A year ago, I heard a brilliant ecologist on On Being with Krista Tippett. Highly recommend the podcast: Tippett gathers philosophers, activists, poets, and scientists to talk about modern spirituality. On one unseasonably warm day, an earth scientist spoke about the collective state of anxiety we’re living in—not just Americans, not just people with iPhones, but all humans. He suggested this anxiety isn’t just cultural or psychological, but biological—an inevitable response to recognizing the distress of the planet itself. Which makes a certain sense when we are, maybe inconveniently, of the earth.

This landed with me because I had been working on a piece with two professional clowns about the last block of ice left in the world. As one does. We were trying to articulate the surreal grief of becoming mothers while also realizing that the ground beneath us is not as stable as we were promised—by our mothers, when we were children, in a tone that strongly suggested they had checked.

There’s an increasingly urgent conversation among writers, poets, and Indigenous land stewards about the relationship between humans and the non-human world. Rebecca Solnit, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Macfarlane—a whole chorus gently (and sometimes not so gently) nudging us out of the center of the story. And within this decentering, I find myself wondering: what’s theater to do? How might theater approach this
without preaching to the choir or sending the choir running for the exits?

Enter Bess Wohl’s Continuity—a sharp comedy with a bellyache. The play follows Maria, an independent filmmaker who, after success at Sundance, sets out to make a meaningful film about the climate crisis. It is, of course, such a good idea that a major studio steps in. The project gets bigger. Notes multiply. Stakes rise. Nuance… negotiates.

And suddenly we are watching a play about a film about a melting ice floe in the northeastern Siberian Sea—shot in New Mexico, in peak summer, against an ocean of blue screen.

What could possibly go wrong? But the more interesting question—the one that keeps tugging at me—is what finds a way to go right. I’m always drawn to undertows — invisible forces that show up as goosebumps, as a quickened heart. Continuity suggests that even inside distortion, something true survives. Maybe even insists.

To place the human being at the center of “animate” is a bold, lonely, and ultimately unsustainable choice. Continuity offers another possibility: that when we surrender, even briefly, to a living world beyond ourselves, something recalibrates. Our vision sharpens. Our nervous systems settle. And we begin to remember that we were never the main character to begin with—just one voice in a much larger, ongoing story.