The Civilians Reveal 14th Annual R&D Group and 2024/25 Next Forever Commissions

 The Civilians  announced the newest members of The R&D Group, as well as the season’s commissions for The Next Forever.

Now entering its 14th season, The R&D Group is comprised of playwrights, composers, and directors who work together as a writing group for nine months to develop new plays and musicals. The season culminates in the Findings, a works-in-progress reading series, anticipated to take place in June 2025. The artists were selected from a competitive application process that included nearly 200 submissions.

The members of The Civilians’ 2024-25 R&D Group are Khristián Méndez Aguirre, Bazeed, Lyndsey Bourne, Ash Marinaccio, Francisco Mendoza, and Camille Simone Thomas.

Princeton University’s High Meadows Environmental Institute and Lewis Center for the Arts and The Civilians, announce the 2024-25 artists of their collaborative initiative, The Next Forever, Kate Douglas and Kate Tarker. The Next Forever is a partnership that seeks to create new stories for a changing planet, exploring how dynamic storytelling can engage vital environmental subjects and provide the vision and inspiration society needs to navigate the challenges of our planet’s future — the “next forever.” The two artists will spend time on the Princeton University campus as guest artists, engage with faculty and students across disciplines, and participate in an ongoing series of public events and performances over the course of a year-long residency and two-year commissioning agreement. They join last year’s inaugural artists Kareem Fahmy and AriDy Nox, who are continuing to develop the works they began during their residencies last year.

Applications for the 2025/26 Next Forever commissions are now open with an application deadline of January 15, 2025.  Details on how to apply can be found on the Civilians website.

Next month The Civilians will present Radio Downtown: Radical ‘70s Artists Live on Air, co-written by Steve Cosson and Jocelyn Clarke, created and directed by Steve Cosson. Radio Downtown begins performances on January 11, 2025 at 59E59 Theaters for a limited run through February 9. 

The 2024-25 R&D Group projects are as follows:

111 Fires and a Flood at the Guatemalan Natural History Museum

By Khristián Méndez Aguirre

111 Fires and a Flood at the Guatemalan Natural History Museum is an investigation into theatrical truth as told by the fires of a heating planet. The fictional story follows 15-year old Oscar, a teenager on a field trip who'd rather be literally anywhere else, especially at home with his mother Nadia. His father, Dennis, died last month while responding to a fire, and Oscar doesn't understand why he has to go back to school as if nothing happened. During a field trip to the Museum,  a jungle rainforest diorama spontaneously combusts, quickly getting Oscar into trouble. Strangely, the pattern of the burnt diorama matches the stories from the field that his father used to tell him, and Oscar suspects something else is afoot....

Woven from interviews with firefighters who braved the historic, 75-all-at-once, 2024 fire season in Guatemala; online comment sections; rumors about government conspiracies; 111 fires... asks what's it like to listen in a catastrophe when the air doesn't let us breathe, let alone speak. 

Ceasefire Later

By Bazeed

Ceasefire Later is a piece of documentary theater attempting to chart the machinations of propaganda that enable and empower the ongoing genocide and mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, the latest phase of which began on October 7th, 2023, and is ongoing as of the writing of this sentence on October 21st, 2024. 

Mabel’s Mine

By Lyndsey Bourne

Mabel's Mine is a new play about big oil from the perspective of workers, centering the effects of extractive mining in the lives and bodies of two sisters in the Canadian Oil Sands. Placing the explicit female body (menopause, miscarriage and menstruation) next to the hyper-masculine, pollution-heavy oil industry, the play explores the gendered practice of care work and reproductive labour as systems upholding industrial mining and company towns. 

The Liberated Zone

By Ash Marinaccio

On May 1st 2024, the NYPD raided CUNY's City College Campus and arrested 173 student protesters as part of an operation to crack down on pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses citywide. This was one of many violent police raids of student protest encampments throughout the United States. As community insiders, student journalists played an unprecidented role in documenting the events where many mainstream and legacy media outlets were otherwise barred or restricted from reporting on the story.  

