THE NEXT FOREVER: NEW STORIES FOR A CHANGING PLANET

GLORIA MAJULE

Project Description:
In a post-apocalyptic world where Africa is the only surviving continent, a team of African scientists develop a time machine to travel back in time and warn humanity of the impending doom that lies ahead. Their mission is to change the course of history—or, at the very least, delay the devastation and give humanity a fighting chance.

Commissioned Artist:
Gloria Majule is a storyteller born and raised in Dodoma, Tanzania. She writes for and about Africans and the African diaspora. Gloria has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship and commissions by Audible, Milwaukee Repertory Theater and Atlantic Theater Company. Her work includes My Father Was Shot in the Back of the Head (Relentless Award Finalist), Culture Shock (Leah Ryan Prize Winner), Uhuru (Alley All New Festival), and Fifteen Hundred (Blue Ink Award Finalist). A 3x O’Neill Finalist and 5x Susan Smith Blackburn Prize nominee, Gloria has been awarded residencies by Yaddo, Art Omi, The New Harmony Project and New York Stage and Film. Her work has been supported by The American Playwriting Foundation, The Alley Theatre, Vassar’s Powerhouse Theater, and The New Group among others. Gloria was the first African woman to receive an MFA in Playwriting from Yale School of Drama.

LIGHTNING ROD SPECIAL

Project Description:
Untitled Climate Change Sex Farce sets a rollicking farce on the eve of the wedding of two wealthy young Americans at a seaside resort. As the high-octane human drama unfolds—with secret lovers cropping up like wildfires, and last-minute pleas to break off the wedding shaking the set like earthquakes—the drama of the natural world threatens the proceedings indoors with more and more urgency. At the play’s conclusion, while the characters remain wilfully ignorant to the looming climate-crisis, the elements overtake the resort, and everyone dies. Using Lightning Rod Special’s unique brand of acerbic political satire, U.C.C.S.F. unveils the absurdity of humanity’s self-obsession and its persistent disregard for mounting environmental catastrophe.

Commissioned Artists:
Lightning Rod Special is an award-winning Philadelphia-based company that makes genre-defying original theater from the ground up. Their work explodes complex and controversial questions with precision and play. Since 2012, they have made eight full-length works, an audio series, and toured their productions to 16 cities in 5 countries. LRS has a history of creating performances around contested American topics. Recent works include SPEECH, a poisonous love letter to cancel culture, The Appointment, a musical satire singing and dancing through the absurdity of the American abortion debate (“Best Theater in 2023” in The New Yorker, “Best Theater in 2019” in The New York Times), and Underground Railroad Game, a time-traveling fever dream about American race relations (2017 Obie Award for “Best New American Theater Work,” “top 25 shows in the past 25 years” by The New York Times). www.lightningrodspecial.com

Lead Artist and Co-Creator:

Alex Bechtel creates new works of music, theatre, and musical theatre. His latest musical Penelope—for which he wrote Music, Lyrics and Arrangements, and co-wrote the book with performer Grace McLean and Director Eva Steinmetz—has had productions at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival and Signature Theatre in DC, and concert performances at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theatre. Other recent work includes: Music & Lyrics for Lightning Rod Special’s The Appointment(“Best of 2019” – The New York Times, Vulture, TimeOut NY, “Best of 2023” – The New Yorker), Arrangements/Music Direction for Pig Iron Theatre Co’s Poor Judge, Music Direction for Night Side Songs by the Lazours, Music & Lyrics for People’s Light & Theatre Company’s Peter Panto, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and Shakespeare in Love, Arden Theatre Company’s The Light Princess and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and 8 seasons of new music for Shakespeare at Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival. Bechtel is a graduate of The Pig Iron School and The University of the Arts. He is a 5-time Barrymore Award Winner, and a 2015 Independence Fellow in the Arts. Bechtel is the creator/composer of The West, Philadelphia Nocturne, and Cheer Up, Dostoevsky. He lives in New York City. www.alexbechtel.com.

