On an uncomfortably hot evening in November—the Day of the Dead to be exact—a group of thirtysomething friends convene in a house in the trendy Silver Lake hills of Los Angeles and proceed to melt down ensemble, as their anxieties blurt out, stack and compound like debt. They worry about career success in Hollywood, about the decision to have a child, sexuality, identity, and yes, global warming—hence the play’s clever title.
At the center are married couple Calder (Nate Corddry), a promising writer-director, and Abigail (Jennifer Mudge), an actress. The worries come like embers blown in on the Santa Ana wind: will Calder’s newest movie, based on a true-life female polar explorer, be greenlit by the studio? Will he have to cast an A-list name, rather than giving the lead part to his wife, who, at 35, is still booking mostly commercials and bit parts and looking for her big break? Will Abigail get pregnant? The couple have been “trying” for some time, and her period is late.
So far, mundane fretting at the end of the work day. But Abigail is also harried by a dread of climate change, and spends too much time on the internet looking up the grim facts of melting ice, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and the coming collapse of planktonic food webs. As these worries begin to overwhelm Abigail, the couple’s close friends gather in their picture-perfect Silver Lake house: Reed (Keith Powell), an old school buddy of Calder’s, now an unlikely, nerdy black paleontologist from Missouri, who is visiting LA for a conference; Molly (Rebecca Henderson), Abigail’s girlfriend who very recently and precipitously married a younger woman, a woman who she is now fretfully contemplating divorcing because the new wife rejects her cat, Taco; and finally Nicky (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe), Calder’s agent, a smooth-talking, tight-suited avatar of the type who is one of the best California characters since Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, gleefully zinging the business lingo and insincerity, while simultaneously holding out the golden promise of Kirsten Dunst accepting the lead in Calder’s movie and right-swiping his Tinder screen.