WALDEN: A Touching Earthly Requiem — Review

Emmy Rossum made a grand entrance into the theatre world in 2004, when she starred as Christine in the Phantom of the Opera film. Exactly two decades later, she makes her New York stage debut in Walden, a decidedly better-calibrated production at Second Stage’s Kiser Theatre off Broadway. Amy Berryman’s play, directed by Whitney White, is a thoughtful chamber piece about an astronaut’s Earth-bound visit to the isolationist shed where her sister, and her luddite boyfriend, live far from where people must wear respirators to breathe outside.

It’s infinitely more relatable than that sounds.

Though Cassie (Zoë Winters) walks into her sister’s secluded home wearing one of these dystopian oxygen masks, the play, set in the near-future, is not as mired in futurism as it appears – though Berryman fleshes out her world quite eloquently. Cassie is there to reconnect with Stella (Emmy Rossum), while on hiatus from an ongoing Martian colonization mission which has garnered worldwide attention. The two once worked together at NASA, following in the footsteps left for them by their astronaut father, whose paternal preferences planted early seeds of discord between the sisters. Stella, we learn, left the job rather unceremoniously, and now lives with her boyfriend Bryan (Motell Foster), who’s part of the Earth Advocate movement (“anti-cloning, anti-symbiotic embryo, anti-synthetic foods”).

It’s a testament to Berryman’s gift for intimacy, in writing her dialogue and scenario, that this never feels like a sci-fi piece. (Nevermind that the state of the world does some heavy-lifting on this front on its own.) Despite these characters representing extremes – even amid their heightened circumstances, the sisters are still the genius daughters of a famous astronaut – there is a timeliness to the way they interact; they could be in an Ibsen play, or Bergman film, discussing the hurt caused by their family relations.

The conflicts are simple and elegantly laid out. In this future, society is collapsing almost as quickly as the environment, leaving people generally in one of three camps: look to technology to save humanity, as Cassie attempts to do in Mars; or turn to the land like Bryan, who rejects most modern trappings in an attempt to save what’s here. The third group, of course, has already been sacrificed to human folly, having succumbed to climate catastrophes, refugee crises, and ongoing wars whose Christmas-day bombs Cassie could see through her telescope.

The drama is just slight enough to start to lag around the one-hour mark, when the characters’ dynamics stall within the confines of the play’s 90-minutes, wisely choosing not to expand its ambitions but sort of over-mining its central conflict. In those moments, you can comfortably retreat into the coziness of Matt Saunders’ set which, with trees growing above their Nordic minimalist home’s railroad setup,  looks like one of those Instagrammy tiny-homes taken up a survivalist notch. And Qween Jean’s fatigue-inspired costumes locate a believable (and chic) next point of fashion for a population forced to use military-grade equipment just to step outside. All of this is lit with end-of-times oranges and greens by Adam Honoré’s lighting design, which hits a peak with an Appropriate-ish finale, and well amplified by Lee Kinney’s sound.

Rossum has chosen a wise debut: her character is the crux of the story, yet mostly relieved of carrying its emotional weight until its cathartic finale. If her background means some of her lines carry the ready-set-go delivery of screen acting, she has an appealing presence and expressive face that promise a future of the onstage lived-inness at which Foster and Winters excel. All three are more than capable of bringing the play’s often-bleak emotions to stark, pulsing light.

Berryman has beautifully tapped into a vein of post-tragic desperation that envelops each scene and character with the exalted, predestined halo of a medieval painting. When that aura temporarily blinded the drama, my mind wandered. I thought of how this wonderful play, by a largely-unknown American writer, premiered cold, to positive reviews, on the West End in 2021; and how it is opening in New York, years later, in a theatre whose resident company will soon be priced out of its lease. I thought of climate – political, social, environmental – and I began to grieve. And, just as quickly, I was brought back into Berryman’s world. May she continue to guide us through times like these.

Walden is in performance through November 24, 2024 at the Tony Kiser Theatre on West 43rd St in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.