Additional Co-Creators:

Mason Rosenthal is a performance maker and educator raised in Skokie, Illinois. He has devised over 75 original performance pieces as an independent artist and as a founding co-director of the award-winning Philadelphia-based theater company, Lightning Rod Special (est. 2012). Mason’s work has been supported by The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, FringeArts, The Rude Mechs, Network of Ensemble Theaters, The Orchard Project, New England Foundation for the Arts, Fresh Ground Pepper, and more. B.F.A. from NYU’s Atlantic Theater Company Acting School where he was on faculty for six years, and M.F.A. in Performance as Public Practice from UT Austin. Post-M.F.A. faculty at Virginia Tech and faculty fellow with VT’s Center for Communicating Science. Projects from the last year include: dramaturg/creative producer LRS’s Nosejob, director/writer Sohrab is Bumbling Foriegner (FringeArts, Cannonball), writer/performer The Fluxus Brothers Present: Good Art Bad Art (Cannonball, PhysFestNYC), director/creator Total Modeling (Denver Fringe, Glitterbox Theater, Philadelphia Fringe), director/creator Fascist Groove (Cannonball). www.masonrosenthal.weebly.com

Scott R. Sheppard is an Obie Award-winning playwright and performer as well as a founding Co-Artistic Director of theater company Lightning Rod Special. He is the co-creator and performer of Underground Railroad Game, (Ars Nova) which won an Edinburgh Fringe First Award, an Edinburgh Stage Award, and was named by the New York Times as one of the 25 Best Plays of the past 25 Years. He has toured with it to 12 cities in 5 countries. Scott was a 2024 Finalist for the National Playwriting Conference (Eugene O’Neill Theater Center) and a semifinalist for the 2024 Terrence McNally Award with Performance Department. He was a Lead Writer/Performer in Lightning Rod Special’s The Appointment (Best Theater of 2023 in the New Yorker and Best of 2019 in Time Out New York and New York Magazine, New York Times Critics’ Pick). Other credits include: co-writer of Nosejob (2024 semifinalist for Eugene O’Neill Playwriting Conference) and lead writer/performer of SPEECH with Lightning Rod Special and Shayok Misha Chowdhury; writer of Blood Meal (New York Times Critics’ Pick) and Topside with Theater in Quarantine; Holdenwith George and Co. Scott graduated from Pig Iron’s School for Advanced Performance Training and has collaborated on several works with Pig Iron Theatre Co. including: Period of Animate Existence, 99 Breakups (deviser/performer), and Gentlemen Volunteers (performer). Scott was an Independence Foundation Fellow, a Guild Hall Resident Artist, a Bric Lab Resident, and a 2021-23 member of Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writer’s Group. He also runs a wedding venue with his wife and friends in the Catskills called Adena Orchard. www.scottrsheppard.com

Alice Yorke is an actor/creator and Co-Artistic Director of Lightning Rod Special. She is the lead creator of LRS’s highly lauded musical satire of the abortion debate, The Appointment (WP Theater: Best of 2023 Theater, The New Yorker; “Should Have Been Nominated for a Tony,” New York Times. NYTW Next Door: Best of 2019 Theater, New York Times, Time Out New York,  and New York Magazine). With LRS: performer/creator: Nosejob, SPEECH, Hackles, Let the Dog See the Rabbit and Sans Everything; creative producer: Underground Railroad Game (2015). Select performance credits include Much Ado About Nothing (Lantern Theater), Once Upon a Bridge (Inis Nua), The Gap (Azuka Theatre, Barrymore nomination, outstanding supporting performance), Pig Iron Theatre Company’s Franklin’s Key, 99 Breakups and Pay Up. Director: We Are Trying to Reach You (LRS’s Sound Break series), Cerebral (UArts), and Lee Minora’s White Feminist (Ars Nova Ant Fest, Sick of the Fringe – London). “Best Theatre Talent in Philadelphia” – Philadelphia Magazine. www.aliceyorke.com

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?

