A little over a year after its premiere at Terminal 5, Dear Everything: A Musical Uprising for the Earth—a theater piece by V (formerly known as Eve Ensler) about the generational clash between a rural town’s climate-conscious youth and the adults who consider selling out its remaining forests—is staging another one-night-only concert performance in New York. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s colossal opera house, Jane Fonda (V’s longtime friend and collaborator on works like the groundbreaking Vagina Monologues) will narrate the climate change folk musical, which features songs by Justin Tranter, Caroline Pennell, and Eren Cannata, this Wednesday—Earth Day.
The project has a curious backstory. An earlier iteration, Wild: A Musical Becoming, had its workshop presentation at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA, derailed by the pandemic. Back then, it starred Idina Menzel, who wanted to collaborate with the songwriters but had yet to develop an idea. When they approached V, the playwright tells Vogue that she had one stipulation: “Only if it’s about climate change, because I don’t want to write anything else right now.”
Wild reopened in 2021, but Menzel amicably split from the team when the project went in a different direction. (The actor went on to create Redwood, also a nature-based musical, though V says the overlap is coincidental.) Still, some of Menzel’s voice and creative input fundamentally shaped a number of songs in the project, so she retains a contributing credit, even as Dear Everything has shed many of the more fantastical aspects of Wild, which featured a town called “Outskirtzia” fighting off the “Extractacals” corporation. V notes that there has also been one change to the plot since last year’s Terminal 5 presentation, which takes the story “out of a fairy-tale context” and into “more of a mystical pop story.”
What’s remained dutifully the same is the project’s commitment to having a real-world impact. Dear Everything was made to tour, and V has taken it to Atlanta, Miami, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake City since its last New York performance. At each stop, around 90% of tickets were distributed to farmers, workers, and students and—partnering with Maya Penn, a 26-year-old organizer and the leader of the Dear Everything Youth Council—the production left some $20,000 for local groups working in the climate space.
The BAM show, directed by Diane Paulus, will feature several direct action efforts and announce five grants for New York-based organizations. It will also feature Fonda as the narrator, which V envisioned as a flexible role that anyone could step into, whether A-list star or community pillar. Ahead of the performance, Vogue caught up with V, Fonda, and Penn to discuss their ongoing fight for climate justice and how anyone can stop doomscrolling and join the movement.
Jane, how did you first find out about this project?
Jane Fonda: I’ve heard about it every step of the way. My daughter lives in Vermont and went into Boston on a number of occasions to see the early iterations, so I would get reports back. I met Eve, I think, in 1998. The Vagina Monologues, to me, are proof that art can transform someone. I saw V in one of her last performances in New York where she played all of the monologues. A mutual friend of ours, Pat Mitchell, really forced me to go. I went by myself and I think that, up until then, everyone thought I was a feminist but I was an intellectual feminist. It was theoretical, it was in my head. I read the right books, I knew the right people. My movies were women-centric. But it was while I was watching The Vagina Monologues—and I remember which monologue, “The Flood”—and I was laughing through my tears that I could feel my feminism descend in my body and I became…I mean, it was extremely powerful. I became an embodied feminist that very night.
I went backstage and fell in love with V and we’ve been together since. I’ve done various monologues. I’m gonna do it again. I have to be part of whatever she’s doing. She awakens—I think that this play does too—a part of the psyche that doesn’t usually wake up, this combination of music and dance and narration. I believe that our original sin is that we forgot we’re part of nature. We forgot that everything is interconnected and, to me, that’s what this play is about.
Maya, what drew you to eco-advocacy at such a young age?
Maya Penn: Being from Georgia, which was the heart of the Civil Rights movement, I’ve had the opportunity to learn from incredible leaders who are the founders of the environmental justice movement as we know it, especially in the US. The thing that’s so powerful about a project like Dear Everything is that it does exactly that. At the heart of the show is a mother-daughter story. It’s a story about a small town affected by extreme weather, a story about a farmer who is just trying to make a living and is having to make these tough choices—not to give too much away. These are all kitchen-table issues that so many of us face and really can relate to. It’s not just about the climate crisis, but the power that we have as people to come together to care for each other and for the earth.
