INTERVIEW: Welcome to your dystopian future in ‘Really Really Gorgeous’
Photo: Really Really Gorgeous is playwright Nick Mecikalski’s creative look at climate change. Photo courtesy of Kevin Bianchi / Provided by Emily Owens PR with permission.
Really Really Gorgeous, the new play running through Feb. 9 at The Tank, envisions a dystopian future where everything is underwater, but the televisions still work, according to press notes. The audience learns of this bleak future — caused by climate change — thanks to two women who must deal with the apocalyptic realities around them, yet they also still yearn to live out their dreams and gain celebrity status.
The allegorical play is the brainchild of playwright Nick Mecikalski. The production, which comes courtesy of Lucy Powis and The Hodgepodge Group, is directed by Miranda Haymon. Really Really Gorgeous was a finalist for 2017’s Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference.
Mecikalski is a previous artistic associate with Roundabout Theatre Company, and his work has been performed or developed at IRT Theater, Dixon Place and Nashville Repertory Theatre, according to his official biography. Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with the playwright. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
What inspired the creation of this play?
Really Really Gorgeous was inspired by the question — what happens when climate change gets personal? It’s not really the data or statistics that are the most viscerally scary parts about climate change, after all. It’s what the data and statistics promise, which is that one day, climate change will affect each of our lives in ways that we can’t quite predict. (Of course, this is already happening to people around the world, and has been for years.) We wonder — will we have to leave our homes? Will the tap water run out? Will there be fights over food at the grocery store? Will we have to give up our careers? Will we still be able to be who we want to be? And — one of the central questions of this play — what will happen to our relationships with the people we love the most?
Are the apocalyptic themes meant to offer commentary on current issues in the world, perhaps climate change?
In Really Really Gorgeous, I imagined an America in which certain effects of climate change are, actually, even more over-the-top than they would be in reality. The nation has been completely flooded by rising seas, and in almost all livable areas (including our main characters’ home), a thin blanket of disgusting floodwater coats the ground. Most cities have been flooded beyond the point of habitability, millions of people have died, and the country is a much smaller place than it once was … or so we hear from The Announcer, a one-woman-show broadcaster who is the only source of news left in the country. The true state of the nation as a whole is sort of uncertain, actually, and this is the kind of apocalypse I am interested in exploring: an apocalypse of information. Climate change certainly happened in this world, but it destroyed more than places and people and things. It destroyed the populace’s grasp on what’s real … which is a far more familiar state of affairs right now than I could have imagined when I started writing this play back in 2016.
How would you describe your two main characters?
The two main characters, Pen and Mar, are doing their best to survive in a dying country. They love each other and they need each other, but when the opportunity for true security and comfort comes along, will they try to push each other out of the way to attain it? Or will they be able to share? This is the question that drives this play: in a world of extreme destruction, which wins out — love or survival?
What’s it like to collaborate with director Miranda Haymon?
Miranda is a phenomenal director. In the years I’ve known her, I’ve seen her helm so many different kinds of projects — from a highly physicalized adaptation of a Kafka story, to a staged reading of one of the most popular musicals of the last two decades, to dark surrealist comedies by Dave Harris (including Exception to the Rule, which she is directing in the Roundabout Underground this spring). She’s incredibly good at honing in on a script’s DNA, no matter what it is, and growing the show into the best version of what it is trying to be, and Really Really Gorgeous is no exception. It’s been magical to work alongside Miranda as she brings to life the bizarre and highly specific world of Really Really Gorgeous in the bizarre and highly specific way it wants to be brought to life. She is a true collaborator in this way, and it has been wonderful to workshop this play with her over the last several months.
Oh, and on top of all this, she also creates a positive and energetic rehearsal room where everyone has a voice and has a ton of fun! What can I say? She is the real deal!
Do you have hope for America’s future?
Well, I can’t say I have a lot of hope that, at this point, the country (or the world) will do what it needs to do to avoid some major consequences of climate change. We’ve missed a few too many deadlines for that. But I have hope that we will, one day, take the truly drastic steps that we need to take to combat global warming. We’ll probably do it too late, and some of our cities might actually fall underwater. But one day, I hope, we will all be united in our quest to save our planet, and together we’ll be able to accomplish a lot more than we ever thought we could. (And, though this may sound strange, I have a distant but sincere hope in our technology. Our computers are growing exponentially sophisticated, and there’s a part of me — maybe it’s the same part that wants to believe that Star Wars really did happen a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away — that dreams of a world in which our AI develop a way to reverse climate change with airborne nanorobots. Too bad they’ll probably kill us all soon after that.)
What do you think the piece says about celebrity culture?
This play depicts celebrity as a means of survival in a world where the ‘common’ person is considered expendable. Naturally, then, a celebrity who will do anything to stay a celebrity … sounds familiar!
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Really Really Gorgeous by Nick Mecikalski plays through Feb. 9 at The Tank in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
