Stephen Kunken (left) plays oil lobbyist Don Pearlman, who narrates Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s play Kyoto, about the U.N. process that culminated in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997; here Pearlman is joined by the U.S. delegate (Kate Burton) and climate-change denier Fred Singer (Peter Bradbury).
Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s Kyoto, now playing at Lincoln Center after runs in Stratford-upon-Avon and London, opens by breaking the fourth wall and reminding the audience that “the times you live in are fucking awful.” The statement, delivered by the play’s narrator, Don Pearlman (Stephen Kunken), a right-wing Department of Energy lawyer during the Reagan administration and now a climate change–denying crusader, is preceded by video projections (designed by Akhila Krishnan) of Americans acting violently, including the Jan. 6 terrorists storming the Capitol. For Pearlman, the 1990s, the period on which the play concentrates, “were freakin’ glorious” by comparison.
Pearlman is often accompanied by his wife, Shirley (Natalie Gold), on his travels around the world in defense of fossil fuels.
What follows is a sleek, intermittently compelling production, directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, that spans 1989 to 1997 and the passage of the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty committing states to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Even anchored by a terrific performance from Kunken, the play ultimately feels too much like a dramatized Wikipedia entry populated by caricatures, and one with a frustratingly muddled message.
It’s fitting that Kyoto is a Royal Shakespeare Company production, since the authors have used a device straight out of Richard III: the villain is the storyteller. Pearlman, like Richard, relishes his role as the antagonist, taking the audience into his confidence and mocking their liberal pieties. He is enlisted by the even more villainous Seven Sisters, representatives of the world’s largest oil companies, portrayed here as almost supernaturally ominous figures in black trench coats, to stymie the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Don takes to his role as destroyer of any international progress on addressing greenhouse gas emissions with verve and glee; “The science isn’t clear!” becomes his refrain. Traveling the world along with the U.N. delegates, he teams up with Fred Singer (Peter Bradbury), a scientist skeptical of climate change, and Saudi Arabia (its delegate portrayed by Dariush Kashani) to throw wrench after wrench into the already delicate and difficult proceedings.
The stage is designed (by Miriam Buether) as an elevated circular platform around which both audience members and actors playing the delegates sit. The delegates take the name of their countries: China (Feodor Chin) clashes with the U.S.’s strategically ineffectual delegate (Kate Burton, who once again showcases her pitch-perfect comic timing), while Tanzania (Roslyn Ruff) and Kiribati (Taina Tully) inject some righteous indignation into the often cynical proceedings.
The U.S. delegate spends much time battling with her counterpart from China and trying to manage pressure from the Clinton White House to get something done that the U.S. Senate might approve. Photographs by Emilio Madrid.
The most gripping moments of the drama involve attempts to modify language in the reports, as countries haggle over verbs, nouns, punctuation, and brackets: a request to un-bracket “Climate change will cause negative impacts” becomes a fight to revise it as “Climate change will cause negative and positive impacts,” which becomes “Climate change will cause negative and positive impacts, but the negative ones will dominate,” which finally becomes nothing, as the lack of agreement means the original sentence is cut from the report. All of this negotiation over language comes to life thanks to Krishnan’s interactive projections.
Pearlman’s main antagonist is the heroically determined but disarmingly lighthearted Argentinian ambassador to China, Raúl Estrada-Oyuela (Jorge Bosch), who teams up with Germany’s Angela Merkel (Erin Darke) and Britain’s working-class delegate (Ferdy Roberts) to actually get something ratified in Kyoto, much to Don’s devastation (though he later prevents the U.S. from ratifying anything).
Don’s wife, Shirley (Natalie Gold), accompanies him on many of his official trips, and mostly she seems focused on when Don is going to call their adult son Brad, who seems to have some nonspecific need of fatherly advice that Don is just too busy to convey.
After many years, when Shirley seems to finally understand that Don is on the wrong side of things, she has her own address to the audience, in which she relates that disagreement is just part of marriage; Don’s activities don’t seem to have dimmed him in her estimation. After Kyoto, she pronounces, “The whole world, we did agree,” even though she has just said that “America didn’t ratify the protocol” because of her husband.
Is this an attempt to soften Don, which would run counter to the Richard III–like premise and calls into question the device of telling the story entirely through Don’s eyes? Or is this strained sentiment just in service of the play’s thesis that today we live in a world where no one can agree, whereas the 1990s were different? That may be so, yet rather than an avatar of principled disagreement or someone embodying nostalgia for a bygone era, Don seems eerily familiar—like a man who would be very much at home in a Trump administration and in a post-truth world.
Kyoto plays through Nov. 30 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday and at 8 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday and at 3 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit lct.org.
Playwright: Joe Murphy & Joe Robertson
Director: Stephen Daldry & Justin Martin
Set Design: Miriam Buether
Lighting Design: Aideen Malone
Sound Design: Christopher Reid
Costume Design: Natalie Pryce
Video Design: Akhila Krishnan
Original Music: Paul Englishby
