HOW TO LIVE ON EARTH is a haunting new play about our unrelenting obsession with the next frontier and the desire to give your life for something greater than yourself. Inspired in part by the Mars One project to colonize Mars by 2025, this piece is a funny, wry, and deeply truthful portrait of the fears and hopes that drive us towards exploration and expansion.
Cast: Molly Carden*, Adam Harrington*, Lynne Lipton*, Genesis Oliver*, Charles Socarides*, and Amelia Workman*.
sets / Amy Rubin// lighting / Grant Yeager
costumes / Ashley Rose Horton // sound / ML Dogg
projections / Lianne Arnold// properties / Shannon O’Brien
production management / Joshua Shain// production stage manager / Sarah Devon Ford*
press agent / Richard Kornberg & Associates
How to Live on Earth was created from scratch with MJ Kaufman, Adrienne Campbell-Holt, the actors and the designers. How to Live on Earth was developed with the support of New Georges’ Audrey Residency. How to Live on Earth premiered at HERE Arts Center in the fall of 2015.
Press
“As with her critically acclaimed previous efforts, like last season’s Dry Land, director Adrienne Campbell-Holt succeeds in creating a natural intimacy through both performances and design.”
“It’s a beguiling subject, a piece of science fiction that isn’t so fictional after all.”
“MJ Kaufman’s darkly funny play, directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt, illuminates the absurd lengths humans will go to to avoid their daily lives, but also captures well the profound despondency of dreamers who are forever looking up.”
“Audiences will receive a refreshing and meaningful gift in How to Live on Earth. This production sparks several of the big overarching questions, regarding the meaning of life and will also keep you chuckling throughout the 90 minutes.”
“Give playwright MJ Kaufman and director Adrienne Campbell-Holt abundant credit for writing a compact and understanding study of isolation in How to Live on Earth, at HERE. Not only has Kaufman come on something you might say has a strong affinity with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but he has a work being played extremely well by the company, under Campbell-Holt’s meticulously clean direction. [...] Kaufman’s recognizing profound existential sadness and the effect it has on those around them is deeply perceptive and utterly compelling. Perhaps needless to say, he offers no answers, undoubtedly because he realizes there are none. He’s to be thanked for taking the time to notice so compassionately.”
