How hard is it to use non-disposable cups?

Q: I am a theatre artist. How should I tackle Global Warming?

A: Let's start with the following idea. People hate global warming b/c it involves telling them to stop doing stuff. Stop consuming, stop travelling, stopusing disposable cups, stop having fun.

Fuck that.

So if you make a work about global warming (by which I mean "on the issue of global warming") you will be faced with two options, either getting it "right", and forecasting a slow slide into impending disaster of our own creation (or more likely going halfway towards this point, b/c it's scary), or getting it "wrong", and clouding this idea or suggesting it  is false, like Richard Bean did with The Heretic.

Q: Um, bad choices.

What are some other choices?

A: Well, of course, we could bury it in an allegory like the modernists did. But does that really work any more? Ionesco's Rhinosceros? Durrenmatt's The Visit? What text even these classics, can carry the tragedy of a political gridlock and national self-interest upheld by years of individualism and carefree consumption? What has adequate irony? Hamlet? ...Wicked?

No, I put it to you that it cannot be done. So we must take the other option, we must make a work that is not "about" global warming at all.

Let me for a moment re-examine the declaration from that great political mastermind Karl Rove, as relayed to journalist Ron Suskind:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Ah, so it's the ACTION that creates the reality, according to Rove. All this discussion, as lovely and peaceful as it may be does not displace the power of action to create reality.

So as Hamlet says:

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion
be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the
word to the action 

Thus it is not words themselves but the happy co-existence of word and action which generate impact.

Q: But how do I put action into a subject that, surely it must be engaged with, but it seems so... dialogue heavy?

A: Perhaps the solution doesn't look like theatre at all. Or perhaps it is a matter of not "What is it to be about?", for that question is solved with the idea that anything which is not about global warming is irrelevant (or worse - a lie), but instead those other questions that make up the theatre which are seldom addressed... and here they are:

how
where
using what materials
using how much
when
why not something else
at what cost?
how can you justify that??
shouldn't you just give up?
wouldn't that money have been better off spent in schools, hospitals, or on more police on the streets?

And I put it to you that this should be our New Theatre. It will be tremendously unpopular. But it will acheieve something.

Q: Thank you. I'm sure it will be a wild ride.