientists in turn have the novel opportunity to contribute to the development of works in the performing arts that may inform societal perceptions of our future—literally our Next Forever.”
Douglas and Tarker started their residencies this fall.
The 2023-24 artists, Kareem Fahmy and AriDy Nox, have continued development of their plays begun last year based on their ongoing research.
Fahmy, a Canadian-born playwright and director of Egyptian descent, has been working on his new play, Riparian Rights, which tells the story of how a new Nile River dam has brought Egypt and Ethiopia to a geopolitical breaking point. Examining how humanity’s relentless harnessing of natural resources to improve our lives has become a double-edged sword in times of climate catastrophe, the play asks: What happens when one country’s progress leads to another country’s decline?
Nox, a multi-disciplinary, Black femme storyteller, has been working on their new play, Why Y’all Hate Earth So Bad, an interactive reverse-ancestral play that centers a group of young descendants who bootleg the latest in virtual-reality technology to perform a jerry-rigged seance of their respective ancestors, all in the hopes of asking one burning question: Why are ya’ll making Earth so damn unlivable?
Fahmy spent a total of three weeks over several visits to campus during the 2023-24 academic year speaking with faculty from a range of disciplines including hydrologists, Ethiopian historians, and international policy makers, as well as students, to gather research for his play-in-progress. Each discussion led to referrals from others around the world whose work intersected with his story. The fellowship also allowed him to visit Egypt and enlist a research assistant; he hopes to next visit Ethiopia, where much of the play is set.
Nox also spent considerable time on campus gathering information that informs their new work, speaking with professors, undergraduate students, and Ph.D. students in areas such as climate change and alternative energy sources. These conversations have also led to further meetings with global experts.
On April 21, Fahmy and Nox will discuss their works-in-progress on campus, possibly sharing some draft excerpts, and gather feedback from the University community, particularly those that helped inform the research thus far. A goal of the event is to assist the playwrights in the developmental process of their new works, as well as to demonstrate the value of artists working in collaboration with scientists and vice versa.
In conjunction with this event, on April 14 the Lewis Center and High Meadows Environmental Institute will partner with McCarter Theatre to present a reading of a new play, The Gulf, that Steve Cosson, founding artistic director of The Civilians, has been working on. The reading will be followed by a talkback with scientists from HMEI and a discussion of the artistic process. The play explores the work of a toxicologist/biologist who advocates for and helps organize communities negatively impacted by the petro-chemical industry. Cosson, along with the late composer Michael Friedman, were Barron Visiting Professors at Princeton from 2009 to 2010, during which time they researched and wrote The Great Immensity, one of the first American musicals to address climate change. The musical went on to receive support from the National Science Foundation and premiered in New York City at The Public Theatre in 2012.
The Next Forever builds on the partnership between The Civilians and Princeton that began with the development of The Great Immensity.
As part of The Next Forever, Cosson is co-teaching an undergraduate course at Princeton in the spring. Cross-listed between the Program in Theater and Music Theater and the Program in Environmental Studies, “Investigative Theater for a Changing Climate” is taught by Cosson and theater director and arts-based researcher Khristián Méndez Aguirre. The course, which is open to undergraduates from all disciplines, explores how dramatic storytelling shapes responses to environmental issues, blending documentary-based theater and eco-dramaturgical approaches to create narratives that stage environmental injustice. Tarker and Douglas will be guest speakers in the course.
High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI) – the interdisciplinary center of environmental research, education, and outreach at Princeton University – advances understanding of the Earth as a complex system influenced by human activities and informs solutions to local and global challenges by conducting groundbreaking research across disciplines and preparing future leaders in diverse fields to impact a world increasingly shaped by climate change. More than 140 faculty, representing 30 academic disciplines, are affiliated with HMEI and contribute to the Institute’s environmental research and teaching activities.
The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University believes that art arises out of questions. Its classes and minors in creative writing, dance, theater and music theater, and visual arts, and in the interdisciplinary Princeton Atelier, operate on the principle that rigorous artistic practice is a form of research, innovation, discovery, and intervention. Like scholarship of any kind, rigorous artistic practice is a way of interrogating that which is accepted or understood in an attempt to break into the territory of the unknown or under-explored.
Founded in 2001, The Civilians is dedicated to ambitious and exuberant new theater that creatively interrogates our lived experience; questions and tests the stories that shape our world; and awakens new thinking and perceptions. Its signature work is “investigative theater”— projects created through field research, community collaborations, and other methods of in-depth inquiry. Shows originated with The Civilians include Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, cited by The New York Times as the “4th Best Play of the Past 25 Years,” and Lucas Hnath’s Dana H., recently on Broadway and included in Top 10 of 2021 lists by The New York Times and Time magazine. Other shows include José Rivera’s Another Word for Beauty, and many works with composer Michael Friedman: Gone Missing; Pretty Filthy; Paris Commune; and more. The Civilians has participated in several BAM Next Wave Festivals, has been produced at many major regional and off-Broadway theaters, and was the first theater company to be Artist-in-Residence at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. With Ghostlight Records, The Michael Friedman Recording Project is creating nine albums of our founding member’s works. The company supports emerging and established artists each year through its new work programs which include the R&D Group new works lab, and a cabaret series of new musicals. The Civilians produces a podcast on SoundCloud; publishes Extended Play, an online journal about its work and the broader theater field; and sustains an active Education Program.
