NEW YORK — V, the playwright formerly Eve Ensler, is hoping her new piece of theater can do for climate change what her “The Vagina Monologues” did for women’s rights.
“We’re living in a period where we’re so disconnected,” she says. “What we all have to do is connect — connect to the Earth and connect to each other.”
She hopes to give audiences a road map at the one-night-only staging of “Dear Everything,” with actors and activists Jane Fonda and Rosario Dawson speaking to the crowd. It will play Manhattan’s Terminal 5 on Jan. 30.
“At a time when our planet is burning from the impact of global warming and human-made climate catastrophe, ‘Dear Everything’ is a powerful musical uprising,” Fonda said in an email.
The concert-musical hybrid has songs by Justin Tranter and Caroline Pennell, choreography by Christiana Hunt and direction by Tony Award-winner Diane Paulus.
V will play the narrator for a story with 10 singers as well as a youth choir. The show doesn’t spell out a single prescription for climate change but hopes to inspire collective action.
“It’s not necessarily about the politics of solution. It’s about the politics of connection,” says V. “I think it’s imaginative. I think it’s really calling on all of us to use our imaginations because that’s the greatest thing we have to really see a way out of where we are.”
“Dear Everything” had an earlier run at Harvard University’s American Repertory Theater. Back then, it was called “WILD,” and its run was cut short by the pandemic.
“I was trying to find a way to create a story, to create pop music, that could really generate an awakening in people. Not by pounding them over the head, but by saying, ‘Listen to the kids. Listen to young people. They really have a vision of what’s coming because they can feel it in their bodies and they want a life.’”
V hopes “Dear Everything” can be produced elsewhere. It’s not expensive and doesn’t need fancy sets or lighting, a bit like her “The Vagina Monologues,” a series of sly, lyrical, incisive first-person vignettes based on her interviews with hundreds of women.
V describes the Earth as a woman and sees her activism against climate change as part of her overall fight to protect and honor women.
“We made the mission to end violence against women, girls and trans and non-binary people and the Earth because it was all part of the same story,” she says. “We’re still going.”
