Steve Andersen would rather be white water rafting, but he has a world to save, again. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are against action on climate change. Ten actors playing over 50 characters from 197 countries argue about how to stop climate change as part of the Montreal Protocol. Steve led the lesser known Protocol to phase out ozone-depleting gases in the 1990s. Diplomats argue, industrialists horse trade, scientists invent, and Steve, as a regulator, cajoles as the world comes together to prevent the World Avoided. The play is based on first-hand interviews with Steve Andersen and leading scientists, lawyers, and diplomats and eye-witness accounts.

World Avoided tells the story of the Montreal Protocol, the most successful climate change agreement. As a playwright, I was welcomed to the Montreal Protocol to witness meetings beginning in 2014. I had the impression it was a compatible group given all they had accomplished. I walked into a pitch battle over greenhouse gases. The play begins with this battle, flashing back to tell the story of the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons were destroying the ozone layer, the hard work to phase out and replace those gases and concludes with the passing of the historic Kigali amendment that will save a half a degree of global warming and the 30th Anniversary of the Montreal Protocol.

By way of background, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer was the first global climate agreement. In 1987, twenty-seven countries initially agreed to phase out the use of ozone depleting chemicals by 2000. By 2012, it had been ratified and fulfilled by every nation in the world including South Sudan and Iraq. While broader climate change remains an unsolved challenge, this phase out added years of life to the planet.

I had the great privilege of observing the 197 countries of the world move from a third against in 2014 to all for by October 2016. Critically, the Montreal Protocol makes all decisions on the basis of consensus. Regardless of population size, wealth, or any other consideration, every country must agree to every decision. The next goal to phase out greenhouse gases will similarly add years and give the world the chance to grapple with the more intractable problem of carbon.

In the play, ten actors portray a wide range of characters from around the world. There are critically important characters from Egypt, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Australia, and more. Science and diplomacy drive the action. When countries pledged to phase-out ozone depleting chemicals, there were no alternatives for essential uses including refrigeration and fire fighting. These extraordinary characters worked tirelessly to invent alternatives, finance, distribute and complete the phase out on schedule.

The play is technical, but not dry. There is humor. The action is driven by the desperate need to save the world and the relationships formed between allies and enemies.

The play begins in an unidentified empty space-not a traditional performance space. It could be an art gallery, a warehouse or loft. It could be a storefront, classroom, hotel—any location in which a performance would be unexpected. The audience is allowed in. Chairs are arrayed throughout, but not quite enough for every audience member. There are random found objects, broken or whole, lying about--discarded items from everyday use from home, office, factory or nature. A smattering are accessible in the open; others might be hanging on walls or from the ceiling or hidden elsewhere. Some items may be offered to random audience members as they come in.

Two female characters enter this space. It is unfamiliar to them and they are unfamiliar with each other. Unsure how they got here, they quickly find themselves “stuck” in this liminal space. Now what? The first woman introduces herself as “Olexzandra with an O and a Z.” The other responds: she is “Jill with an ill.” Gradually, Olexzandra proudly reveals she is a doctor, a wife, a mother expecting her third child. Jill reveals much less but appears to be hypo manic and suffering from somatic delusions. The two struggle to maintain their composure while competing for audience attention and approval. Frequently, they break the fourth wall to ask for random items, for confirmation, acknowledgement--anything to avoid confronting the circumstances that lay beneath their arrival at this "place" or admit their burgeoning attraction to each other. They clash against each other and then, unexpectedly find connections. Ultimately, they fall irretrievably and undeniably in love.

ME YOU US THEM is a theatrical piece utilizing both text, dance, sound and projection to create the play’s language, thus physicalizing as well as describing for an audience the world onstage. This play is particularly complicated - the language is invented, at times broken making Dance and Sound as essential a mode of communication and, at times, a more articulate one than text.

Two B-Boys find each other in a vacant lot, while a woman sits alone at her desk searching for answers on the Internet. Another B-boy arrives and an explosive connection is made between the boys and, when she figures out how to get there, the woman’s Avatar. Bound by a search for the Center of Things, the four new friends invent the ultimate battle plan.

Sean Lynch announces to his beloved wife, Fiona, they are dropping their cultured New York life and returning to his family’s ancestral home in Ireland. Shocked by this unprecedented request, Fiona presses Sean to find out what has happened. Fiona has just won a green card for her maid Esperanza to save her daughter from the poverty of Guatemala; Fiona is not going anywhere. When Fiona’s sister Kat arrives looking for her step-daughter Lily, one of Sean’s employees, the truth gradually emerges. Through flashbacks between Lily and Sean and the present battle between Sean, his wife and sister-in-law, it is uncovered that Sean and Lily were having an affair, that Sean has been de-frauding his investors for the past five years and that he had thrown Lily overboard off his sailing yacht that afternoon. A pitch black comic thriller, Dinner at Home between Deaths examines the American Dream and American identity in the face of eroding ethics.