OLIVIA
New play by Catherine Filloux; Directed by Elena Araoz
The Studio Theatre | 530 8th Ave, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10018
February 27th, 2026 at 3pm
Theater is a catalyst that inspires change in subliminal ways. For those looking to be entertained and amused, ever so often does a play become a magnifying glass for the larger social issues at hand. With the extreme amount of wealth regaled ever so willfully on social platforms, does one ever step back to think, at what stake? Does pushing products and flexing wealth ever raise an alarm for how the planet is to suffer at the expense of landfills, deforestation, and weather pattern changes? Even the amount of electricity harvested is coming at the cost of available water sources that are now becoming borderline scarce.
Olivia, a new play by Catherine Filloux, is a riveting call-to-action piece that questions our relationship to the environment and how our social duties impact it. The intimacy of the theater lends a perfect platform for Filloux’s piece of high-powered stakes of inheritance, family legacy, and social justice. A fossil fuel empire serves as the gravitational force behind environmental destruction, while a family bloodline rooted in the drudges of colonialism faces a staggering reckoning when its future rests at the helm of an heir.
Olivia, examines identity and how family lineage can either disrupt or impact the planet for generations to come. The play underlines the very uncomfortable telltale truths of finding the courage to confront your very roots and make choices that are morally impactful for the betterment of mankind, even at the expense of worldly comforts or severing familial ties. Escalating tensions create the brink of despair when a modern day family dynasty cannot find moral common ground.
The Q&A afterwards was held by a panel of esteemed guests in the field of climate accountability and policy advocacy. The moderators were Zamira Chevrestt from In The Same Boat (Norway), Kylie Ford of The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, Daniel Wilkinson of Climate Rights International, and James Browning of F Minus. This was the moment where watching the play unfold created a dialogue amongst these esteemed professionals in their fields, opening the floodgates to how the social impacts of today can affect our tomorrow. The symposium packed a powerful punch when highlighted side by side with a play to emphasize radical undertakings to make way for much needed change.
American theater does not shy away from drama or grand tensions at hand, but there is something ever so impactful when our global impact is closely scrutinized on a platform we must confront. The theater can be sanctuary or sanctimony, depending on which way the moral gavel falls. Are you willing to allow theater as a means to question the very moral fabric of your being and bring you to the depths of discomfort? In doing so, does pushing you to the brim set a new fire under you to make waves and changes beyond a social media comment here or there?
Theater for social change is a wave of storms asking audiences to be daring and take part in a moral revolution, to make even subtle changes that eventually lead to substantial growth.
During the Q&A, conversations were had about plastic and the call for supporting the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act. This act requires companies selling products, offering them for sale, or distributing packaging materials or products to register with a packaging reduction organization to develop a packaging reduction and recycling plan. Presenting a live performance with tremendous stakes at hand is the perfect foray into welcoming conversations on climate and recycling reforms so that the audience, and future, if not current, advocates, can see with their very own eyes the intimacy theater allows, staying entrenched in story with no other distractions, or as one says nowadays, doom scrolling on social media.
We are all presented with “The Bigger Truth” at hand as our existential core is examined:
We are not struggling with ideas.
We are not struggling with voice.
We are not struggling with conviction.
Our only vulnerability right now is lack of authoritative conviction under emotional duress of hopelessness and helplessness at what feels beyond our control.
Pass the Packaging Reduction & Recycling Infrastructure Act S1464/A1749
Editorial by Bianca Lopez.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on March 4, 2026. All rights reserved.