PLaywriting
In recent years, my playwriting practice has become deeply community-based.
In July 2016, I was invited by NoPassport Theatre Alliance and Missing Bolts Productions to write a piece in response to the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, which had occurred just weeks before. The work would become part of After Orlando, a collection of short plays made available cost-free to universities and venues worldwide for festival presentation. The goal was to provide multiple perspectives on this national tragedy and make room for grieving and healing in the community. My play, Today is a Good Day, was performed in over a dozen cities in the U.S. and internationally.
This quick-commission + free festival model is known as a “Theater Action”– a mode of responsive theater-making that creates space for audiences to confront and reckon with current events through performance.
I was subsequently commissioned by the Climate Change Theater Action Project (CCTA).
As a global participatory project, CCTA uses theatre to unite communities and encourage them to take local and global action on climate change. Every other year, fifty professional playwrights, representing all inhabited continents as well as several cultures and Indigenous nations, are commissioned to write five-minute plays about an aspect of climate change based on a prompt.
Two of my plays, Appreciation, written and published in response to the theme “Where is the Hope?” in 2017, and The Earth’s Blue Heart, written and published in response to the theme “Lighting the Way” in 2019, have been performed in over 50 cities globally. The plays continue to be performed and written about today; in 2023, The Earth’s Blue Heart was chosen by students in New Zealand as the basis of a cultural exchange with peers from Universidad de Los Andes in Columbia.
Please see my CV for a list of presenters.
CCTA Play Collections
Interactive map of over 45 presentations globally of Appreciation and The Earth’s Blue Heart since 2017:
Eco-Design CharRette
The Earth’s Blue Heart was the basis of a concept design in the inaugural Eco-Design Charrette hosted by internationally recognized Triga Creative & The Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (Dec 2019, Toronto).
The Charrette was centered on creating concepts for each of the 50 Climate Change Theatre Action plays for publication and exhibition with an international reach. The designs were exhibited at Triga Studio during DesignTO in 2020.
All designs generated during the Eco-Design Charrette have been published in Lighting the Way, featured at World Stage Design in Calgary 2022.
Eco-Charette Publication
The Earth’s Blue Heart Design Concept
TESTIMONIALS
“My students prepared a CCTA play before leaving Aotearoa (New Zealand). They chose Katie Pearl’s The Earth’s Blue Heart because of its dual focus on the oceans that connect us all no matter where we are on the planet and on restoring Indigenous sustainability values to the forefront of climate conversations. There were several Māori students in our group, and they felt that the play connected with their own values from their Indigenous heritage as well as offering something universal that might resonate for Colombian audiences. …The students were right: the performance sparked deep conversations and recognition of profound connections between Māori worldviews and Indigenous Colombian worldviews.”
- Prof. Elspeth Tilley, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand, on taking theater students to the Universidad de Los Andes in Columbia to explore how theater can cross cultural boundaries and create mutual understanding around the shared issue of climate change. In All Good Things Must Begin: An Anthology of Short Plays About the Climate Crisis, edited by Chantal Bilodeau, Arts & Climate Initiative and the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, 2024 (forthcoming)
“We performed Appreciation by Katie Pearl, a piece that encouraged the audience to clap for a multitude of devastating events brought about by climate change: Let’s clap for the one white rhino left in the world; a round of applause for the waters flooding back into their original waterways. Like the best activist theatre, it was fun, and funny, and you are clapping and laughing until you are really uncomfortable doing so. It feels gross, but you are required to clap for the play to succeed. So you do. And by the end, the audience is still clapping, but it is faint and painful. And we all want it to stop.”
- Alicia Hyland, Producer of Climate Change Theater Action at Brandeis University, in A Theatrical Revolution of Hope, 2017
“The shift in the room could be physically felt: the quality of the silence was incredible and awful.”
- Aysan Celik, on reading Appreciation to her students, in “Does Laughter Have a Place Here?,” HowlRound, 2018
Presence in the Field
Features and Citations
Tilley, Elspeth. “Drinking Imaginary Cosmopolitans in Beijing: Or Why Kiwis Sometimes Fly, in All Good Things Must Begin: An Anthology of Short Plays About the Climate Crisis, edited by Chantal Bilodeau, Arts & Climate Initiative and the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, 2024 (forthcoming)
Bilodeau, Chantal. “ATT On Air #19: Rain/Regen,” (spotify link) Deutches Theater Podcast, Berlin, Germany, March 2024
Triga Collective: Doyle, Shannon Lea et. al., with Ian Garett, editors. Climate Change Theatre Action Lighting the Way EcoDesign Charette, Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, Toronto, ON, 2021
Hyland, Alicia. “A Theatrical Revolution of Hope.” Artists & Climate Change, June 28, 2018
Celik, Aysan.“Does Laughter Have a Place Here?” HowlRound, Mar 19, 2018