There’s a standout line—“We want you to panic, we want you to act. You sold our future, we want it back”—that speaks to the generational angle of the story. It’s hard for younger people to not feel completely victimized by climate change.
JF: This has never happened before in human history. You know, democracy and climate are totally interconnected. You can’t have a stable democracy if you don’t have stable climate and you can’t have a stable climate unless you have a stable democracy. I mean, what is happening politically is the worst possible thing that could be happening, given the climate crisis. The people responsible for the climate crises have coalesced, and a particular person with an orange mien, everything he’s doing is pretty much funded by the climate crisis and by the tech bros. It’s existential. Those two things need to be solved together or they won’t be solved, and the clock is ticking rapidly. So, yeah, this is all new and we want you to panic. “You stole our future and we want it back”—I mean, that’s it. I love that anthem. I think young people know it’s their future and we fucked up and they’re gonna fight, and we have to hang on to their coattails and urge them on.
V: But I also think your sense of being, quote, victimized is that we have left this generation in a very bad place, you know? And for some of us, it’s not for trying. We have been fighting. But I think we are living, as Jane was saying, under an administration that has really got an end times mentality. Part of what we’ve got to do is all realize that we have much more power than we think. If Minnesota proved anything, it’s that when we are in solidarity, when generations come together, when workers come together, we can do everything. My dream with this play is that people walk out of the theater and they’re like, Okay, I can do stuff.
Maya, what have you found gets your generation to stop scrolling and do something?
MP: I have always been a solutions-focused activist. I’m not going to be someone who tells you, “This is the problem, something needs to be done about it,” and then gives no further explanation. I am one of those people who has always centered what can be done, what’s already being done, because something else that happens is you don’t actually see the hard work and incredible impact that so many changemakers are having. You don’t get to hear a lot of those stories: the ocean that gets cleaned, the terrifying bill that does actually get blocked. This is why Dear Everything is super powerful, because the show itself is not prescriptive, it’s about getting you reconnected, resensitized, and energized to do something. And then through V-Day and the Youth Council, we center the people in real life who are doing this amazing work: Here are the young people on the front lines who are really helping us to fight for a livable future, and here’s how we’re supporting them.
V, you told American Theatre that when the show was put into a musical format, it became very twee. Can you talk a little bit about boiling it down to its essence?
V: It’s very strange with pop music, because pop often tells you a lot of things in a way that musical theater doesn’t. We were trying to fit it into scenes, but pop demands something else—more Brechtian, more forward-facing, much more rabble-rousing. Once we understood that, the form shifted. It became a narrated kind of concert-storytelling-happening thing. The minute we found that, everything began to work. I think we were really experimenting with the musical theater form, which has never been my forte. I like things that feel revolutionary and radical and just kind of come at you. One of the composers said the best time this ever worked was when I narrated the story and we played all the songs. So we tried that and it was like, Oh, here it is. Sometimes it’s right in front of you.
Jane, I feel you don’t lend your name to just anything. What was it about this that felt particularly true to you?
JF: It takes the notion that we’re part of nature, we can’t allow ourselves to be cut off or exploited. It’s part of us, if we want to survive on any level. This is my deepest belief about where we’ve gone wrong. So for one of my best friends to have written a play that reveals this in a very inspiring way, you bet I’m going to sign on. But I sign on to things [all the time]. I just signed on to [executive produce] Steal This Story, Please! [a documentary about independent journalist Amy Goodman].
V: Yes, I heard! I’m a producer on that, too, by the way. Jane signs on to everything. She’s the most supportive advocate I’ve ever met.
Aside from touring, do you see a future life for this?
V: I would love to see this as an animated film, because I think it would be a way to get into children’s minds so that they really start to love and fight for the earth. I dream of children singing that song to their parents and talking to them about trees. [Our lead character] goes through a mystical transformation and I think that it would be a gorgeous animated film.
I’m really hoping that people will come to this show and say, “Let me bring it to Detroit. Let me take it to places where they’re building AI centers that are gonna use up every drop of our water and let’s use it to stop the things that need to be stopped and to grow the things that need to be grown.” It really is very simple. You just have to give a certain amount of money and host it in your city and then you can invite everybody in your city to come. It’s a very beautiful model of theater where we’re also leaving money for climate change groups as we go.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.