The Comfort Illusion
Video tests. Photo credit: Nic Adams.
SYNOPSIS
An over-educated, underachieving twenty-something earns a living stocking the snack room at a high-end hedge fund. The protagonist, named You, lives their life as if everything is disposable. Jumped one night by an extremist sect of eco-warriors, You awaken to the imminent catastrophe that awaits our planet. Slowly, You begin to build your moral code, but the more personal sacrifices You make for the sake of our more-than-human-world, the more You become plagued by feelings of futility. Want to save the earth? Hold your breath.
The Comfort Illusion is a darkly comedic solo performance-poem charting one person's descent into eco-psychosis.
PRODUCTION TEAM
Created, performed, and designed by Nic Adams.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
The Comfort Illusion has received development support from Space/Time at BRIC (2018) and the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2020, FL).
PRODUCTION HISTORY
The Comfort Illusion has received excerpted, work-in-progress showings at HERETOFORE UNSEEN (2018) Title:Point’s salON! (2018), FEAST (2018), Pete’s Candy Store (2018), Irregular Salon (2018), ApartmentPARTY (2018), Judson Memorial Church (2019), The Tank (2019), JACK (2019), and INsideOUT (2020, FL).
DEVELOPMENT AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Work on The Comfort Illusion began in summer 2017. It was inspired by our country’s withdrawal from The Paris Climate Agreement, the article entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth”, and an abundance of dead baby birds on the sidewalks of Flatbush that summer, seemingly cooked to death.
Originally written as discrete monologues and dance performances on a unified theme of climate change, the writing served as a time-capsule of the adjustments I was making as an individual to respond to ecological degradation (including vegetarianism, zero-waste, and divestment from Big Oil banks, among others). During my residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in the fall of 2020, I workshopped the text with an actor and found a new organizing principle for the piece in the protagonist's neurosis - the fictional "eco-psychosis". I identified deeply with this new affliction, as I wrestled with what changes my own lifestyle choices had affected in a more global sense, if any.
The Comfort Illusion interweaves ecological works by Gregg Segal, Elizabeth Kolbert, Daniel Quinn, Paul Kingsnorth, Robert Macfarlane, as well as the sixty-year-fire underneath Centralia, PA.
Script, video, and audio work samples available upon request.