Interview: Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson Create a Climate Change Thriller in Kyoto

Once upon a time, the world actually managed to unite over one of the most divisive issues imaginable: climate change. The result was the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 treaty in which industrialized nations agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The road to ratification was fraught, but ultimately, there was a greater good at stake and everyone knew it.

Kyoto, the new play by Good Chance founders Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, is set against the backdrop of the historic climate negotiations that led to the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, exploring the political maneuvering that made it happen. In a rare twist, the protagonist of the story is not someone fighting the good fight for change, but an American Reaganite lawyer and Big Oil lobbyist actively working to stop the negotiations. That real-life figure, Donald Pearlman, once dubbed “the high priest of the carbon club,” is played by stage stalwart Stephen Kunken, reprising a performance he originated last year in the United Kingdom.

Now running at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater after engagements at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the West End’s @SohoPlace theater, Kyoto is less docudrama than international political thriller—one that, according to its writers, feels more urgent with every passing day.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I saw Kyoto last winter at @SohoPlace, and what struck me was that it’s a British play, with an American protagonist, about an international event. You don’t often see that.
Joe Robertson: We’ve never lived in a more global, interconnected, interdependent society. We’re all so dependent on each other now in a way we never have been before. We love putting the world on stage. That’s what’s exciting for us: Hearing different languages on stage, seeing different nationalities.

Obviously, your play The Jungle came out of your living in the Calais refugee camp where its set. But you weren’t at the Kyoto climate summits. Where did the idea to dramatize them come from?
Joe Murphy: We were talking about the society that we’re living in, this strange, disagreeable, polarized society where conversations feel difficult no matter what your opinion is. It seemed that it would be good to find an entertaining way to talk about that quite lofty subject, and that was well before we even began a play about climate. It just so happened that the two ideas—that it would be good to write a complex show about climate and good to write a show about polarization—collided.

Joe Robertson: We heard about the story of Kyoto. It sounded like an insane miracle that, once upon a time, the entire world agreed unanimously to agree on one of the most contentious subjects ever. With The Jungle, because we lived there and made the show with the people who were there, we recognized the importance of having the real authorities telling the story. In a way, we unconsciously tried to recreate that by talking to probably more than 100 people who were crucial in the process, from diplomats to delegates to scientists, on all sides, from all countries.

Joe Murphy: It has felt important, in hindsight, that we spoke to people from a wide range of opinions on this same subject. It was a fascinating process, and we’re indebted to so many people for sharing their experience of this amazing moment with us.

I have a two-pronged question about Donald Pearlman. How did you settle on the idea of an Iago figure as the protagonist of this story, and then, how did you settle on him specifically?
Joe Robertson: We wanted to really understand every bit of what led to the impossible agreement in Kyoto. As we talked to more people, we kept hearing the name Don Pearlman. He was in the footnotes of a lot of books, but there was not much about him online or published. He was a brilliant legal strategist who operated under the radar but did more to stall and obfuscate the process than most other people at that time.

We’d built up this monster of Don Pearlman in our heads, and then we talked to his son about the human being. We got very interested by the tension of this family, knowing now what their father did, but he’s still their dad. These things risk being earnest and lofty and moral high groundy, which I think turns a lot of people off the subject of climate. So, to have this Iago, this Richard III-like character, right in the center, who is trying, at every moment, to stop the agreement, to stop the play, became exciting.

When I talked to Stephen Kunken in February, all that I could find on Don was an obituary in the Washington Post and a profile in Der Spiegel. Literally right before this call, I discovered that there is suddenly a Donald Pearlman Wikipedia page, which did not exist eight months ago when I was researching him.
Joe Murphy: That popped up, if I’m not wrong, in March. We knew nothing about it. We still don’t know who created it. It’s obviously somebody who knows a lot about him and knows a lot about the play. But it’s not just about the play.

Joe Robertson: There’s information in there that’s not in the play that we wish we knew.

Joe Murphy: One day we will hunt down who created that page. But it’s very interesting that it happened. Don was not unlike any other lobbyist, in that a lot of his work depended on a degree of anonymity, and obviously, the play brings him to an audience that he never found during his lifetime.

Joe Robinson: And Stephen Kunken, beyond being the most amazing man you’ve ever met, an absolute pro, and a brilliant company leader, from Billions to Handmaid’s Tale, he’s a fucking great actor of villains.

Joe Murphy: He’s got this delicious thing, which is that he’s the loveliest person in the world. It’s a complicated experience watching this creation of his because I know, as an audience member, that I’m not meant to be on his side. At most moments, I’m not. But there are moments where I’m drawn into him.

Obviously, Ragtime is going on upstairs at the Beaumont. If you’ve seen it, did you see a thematic connection between the two plays?
Joe Robertson: Oh, my God, 100 percent. It is such a brilliant piece of programming. Both have this immense scale. Ragtime has the ambition to talk about the vastness of America. There’s Houdini, there’s Henry Ford, there are all these different communities trying to coexist on stage in a nation. There’s that streak of hope and desire, in spite of all the difficulties that are part of our daily lives. Kyoto does that about America, but also about the world. It tries to go, “What unites us is greater than what divides us.” They’re great little partners, upstairs and downstairs.