Review: Kyoto Actually Makes UN Diplomacy Thrilling

Confession: Whenever I see a headline about climate change, I usually scroll by without reading. We’re told it is the greatest crisis facing the planet, but that enormity has an air of fate—as if nothing I could do or say will ever make a difference. This is an issue typically addressed through dry scientific studies and dull multilateral diplomacy, which is why the theater rarely touches it. No one wants to look out every night at a sea of sleeping patrons—or worse, empty seats.

That makes Kyoto, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s electrifying political thriller about climate diplomacy in the 1990s, an impressive feat. It is now making its US debut at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater under the caffeinated yet lucid direction of Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, who helmed the world premiere for Good Chance and the Royal Shakespeare Company. This is the same team that created The Jungle, the excellent drama about a refugee camp in Calais, and they have brought the same people-centric passion to this tale of global diplomacy.

Murphy and Robertson have wisely centered their tale on an antihero to rival Richard III. Stephen Kunken plays Washington lawyer and climate talk spoiler Don Pearlman with all the delicious relish and unexpected charm of the son of York. Under the banner of his NGO “The Climate Council” (which was really just a front for big oil), Pearlman operates in the shadows, expertly exploiting the byzantine procedural rules of the United Nations and irritating national rivalries in order to scuttle the talks that began in Berlin in 1995 and culminated in the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

Kunken is transfixing as he calmly manipulates the game, issuing orders to his proxies like a superstar NFL coach. But Pearlman is not just a Brooks Brothers-clad mercenary. He truly believes that the proposed policy, which will have legally binding emissions targets for developed countries but non-binding targets for the developing world (including China), is a stealthy way to undermine American dominance using the rules-based international order we championed after 1945. He sees it as his patriotic duty to kill it before it kills us.

The supporting players rise to the high bar Kunken has set. Jorge Bosch is both hilarious and moving as Kyoto chairman Raúl Estrada-Oyuela, portrayed here as an Argentine clown with a heart of gold. Kate Burton confidently steps into the sensible heels of America’s ball-busting delegate. Feodor Chin is every bit the proto-wolf warrior, on guard for western tricks to arrest China’s rise. Erin Darke plays a surprisingly nuanced Angela Merkel, finding the mob boss hiding beneath the bad haircut and frumpy blue suit.

Natalie Gold gives a quietly powerful performance as Don’s wife, Shirley, who follows her husband around the globe to five-star hotels and asks very little about his work. Those of us living comfortably in the first city of the empire are likely to find her unnervingly relatable.

Peter Bradbury is shadier than any drag queen as the climate skeptic Fred Singer, mocking his rival scientists until they are literally red-faced (Ferdy Roberts is particularly skilled at this party trick). And Taiana Tully delivers the most memorable speech of the entire play as the representative from Kiribati, who looks directly at the American delegate as she says, “Perhaps American freedom is ill-suited to the challenges of the future.”  It’s alarming stuff for a guy like Pearlman.

Daldry and Martin have staged a tight production with the actors leaping on and off Miriam Buether’s set, which turns the stage of the Mitzi into a giant conference table, making everyone in the audience delegates. Natalie Price’s costumes capture distinct personality within the confines of ’90s business attire. Aiden Malone’s lighting puts hard borders of illumination around scenes, helping to transform this wooden O into a multitude of locations around the world.

Christopher Reed’s tense sound and Akhila Krishnan’s evocative, smartly curated video design keep our pulses racing, turning this nearly three-hour play about climate change into an action-packed spectacle. A late scenic effect slyly nods at Broadway: If this is what it takes to get audiences to care about climate change, the creators seem to say, we’ll do it.

Naturally, much of the nuance of this story is lost in Murphy and Robertson’s more Shakespearean flourishes. We never learn much about Pearlman’s paymasters from the seven sisters, who occasionally appear behind him in a phalanx wearing long black coats, their gloved hands folded like drowsy vampires.

A complicated, fast-paced sequence that imagines negotiations over a single paragraph (without the aid of UN translators) won’t help anyone understand the stakes behind that clause but will certainly go down as a triumph of multilingual absurdism. Special recognition should be reserved for dialect coach Liz Haynes, who has done phenomenal work here. Kyoto is never short of thrilling, even if we’re never quite sure what it all means.

And judging from the tepid applause that greeted a late line about most countries meeting their emissions targets, it seems the reliably liberal audience at Lincoln Center wasn’t entirely certain what that achievement meant either—especially as the mask of the rules-based international order slips off to reveal the ugly face of raw power that was always lurking underneath.