Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on February 24, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission.
Princeton University students can learn about “Investigative Theater for a Changing Climate” this spring.
Students will create “an original work of theater” by “pursuing a creative inquiry into some aspect of climate change,” according to the course description. Students will also “study performance texts and films about climate change, to understand critical concepts that facilitate the development of eco-theater.”
This course counts as upper-level theater or musical theater credit, but “previous theater experience is not required.” It is graded on a “pass,” “D,” or “Fail” basis, and participation counts for 30 percent of the total grade.
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Students will be taught by Steven Cosson, who helped develop the method called “investigative theater” along with his troupe “The Civilians.”
He did not respond to two emailed requests for comment from the College Fix in the past month on the grading scale, the inspiration behind the course, and the connection between theater and climate change.
Past works by the Civilians include ‘Sex Variants,’ a look at the “intimate lives of Depression-era queers,” “Black Feminist Video Game” about a “biracial teenager with autism,” and “The Unbelieving” that looks at “the lives of practicing clergy members— Catholics, Episcopalians, Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, Jews, Mormons, Muslims—who have stopped believing in God.”
Cosson co-conceived “Sex Variant” and directed “The Unbelieving” as an artistic director for the group.
The other instructor, Khristian Aguirre, also did not respond to requests for comment over the same time period. The course description describes him as an “emerging expert in the field of Performance and Ecology.” Aguirre is also featured as “theatre director and researcher” in Howlround Theatre Commons, a site that “amplifies progressive, disruptive ideas about the art form and facilitates connection between diverse practitioners.”
His website, devoted to “Theater + Education + Intersectional Equity + Environmental Justice,” was made private after the Fix emailed him.
An emeritus professor of English at Emory University and a senior editor at First Things criticized the course in a comment to the Fix.
“At a time when American youth, including elites, have poor reading habits, meager knowledge of history, vulgar tastes (having been fed vulgar social media for years), and humanities enrollments are plummeting, the assignment of course time and effort to climate change is pedagogical malpractice,” Mark Bauerlein told the Fix.
The Lewis Center for the Arts, which hosts the theatre and music courses, did not respond to an email and voice mail left in the past month.
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The course is a component of “a multi-year project about environmental storytelling led by The Civilians, Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute, and the Lewis Center for the Arts.” The project is called “The Next Forever: New Stories for a Changing Planet.”
“What stories can we tell to find our way out of the planetary crisis we’re in?” relating to climate change, biodiversity loss, ecological collapse, and food insecurity,” the initiative asks.
“The initiative provides forward-thinking artists unparalleled access to a cross-disciplinary range of knowledge and ideas—of scientists, conservation psychologists, historians, and policy and communications experts, and fellow artists, among others,” according to the Lewis Center website.
Image of McCarter Theater Auditorium Princeton by Andreas Praefcke on Wikimedia Commons