If I Forget Thee, O Earth is a full-length play that puts the cosmic and the terrestrial in the context of mass extinction events (present and past) through the lens of astrobiology.

Kate Douglas is a writer/performer and composer. Recent work includes The Apiary (Outer Critics Circle Award nomination), Tulipa (New York Stage & Film), and hag with co-writer Grace McLean (New Group). She has been awarded residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm, Swale House on Governors Island, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, Millay Arts, and Goodspeed Musicals, among others. Alum of the Dramatists Guild Fellows Program, Colt Coeur, The Civilian R&D Group, GTG Speakers Corner, and The Orchard Project Greenhouse. Previous performance credits include Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (where she also held the title of Associate Artist), Liz Phair’s 30th Anniversary Tour of her seminal album Exile in Guyville, Fernando Rubio’s Everything by my side, Third Rail’s The Grand Paradise, and Kansas City Choir Boy starring Todd Almond and Courtney Love. Upcoming: Centuries starring opposite her co-writers Matthew Dean Marsh and Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez (Ancram Center for the Arts). Certificate in Sustainable Garden Design, NYBG. www.katedouglasprojects.com

EXTENDED PLAY: If I Forget Tee, O Earth: afterimages
EXTENDED PLAY: Loneliness in a Time of Mass Extinction

TOPIA by Kate Tarker

TOPIA is a metafictional journey through optimism, pessimism, and two possible climate futures for Providence, RI. In a rapidly changing city, two very different women imagine their way into each other’s lives— and accidentally open Pandora’s box along the way.

Kate Tarker is an American playwright who grew up bilingually in Germany. She writes offbeat, countercultural plays for fun-loving audiences. Her plays include Montag (Soho Rep.), THUNDERBODIES (Soho Rep.), Dionysus Was Such a Nice Man (The Wilma, FoolsFURY), and Laura and the Sea (Rivendell Theatre Ensemble).

EXTENDED PLAY: Imagined Futures, New Utopias

WHY Y’ALL HATE EARTH SO BAD by AriDy Nox

Why Ya’ll Hate Earth So Bad? is an interactive reverse-ancestral play. In its current ideation, it centers a group of young descendants who bootleg the latest in virtual-reality technology to perform a jerry-rigged seance of their respective ancestors from the 21st century, all in the hopes of asking one burning question: Why are ya’ll making Earth so damn unlivable? The “ancestors” will be a mix of audience members and actors, all recruited to brainstorm how to change the future, and changing “the descendant’s” world in the process. The entire project will ultimately be a mix of scripted, devised and improvised theatrical performance that is shaped by audiences’ input, whether that be wisdom, fear, hope, or curiosity. And by the end, we should have a clear understanding of what the community is longing for in terms of future-shaping. An experiment in both community-building and radical imagination, it will aim to highlight the ways pressing issues in specific communities inevitably lead to untenable environmental conditions for entire populations in the (near) future.  Acting as both theater piece and ground-zero for geographically specific climate organizing, the work will hopefully inspire communities to be more nuanced in their evaluation of climate crisis and allow them to ideate and plan tangible action steps towards making change in their communities.  

