Emily Swallow & Geoffrey Arend to Star in Newest Audio Play From L.A. Theatre Works

You may not know her name, but amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote made groundbreaking discoveries about the greenhouse effect back in the 1850s. Emily Swallow (The Mandalorian) and Geoffrey Arend (Madame Secretary, Body of Proof) head the cast of the newest addition to the L.A. Theatre Works catalogue of state-of-the-art audio theater. Recorded as part of the company’s acclaimed Relativity Series of science-themed plays, Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays by Amanda Quaid is now available at streaming.latw.org as well as at retailers and libraries everywhere.

The play takes its title from the path-breaking 1856 paper by Foote, an amateur scientist, inventor and women’s rights activist. In a two-page report on her innovative experiments, Foote became the first to identify carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and as the principal cause of global warming. A pioneer of climate science, she remains largely unknown… until this play.

“Eunice was a founding mother of climate science,” explained Quaid in an interview with Ensemble Studio Theatre, where the play premiered in 2021. “This play is a kind of origin story. At its heart, it’s about a family’s ambition—hers, her husband’s, her daughters’—and how that pans out for all of them in unexpected ways. I’m fascinated by her marriage because her husband was a feminist and her greatest supporter. Their bond was unusual and complex, and it completely upended expectations I had about marriage in the 1800s.”

The cast also features Tara Lynne Barr, Scott Brick, Jake Green and Monica McSwain. The recording was directed by L.A. Theatre Works senior producer Anna Lyse Erikson.

L.A. Theatre Works, the world’s foremost producer of audio theater, stands apart in its approach to making great theater widely accessible and affordable, bringing recordings of plays into homes and classrooms of millions of theater lovers, teachers and students each year. The company’s catalog of nearly 600 recorded plays is the largest archive of its kind in the world. LATW’s syndicated audio theater series broadcasts weekly on public radio stations across the U.S. (locally, in Southern California, on KPFK 90.7 FM); can be downloaded wherever you get your podcasts; and can be streamed on demand at latw.org. AudioFile magazine calls L.A. Theatre Works productions “the gold standard for fine audio theater recordings.”