There are some very big ideas packed into an intimate domestic setting in Amy Berryman’s thought-provoking and finely crafted new play Walden, which opened Thursday at Second Stage’s Off-Broadway Tony Kiser Theater. This is the third Off Broadway show this fall premised on the devastating effects of climate change, but it offers perhaps the most realistic scenario for what we might be facing in the not too distant future. We learn not only of a series of environmental calamities — a news report indicates more than 1 million deaths from a recent tsunami — but also of ongoing attempts to abandon Earth altogether for a colony on the moon, or perhaps Mars. We also learn that there’s a radical group of Earth Advocates who are trying to live off the land, unconnected from the electrical grid, and who staunchly oppose the vast expenditures by NASA on projects that seem to concede that it’s just too late to save the home planet.

One of them is Bryan (Motell Foster), who lives with his fiancée, Stella (Emmy Rossum), in a remotely located rural cabin made of corrugated steel panels (the striking and evocative set design is by Matt Saunders). Stella, we soon learn, is a recent convert to the EA ways. What’s more, she’s a former NASA scientist who designed models for a Mars colony and was hoping to join a space mission herself until she failed a physical test and then quit the agency altogether. But her twin sister, Cassie (Zoë Winters), stayed on at NASA — and has just returned from a successful one-year mission to the moon, where she managed to achieve a scientific breakthrough in terraforming, growing tiny plants in the harsh dirt of the moon.

The sisterly reunion is an awkward one, and the tension is immediately clear from the way the two actresses circle Stella’s patio/garden, and from the prickly way that they respond to each other. Berryman ladles out the exposition of the sisters’ fraught backstory gradually, along with the details of a dystopian near-future that seems all too plausible. Cassie is assured that she need not wear a mask since “the air is totally safe” and that her sister’s homestead has managed to escape the worst effects of climate change: “Even in the summers, it hasn’t been over one hundred and twenty degrees.”

What’s even more impressive is how Berryman sketches characters who can argue different points of view on how to address the climate crisis without making them mere mouthpieces for agitprop. Bryan is a true believer in the Earth-first cause, rejecting “printed food” and anything else that might harm the planet, but he also owns a solar-powered car and a generator that provides electricity to his and Stella’s home. (“It’s a compromise,” Stella explains. “I can’t live without the news, being online, being connected.”)

More tellingly, Bryan, who is Black, also notes how the growing number of people living off the electrical grid is making an impact on reducing CO2 levels — and points out some of the flawed reasoning in NASA’s attempt to colonize other planets, starting with the terminology. “There’s life on Mars, anyway, isn’t there? There’s water –” Bryan tells Cassie in a late-night conversation that flits from the political to the personal and back again. “So we’re just going to put our shit there, take it over, no regard for any life that’s already there. Sound familiar doesn’t it?” He doesn’t dwell on the point, but an anti-colonialist argument coming from a Black man carries considerable weight without any embellishment.

Walden, which draws its name from the Henry David Thoreau treatise on pursuing a life of self-reliance outside the white-picket fences of traditional society, proposes two different paths for sustaining life in an age of environmental collapse: one rooted in the Earth, rebuilding a sick planet, and the other striking out into a brave frontier of the unknown. (It’s worth noting that Thoreau himself built his cabin in the woods just two miles from his home in Concord, Massachusetts, and returned to “civilization” nearly every day during his two-year experiment.)

As the story progresses, and as details of the sisters’ past history emerges, the drama deepens in unexpected ways. The impulse toward dogmatism, and of one-up-manship, dissipates. Director Whitney White calibrates the pacing of the scenes and the transitions between them with perfect precision, and she’s helped by a first-rate cast of three. Winters in particular stands out as a woman who initially strikes a pose of heroic achievement that soon gives way to self-doubt in the presence of a sister who was denied the same opportunities that have made her a celebrity. And Rossum, best known as the feisty older sister/de facto mother figure in the Showtime series Shameless, presents a mirror image of her onstage sister — a woman who’s been forced to bury her lifelong ambitions for reasons beyond her control (“My body is broken”) and to cobble together an altogether different life for herself.

Here, too, Berryman and this remarkable cast resist easy binaries — you can see in Winters and Rossum’s eyes how they both have regrets about how things have turned out, and they maintain a sense of obligation and even affection for each other despite the undeniable fissures in their relationship. Each initially shudders at the other’s self-confidence in their chosen paths, delivering lines with a barely contained passive-aggression, while eventually seeing not only the upsides of the alternative but also imagining how it might actually suit them as well. This is a rare case when the domestic conflict enriches the larger themes. There are no easy answers here, no obvious solutions that don’t also come with big risks and even bigger sacrifices. The story builds to a riveting final scene, strikingly lit by Adam Honoré, which neatly encapsulates all of the play’s themes while elevating them to heights that are both poetic and profound. Walden makes you think, but it also makes you feel.

WALDEN
2ndStage Tony Kiser Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 85 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through Nov. 24