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.