AriDy Nox is a multi-disciplinary black femme storyteller with a variety of forward-thinking creative works under their belt including the historical reimagining of the life of Sally Hemmings BLACK GIRL IN PARIS (2020), the ancestral reckoning play A WALLESS CHURCH (2019), the afrofuturist ecopocalypse musical THE ANOMALY (2019), the generational magical realism heptology THE DAUGHTERS OF OMILADE (2020) and many others. AriDy creates out of the vehement belief that creating a liberated future requires a radical imagination. Their tales are offerings intended to function as small parts of an ancient, expansive, awe-inspiring tradition of world-shaping created by black femmes and with black femmes at the center.  As a graduate of the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at Tisch School of the Performing Arts at NYU, a beneficiary of the Musical Theatre Factory Inaugural MAKERS cohort and the Horizon Theatre’s Black Women Speak Cohort, a beneficiary of the Civilian’s Research and Development Group, a 2020-2023 fellow of the Emerging Writer’s Group at the Public Theatre, a recipient of the 2022 Live and In Color June Bingham commission, a 2022-2025 Playwrights Center Core Writer, and the 2023/2024 Van Lier New Voices Fellow, they have been inordinately privileged to share the workings of their imagination in collaboration with a vast array of inspiring and supportive artists of various radical backgrounds throughout the country. 

EXTENDED PLAY: RE: Unmaking The World

RIPARIAN STATES by Kareem Fahmy

Riparian States is inspired by true events surrounding the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on a tributary of the Nile and the climate-related factors that make this revolutionary project controversial. The dam promises to transform Ethiopian society, electrifying huge swaths of the country that have never had power. In Egypt, the dam is seen as a threat, climate change having severely affected the hydrology of the Nile. Egyptians may lose more of their already diminishing access to drinking water and irrigation. Riparian States examines how humanity’s relentless harnessing of natural resources to improve our lives has become a double-edged sword in times of climate catastrophe.  

Kareem Fahmy is a Canadian-born playwright and director of Egyptian descent. His plays, including American Fast (winner of the Woodward/Newman Award), A Distinct Society(National Showcase of New Plays finalist), and Dodi & Diana (O’Neill NPC Finalist) have been seen at theatres across the U.S. and Canada. Commissions: Ensemble Studio Theatre/Sloan, Colt Coeur, Artists Repertory Theatre. Fellowships include MacDowell, Yaddo, Sundance, Stratford Festival, and more. He founded the Middle Eastern American Writers Lab and created the BIPOC Director Database. Kareem was named a Rising Leader of Color by TCG and earned an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University.www.kareemfahmy.com 

EXTENDED PLAY: “Riparian States” — On Creating a Play as Long and Deep as The Nile
EXTENDED PLAY: Choose Your Own “Riparian State”

As part of the Next Forever initiative, two $10,000 commissions will be awarded annually to two theater makers to create original work that engages environmental subject matter. Proposed projects can be entirely new or in early stages of development. Collaborations between two artists will be considered.

The initiative provides commissioned artists with the opportunity over an academic year to engage with Princeton faculty working in fields relevant to their projects. Each recipient will receive a $5,000 residency stipend, as well as a budget to support research activities, travel and a research assistant. Over the course of an academic year, the artists will engage with faculty and students. (Artists will not receive housing and are expected to live within commuting distance. The residency stipend and research budget is intended to defray costs associated with being on campus.)  The specific residency schedule will be developed in collaboration with each artist, but as a general rule the artist will be expected to be present on campus at least 14 days during the academic year. Each artist will organize at least one public event, which can be an artist talk, play reading, panel discussion, or other format. Other forms of engagement with faculty and students (e.g., courses, seminars) are also possible. Following the completion of the commission, there may be potential for further development of the work with The Civilians.

Applications will be accepted from December 11, 2024 – January 22, 2025.

The Civilians is a theater company in New York City, creating work that investigates our lived experience, interrogates the stories that shape our society, and awakens new thinking. Central to our mission is the process of investigative theater, which we broadly define as any creative process of inquiry that feeds the creation of work. Methods may include research, a community-based focus, interviews, or other experimental strategies of the artist’s design. The Next Forever initiative is named for the final song in The Civilians’ 2014 show “The Great Immensity,” a musical about climate change.

The High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI) – the interdisciplinary center of environmental research, education, and outreach at Princeton University – advances understanding of the Earth as a complex system influenced by human activities and informs solutions to local and global challenges by conducting groundbreaking research across disciplines and preparing future leaders in diverse fields to impact a world increasingly shaped by climate change.

