Tisch Drama Stage's "The Duck" reinterprets a 19th-Century drama by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.
Rehearsals are in full swing for TISCH DRAMA STAGE’s production, The Duck. This devised work reinterprets Henrik Ibsen’s 19th Century drama The Wild Duck in the context of climate breakdown, platform capitalism, and our current geological era, the Anthropocene.
The project is a collaborative effort. The Duck was conceived by Shonni Enelow, Sebastián Calderón Bentin, and Una Chaudhuri. Enelow wrote the script; Calderón Bentin is directing; and Chaudhuri is the production’s dramaturg.
The piece explores the challenges and opportunities of a family swept up by extractivist modernity whose past and resourcefulness might hold the key to new forms of multi-species kinship and flourishing. In the broken world of the play a disgraced forest scientist and a tech savvy teenager draw inspiration from the Popol Vuh to transform the world, using interspecies DNA and a stolen code from an app-in-development originally intended to strengthen the alliance of consumer capitalism and addiction.
“Devising this work with drama students—the designers are as engaged in the devising as the actors—has been exciting and inspiring,” said Chaudhuri. “The play is partly about how to make plays in which we can imagine—or "try out"—planetary futures that are different from the dystopian ones suggested by the current environmental crisis and climate emergency: futures of multi-species thriving and ecospheric lifeways.”
She adds: “We're trying to imagine a future that is different from the tragic one in Ibsen's play yet is also suggested by the more-than-human elements in the play—the forest, the duck. In our rehearsal process the actors and designers have embraced these non-human elements with curiosity, playfulness, embodiment, and great good humor. What's emerging is a landscape of questions and possibilities, of second chances and new conversations.”
