Climate Cafe
Available for Full Production
Commissioned and presented by the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles
The Leimert Park Cultural Hub Festival of New Works: Short Plays on Environmental Justice
Play Reading on September 4, 2024
Nate Holden Performing Arts Center, Los Angeles
Climate Cafe is a commission by the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs Performing Arts Division and is available to producing theaters for full production. It is the third play of Keating’s Climate Trilogy. Set in both rural and urban locations in America, these plays are a time capsule of how America’s climate consciousness has changed over a single decade.
The final play of the trilogy, Climate Cafe, encapsulates climate injustices in Los Angeles as different communities cope with adapting their lives, strengthening the ethos of ecofeminism, and enduring climate change weather catastrophes. A Climate Cafe is a space for people to come together to eat, share stories and feel comforted from the emotional toll of enduring our climate crisis. The script depicts three different Climate Cafes and is designed to be performed around an oversized dining room table, so performers and audience exist on the same plane, creating an immediate sense of community and common ground. We are all in this together.
The play is intimately set in Los Angeles, in a future that could be today, as dystopian as our current politics and weather patterns. While the all female-identifying cast of characters share their hardships, solutions are offered through alternative ways of living, all deeply rooted in community resilience. Throughout all the action, meanwhile a white woman performs Climate Change, quietly reciting the casualties of current hurricanes, droughts, and pollution borne illness.
The first Climate Cafe is hosted at a dinner party, in a Downtown LA loft that has been transformed into a sustainable farm. Heirloom vegetables are served to the audience. As the dinner party guests struggle to commute through the torrential downpour and toxic sludge that fills the streets, the group finds solace in learning new ways to produce food in small places, eating pie, and sharing poetry. When the dinner is interrupted by loud protests against government inaction outside, the women turn to song to drown out the violence.
Members of a Trans led, off-the-grid tiny home community in Boyle Heights deal with anxiety around microplastics, air pollution, toxic beauty products, and other infestations of the body. Some members of the group are overwhelmed with their climate angst, others focus on self education and not depending on the government for aid. With delicious herbal tea served, the discussion meanders from anxiety to solutions, and reminds us that placing blame is not as useful as action and creating mutual aid.
The final Climate Cafe is hosted by a gardening group in Mid City who have turned an empty lot into a community garden. Foraged fruits are served to the audience. The gardening group hosts an artist in residency whose artwork emphasizes care in the Black community, and the need for healthy food options. The group imagines new ways for care to be accessible to all.
The play ends with a tour of a future community, an eco-village. The audience is led through gardens, urban farms, a community pantry, grey water systems, and alternative financing models. Water, too much or too little, is the main concern for all.