This investigative theatre project explores student activism by telling the story of the City College police raid through memories of student journalists, activists, faculty, and community members present at the raid that night. The project aims to highlight broader issues of police and militarization of college campuses, academic freedom, the legacy of student activism in the United States, and independent journalism. We are interested in exploring the role of theatre as a living archive to document and record contemporary events. 

USCIS: Immigrant Nightmares Division

By Francisco Mendoza

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency (USCIS) is the bane of most immigrants’ existence, as it holds the power to allow or deny their presence in this country – and it wields that power within an erratic bureaucracy that taxes their pockets and tests their sanity. But what if, on top of that, it turned out its agents were engaging in fringe science, incepting immigrants with nightmares about being deported to keep them compliant? Conceived by the playwright when he stumbled onto the fact that he was not the only immigrant to have a recurring night terror about being sent back, USCIS: Immigrant Nightmares Division explores the psychological effects of immigration to the United States through the lens of science fiction and horror. 

111 Orchestra Place

By Camille Simone Thomas
 

111 Orchestra Place is a play about the rise and fall of The Gotham Hotel in Detroit, Michigan during the 1950’s. One of the first 5-star luxury establishments for Black folks of its time, it was a safe haven for African-Americans all around the country to be treated with dignity and respect and it was completely funded by the "illegal" Numbers gambling ring. I want to explore the cost of Black ambition in a time when we started winning so the United States changed the rules. For this play, Camille will be conducting both oral histories of Black Detroiters and doing archival research at libraries in Detroit. 

Led by The Civilians’ Resident Dramaturg Phoebe Corde, R&D Group artists share work as it develops, discuss their creative processes, and provide a community of support for one another. Each project develops according to its unique methods of creative inquiry, offering new approaches to the idea of “investigative theater.” Methods may include interviews, community engagement, research, or other experimental methods of inquiry. The artists will meet twice a month.

The 2024-25 Next Forever Commissions are as follows:

IF I FORGET THEE, O EARTH

By Kate Douglas

An astronaut and a robot are rehearsing a mission to Mars in the Utah desert that is interrupted by the discovery of fossils. When a paleontologist arrives to assess their significance, it sparks a conflict around the question of habitability and sustainability on Earth and Mars - in this age of mass extinction, whose work is more vital: the futurists or the historians?

TOPIA

By Kate Tarker

TOPIA is a new play that examines possible scenarios for our near-term climate future on the East Coast. It explores an estranged mother-daughter relationship and focuses its investigation on how climate crisis intersects with gender, reproduction, and getting by in America. One generation from now, Marty struggles with her daily life in a climate dystopia version of Providence, RI, and she is writing a novel in which she tries to imagine a better world worth bringing a child into. Two generations from now, her daughter Leah thrives in a green utopia version of Providence, RI, and she is writing a novel in which she tries to understand how bad the world must have been for her mother to abandon her soon after birth. What starts out as these characters' writing projects eventually morphs into a real-world quest, as Marty and Leah search for each other across a landscape of rapid political, environmental, and technological changes.

The Next Forever provides forward-thinking artists unparalleled access to a cross-disciplinary range of knowledge and ideas—of scientists, conservation psychologists, historians, policy and communications experts, and others. The intention of The Next Forever is to support artists as they pursue rigorous inquiry into their subject matter alongside some of Princeton University’s greatest thinkers.

This multifaceted initiative comprises a competitive commission-and-residency program for theater makers, an ongoing series of public events and performances, and an undergraduate class on narrative and the environment. It will fund two commissions of theatrical work that offer new visions for how we relate to the world around us. Additionally, The Next Forever provides artists with the opportunity to engage over a semester with Princeton faculty working in relevant fields.

As part of The Next Forever, two commissions are awarded annually to theater makers to create original works that engage environmental subject matter. The initiative also provides commissioned artists with the opportunity to engage with Princeton faculty, researchers, and students working in fields relevant to their projects. Following the completion of the commission, further development of the new work with The Civilians is possible.