By Anny Liu
Contributing Writer, NYU Tisch School of Art
At Tisch Drama, innovation is often born at the intersection of tradition and experimentation. The Duck, a bold adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, embodies that spirit fully. Directed by Sebastián Calderón Bentin with dramaturgy by Una Chaudhuri and a text by Shonni Enelow, this production offered students not only a chance to perform but to create, question, and shape the work from the inside out.
From the outset, the team approached The Duck not as a finalized script to be interpreted, but as a living piece of theater developed through conversation and collaboration. “Since this is a devised project, with a textual adaptation written by Shonni but with staging elements developed with our dramaturg Una, our designers, our actors, and other collaborators,” Calderón Bentin explains, “it was important to highlight the collaborative spirit of the process. Experimentation and exploration were at the heart of the process, just as much as construction and production.”
That spirit of collective authorship marked a significant departure from many college productions, where students typically work with completed scripts. Here, Tisch Drama students were asked to contribute their impulses, questions, and ideas to the foundation of the work. “This means the final performance has a true sense of collective authorship,” Calderón Bentin says. “Practicing collective forms of creation empowers students’ creative agency, opens ways of thinking together, and treats ‘collaboration’ as more than a buzzword”.
In that sense, The Duck became more than a play—it became a space for students to engage with urgent contemporary questions through the medium of performance. Climate collapse, media disinformation, political apathy, wealth inequality, and the fragile desire for repair: these were just some of the themes the ensemble explored through writing exercises, rehearsals, and open discussion. “Even though this material might not be seen or heard on stage,” Calderón Bentin notes, “it is still embedded in the performance. As Corita Kent said, ‘don’t try to create and analyze at the same time’—so we made time for both.”
Una Chaudhuri’s dramaturgical approach echoed that same ethos of integration and inquiry. A pioneer in eco-theatre and the environmental humanities, Chaudhuri sees dramaturgy not as a static form of academic support, but as an active and theatrical mode of knowledge production. “I think of all aspects of theatre practice—including things like warm-up sessions and design meetings—as ways of producing knowledge,” she says. “That expands what we think of as ‘academic’ work. We welcomed the actors’ and designers’ insights as well as their uncertainty and their confusion: that’s the soil of the kind of attitude we wanted to nurture.”
Drawing on the world of the Popol Vuh, the ancient K’iche’ Maya creation text, The Duck embraced a philosophy of experimentality—creation as partial, messy, and ongoing. “Our play is largely about experimentality as a philosophy of life, even a cosmology,” Chaudhur adds. “That meant the process was just as important as the product.”
Playwright Shonni Enelow—who, notably, was once a Tisch Drama student herself—wrote the script with the student experience in mind. The piece grew out of her long-term collaboration with Chaudhuri, and also built on earlier works they had developed together, including the 2011 play Carla and Lewis, which similarly addressed climate themes and challenged conventional dramaturgical structures. “Yes, the experiences of Tisch students as artists and young people were very much on my mind,” Shonni says. “A good amount of the text was revised and developed with the actors. Some of it I wrote very closely based on conversations we had in rehearsal.”
That openness to actor-driven development became especially important in shaping specific characters—most notably Hailey. “She changed a lot from the first draft,” Enelow recalls. “The actors are a lot closer in age to her than I am, and it was important to us that her voice be authentic to their generational experience.”
For Enelow, writing for the stage means imagining how language will live and breathe through the actors’ bodies. “It’s not just about memorizing text—it’s about discovery. I want students to approach my work as artists, not just performers.”
Ultimately, The Duck invited its ensemble to grapple with big questions—about art, the planet, and the future of storytelling—by making space for uncertainty, curiosity, and the joy of collective creation. “I hope what students take away,” Calderón Bentin reflects, “is a sense of possibility when it comes to performance, the reality that theater is what we make of it, and the importance of listening, collaborating, and thinking together. Because in the face of the critical issues of our time, that’s the only way forward.”
The Duck will be playing from April 24 to May 3 in the Abe Burrows Theater. You can learn more about this production and purchase tickets to The Duck here.