Madeline Elaine / Lizzie Esses - ALGAE

ALGAE: Love Stories for a Warming World features two brand new plays. The Grove, by Madeline Elaine, is a dance-play that explores guilt and culpability in a climate-changed ailing world. The Blues, by Lizzie Esses, is a play and live jazz concert that discusses plastic pollution and ocean plastic through the language of heartbreak. These plays were chosen to be presented in tandem because they both address the crisis of environmental destruction as an ongoing issue with physical and mental health consequences for all human and non-human beings. Rather than a call to action to address a far-off hypothetical, ALGAE demands that we sit with the situation of the present and use our collective care for the planet and each other as a tool for combatting systems of extraction.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Madeline Elaine [producing artist, playwright The Grove]

Madeline Elaine is a lighting designer, playwright, and dramatist dedicated to boundary breaking work. They are committed to the survival and interconnectedness of community and environment and uphold principles of sustainability in their practice. Madeline holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Drama with an additional major in Environmental and Sustainability Studies.

Lizzie Esses [playwright The Blues]

Lizzie Esses (she/they) is a writer/director/stage manager from Denver, Colorado. In the past she’s worked with The Denver Center for the Performing Arts Youth Summer Series, Teesri Duniya Theatre, and Paper Sailor Theatre. She recently completed her undergraduate studies in Performance Creation at Concordia University in Montreal. She is currently dedicating herself to making soup and reading horror novels.

Alistair M Keating [director]

Alistair M Keating is an interdisciplinary artist and generator of provocative live performances and immersive installations, a director of experimental theater, an artist curator, a producer, and a production designer. Keating creates artistic projects that are relevant to NOW, charging people to examine and question our current contemporary moment, to provoke community engaged discussion in a hopeful effort towards perception change, empathy, and a more tolerant society. She works to ensure the experimental arts (works of art in which the outcomes are unknown) thrives in Los Angeles by fueling a culture of collaboration, resource sharing, support and sustainability, both economic and environmental.