WHEN DAVID BUCKEL
SAVED THE WORLD
BY COLM SUMMERS
“Our present grows more desperate, our future needs more than what we’ve been doing. My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
DAVID BUCKEL, Note, 2018.
ABOUT THE PLAY
On stage, a huge mound of earth in shadow. Voices speak from the compost before us, sounds we distinguish as reportage, 9-11 calls and sirens. There is an emergency at Prospect Park: David Buckel, prominent LGBTQ+ rights lawyer and activist, has set himself alight to protest the climate catastrophe. Two voices stand out: Terry Kaelber, Buckel’s widower, and an editor, who demands the inside scoop from Terry.
When David Buckel Saved the World is a new play that imagines a future where the real-life Buckel’s death initiated a wave of climate activism, one that saved the world. It utilizes verbatim interviews with David’s loved ones, blending docudrama with magical realism to address the climate change and mental health crises.
The play follows two parallel stories of grief: one begins in the year 2090, and transforms the mound into Red Hook Farm (where Buckel spent years as a leader in sustainability). There, Tomas, one of the composters, is mourning the recent loss of his mentee, Louis. The second story finds a fictional version of the real-life Terry trapped in the mound, now a purgatory. The pushy editor prods Terry for the scoop and they revisit David’s past, digging up secrets in the process. As decades pass, Tomas remains stuck in his grief. Terry eventually comes to terms with David’s death.
Created in collaboration with David’s widow, developed on Red Hook Farm, this play literally puts sustainability center-stage, and asks audiences, like Terry, to take action in the face of enormous odds.
ABOUT THE PEOPLE
DAVID BUCKEL led a life of service. He was the lead attorney on the Brandon Teena case (a legal victory that made strides in defending trans lives), and blazed the trail for the legalisation of same-sex marriage in America. When he retired, he set his sights on an equally urgent cause: the climate crisis. He saw that the path towards a greener future, indeed, our only chance of a future at all, was in the hands of earth’s greatest violators: us. David spent the next few years building the nation’s largest human-powered compost site on Red Hook Farm in Brooklyn, New York.
David Buckel on site at Red Hook Farm
David Buckel and his husband, Terry Kaelber
TERRY KAELBER (David’s widower) is currently based in New York. There, his organization, The Institute for Empowered Aging at Unite Neighborhood Houses, was awarded the Eisner Prize in 2021. He has been collaborating with Colm on When David Buckel Saved the World since 2020.
DOMINGO MORALES was David Buckel’s mentee on Red Hook Farm in Brooklyn. Since David’s passing, Domingo has become a climate activist in his own right, and founded Compost Power, an organization centered on developing community compost sites, with a focus on marginalized communities. In 2020, Domingo was awarded The David Prize for his sustainability activism.
You can learn more about Compost Power by clicking this link.
PRODUCTION DEVELOPMENT
JULY 2020: Colm forms a relationship with Terry Kaelber and Domingo Morales. That summer, he spends weeks volunteering on the site of Red Hook Farm, where he learns first-hand about David’s revolutionary compost methods.
JANUARY-JUNE 2022: As part of the Pan Pan International Mentorship cohort, Colm works with Terry O’Connor of the UK’s Forced Entertainment on the script development of Buckel. Their work culminates in a public presentation about the project in Dublin, Ireland.
April 2023: Colm and the Buckel team will be artists-in-residence at BRIC, based in David Buckel’s home borough of Brooklyn, NY. There, they will take part in a two-week development residency that concludes in a works-in-progress performance for the community.