The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University believes that art arises out of questions. Its classes and certificate programs in Dance, Creative Writing, Theater, Music Theater, and Visual Arts, and in the interdisciplinary Princeton Atelier, operate on the principle that rigorous artistic practice is a form of research, innovation, discovery and intervention. Like scholarship of any kind, rigorous artistic practice is a way of interrogating that which is accepted or understood in an attempt to break into the territory of the unknown or under-explored

Applications for the 2025-26 season are now closed. Sign up for our newsletter to be notified when applications open again in 2026.

Selection Process

There will be four rounds of reading throughout the process. The review team will consist of The Civilians artistic staff and a diverse team of evaluators familiar with The Civilians. Members of the review team will be compensated for their time and expertise.

ROUND 1 – Initial Review – The artistic staff at The Civilians will give each proposal an initial review.

ROUND 2 – Applications Are Read and Evaluated by Reading Team/Semi-Finalists are Selected – Projects still under consideration will be reviewed and evaluated by the team of invited panelists. Each will review approximately 6-10 proposals, and semifinalists will be selected on the basis of their evaluations.

ROUND 3 – Finalists Are Selected  – A review team comprising The Civilians artistic staff, and three-to-five panelists will read the semifinalists’ applications, and finalists will be selected.

ROUND 4 – Commissioned Artists Are Selected – Members of the review team, consisting of The Civilians artistic staff and representatives of The Lewis Center and HMEI, will read or reread all finalists’ applications, and some team members may meet with finalists to discuss their proposed projects and how their work would benefit from access to the Princeton community and resources.

Qualifications

• Applicants must be 18 years of age and have authorization to work in the United States.
• We will consider a broad range of generative artists including playwrights, composers, devisers, directors and performers looking to create original theatrical work.
• Applicants must articulate some kind of research-based approach to creating their work, demonstrating that the residency period is a valuable and necessary aspect of the project.
• Applicants must be available to fulfill the Princeton residency component of the commission and should live within commuting distance via ground transportation to Princeton University. The residency period is to take place during the academic year: (September 2025 to May 2026).
• We will consider both original and adapted works, provided that the rights to any material not in the public domain have been granted in writing, and a copy of the release is emailed along with the script.
• We will consider plays, devised work, performance, live art, musicals—anything that takes place live in front of an audience. If submitting as a collaboration, please submit a single proposal as a team. Your team application should consist of a single joint proposal but with individual bios and work samples.
• Scripts and proposals should be submitted as PDF files. Music samples should be submitted as MP3 files.

View Past Application Guidelines

The Civilians’ Commitment To Our Community

As you take the time and energy to apply for The Next Forever Commission, we want to share our commitment to you, our extended community.

The Civilians strives to be a vibrant company of artists whose work reflects our celebration and investigation of diverse human experiences. We believe that our work and our lives are infinitely more complex, rewarding, illuminating, and nearer to truth when we have a wider variety of human experiences in our room, at our table, and on our stages.

The Civilians is committed to dismantling racist, sexist and other unjust and harmful systems and we are committed to anti-racism practices that actively promote equity, inclusion and justice for each person in our community, regardless of and without limitation to race, ethnicity, culture, nationality, gender identity, sexual orientation or identity, religion, age, economic class, educational level, language, immigration status, physical mobility and ability, Neurodiversity and family status. The Civilians believes that everyone should have equal access to our programs, and that our diverse community should be reflected in all that we do.

The process of selecting our Artist Commissions are guided by these commitments. All activities throughout the season are also shaped by these values and priorities, and space is held collaboratively, equitably, and with mutual respect, accordingly.

To learn about The Civilians’ commitments to anti-racism, accessibility, and indigenous peoples, lands, and stories, please visit our living document here:  https://thecivilians.org/anti-racism-commmitment/