Walden
InterAct Theatre at The Drake
302 S Hicks St.
Philadelphia
Nov. 14, 2025
Showing through Nov. 23
Is saving Earth still a possibility or should we commit ourselves to colonizing another planet? This was the question posed by InterACT’s newest production “Walden,” written by playwright Amy Berryman and now showing at The Drake.
That either-or-premise on the brochure in my mailbox made me skeptical at first. I know there is a desire for this kind of thought provoking theater, evidenced by a group sat behind me at The Drake who excitedly murmured, “They (InterAct) always leave you with something to think about.” However, when a piece is so centered on a thought experiment, it can reduce characters to inflexible talking points, rather than building them into realistic people. I’ve noted such difficulties in similar productions put on by Interact in the past, like in their telling of a professor wrongly accused of spying on the U.S. because of his ethnicity. I feared a lack of feeling this time around, too.
However, Walden successfully evaded the format’s pitfalls by focusing the story around sisterhood as an intimate and lively metaphor for the debate around space travel. This structure transformed a highly intellectual debate about the ethical implications of interplanetary colonization and relocation into an emotional tale about a pair of twins’ splintering paths through life. In a play about the grim future facing humanity, family is a tender and complicated beacon of hope, harboring the potential for renewal and forgiveness.
The core conflict of the show exists between estranged twin sisters who were raised to follow in the footsteps of their father and go to space. One sister, Cassidy, has been offered a chance to live out the rest of her life on the moon, while the other, Stella, has been deemed unfit for space travel. In a dystopian future, Cassidy wants to find an alternative planet to house the human species while Stella ultimately decides to fight to save humanity’s home planet at whatever cost.
Both sisters are trying to find ways to “make something out of nothing,” as Cassidy puts it. In the face of a black and white question – to stay or to go – the play manages to find a human middle ground. Familiar conflicts between sisters are set on a cosmic stage as we consider our responsibility to our familiar planet as well as to each other.
Though the script revolves around space travel and our futuristic societal collapse, the set smartly does not attempt to imagine these scenes. Instead, we are invited into the traditional scene of a cabin in the woods, where the earth-bound sister resides. Light streams from behind prop tree trunks while bird and insect noises play over the loud speaker.
After returning from the moon, Stella’s everyday life is a revelation to Cassidy. Cassidy is in awe of the clean air and presence of wildlife that her sister and her “Earth Advocate” fiance have helped to cultivate. The only problem the two are unable to reconcile is that they have developed fundamentally diverging lives following Stella’s rejection from the space academy.
Campbell O’Hare’s portrayal of Cassidy is illuminating; when the sisters first nervously greet each other, O’Hare’s body language unearths years of sibling rivalry. Constantly watching Stella out of the corner of her eye and mirroring her stage direction, O’Hare embodies the sister’s self doubt and desire for approval. In contrast, Alice York’s performance lets slip Stella’s sense of allegiance as she transitions their tense relationship into organic banter and self-reflection about their family’s upbringing. Together they are magnets, both drawn together and repelled apart.
As identical twins, the moments when the sisters are closest are when they are able to see their separateness. When Cassidy arrives, Stella is resentful of her success, but still eager to know what it’s like to be in space: “How does it feel?” she wonders. This is the same question that Cassidy later asks when Stella announces that she is pregnant. Their curiosity for each other’s experience of major life events allows them to be more generous with their acceptance of the others' choices.
While in this future I would probably be deemed an Earth Advocate – I am not interested in living out my life on another planet – the show succeeded exactly where I thought it would fail: It helped me to consider life in someone else's shoes. I felt for Cassidy and the life she dreamed of in space — and I understood Stella’s cautious optimism.
The argument between the sisters’ two ways of life, as well as the idea of right and wrong when it comes to deciding what constitutes "home," is left unanswered and unfulfilled. The play concludes with a phone call in which Stella and Cassidy confront the different roads lying ahead of them. On the phone, Stella asks Cassidy, “So, are you going to go?”
Then the stage goes dark. Looking up at the full moon on my way home, I wondered if Cassidy was up there, and what it would feel like.
