Earth Day Event: Staged Reading of "Two Degrees"
- Public Event
A cool new play about frozen people on a thawing planet, written by Tira Palmquist and directed by Joshua Wolf Coleman, presented by Theater Arts at Caltech.
Emma Phelps is a paleoclimatologist, focusing on ice in Greenland. She sees firsthand what we have wrought in terms of climate change. She's also a recent widow and, until recently, all she could think to do was to study, to amass data, to publish. Now she's asked to come to Washington, D.C. to testify before a Senate Committee regarding climate change legislation, and she finds more than just a little is breaking up under the strain of change.
Audience members and the public are invited to attend a free dynamic post-show discussion when the playwright Tira Palmquist and the director Joshua Wolf Coleman are joined onstage by the play's science mentor Jennifer Walker.
Tira Palmquist has authored the plays Two Degrees, Ten Mile Lake, Age of Bees, And Then They Fell, and many others. Two Degrees, her newest play, was recently read at the 2015 Athena Project Festival in Denver. Tira teaches writing at UC Irvine and at the Orange County School of the Arts.
Director Joshua Wolf Coleman is known for his acting roles in the films Multiple, Mr. President, and Hidalgo and such TV shows as How To Get Away with Murder, Castle, Scandal, Parenthood, and Grey's Anatomy. Josh performed the role of Clay in a reading of Two Degrees" at The Road Theater.
Science mentor Jennifer Walker is an Environmental Science doctoral student in the Simona Bordoni research group at Caltech. Her research focuses on the atmosphere and on the tropical monsoons which affect the water resources, agricultural productivity, and economic vitality of more than half the world's population. Jennifer is also co-founder of Science & Engineering Policy at Caltech (SEPAC), a student organization which explores the roles of scientists and engineers in policy development.
The performance of Two Degrees is the first event of "MACH 33: The Festival of New Science-Driven Plays at Caltech," presented by Theater Arts at Caltech under the direction of Brian Brophy.
Don't miss the FREE Climate Change Interactive Experience at 7:00 p.m. in the lobby and on the patio just outside.
This Earth Day event is presented by Theater Arts at Caltech and cosponsored by JPL/NASA, with generous support from Caltech's Linde Center for Global Environmental Science, TIAA-CREF, "Modern Family," Diane and Robert Lang (recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award), and many others.
