Ever wonder what goes on in the mind of a playwright?
Our Author Insights series features personal essays from playwrights, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the ideas and experiences that shaped their work.
Below, read “Friendship at the End of the World Reflections from the Author of The Amphibians.” You can also download a free PDF that pairs the essay with short, classroom-ready activities for students.
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Friendship at the End of the World: An Author’s Journey with The Amphibians
Dan Caffrey
It was New Year’s Eve of 2012, and another playwright I knew shared an article from The Nation about how bad the climate crisis had gotten. I felt a mixture of shock and naivety wash over me. Climate change hadn’t really been an issue I’d been paying attention to in my adult life; even the term was somewhat unfamiliar. Growing up in Florida (in the very town The Amphibians takes place in), it had always been called “global warming” and was taught to me by my science teachers as something that was very debatable, only caused by aerosol cans (if it even really existed), and wasn’t anything to worry about.
That night, I quickly became a black hole of despair at the NYE party my wife Susan and I attended. All I wanted to talk about was this Nation article, but no one seemed interested. My climate anxiety only worsened the following year when Susan and I had nieces born on each side of our family. Suddenly, there were two very young people in our lives who had an uncertain future ahead of them. When I imagined them growing up, all I could picture were two little girls wearing sundresses and gas masks. I know how alarmist and hyperbolic that sounds now, but it’s true. Sundress and a gas mask, sundress and a gas mask, sundress and a gas mask…
When I started trying to figure out how to manage my spiraling climate grief, I did what I do with any topic that worries me: I wrote about it. Wanting to break them free of the apocalyptic image that had been plaguing me (though it did end up making its way into the script), I imagined my nieces not as little girls frolicking in a wasteland, but teenagers hanging out in the serene woods of Starkey Park, part of the nature preserve where I grew up. Eventually, a giant monster made its way into the pages. It always does.
So my initial goal with The Amphibians was an admittedly selfish one: to make myself feel better. But as I dove further into the script, I realized I was writing about the simple act of acknowledgment. I’ve always believed that there’s power in seeing someone who feels like you do onstage, and in Bryn and Simone, I tried to create two characters who struggle with all the stress, worry, and sadness that comes with a changing planet, while also permitting them to struggle with the more intimate emotions that come with a changing high-school friendship.
It makes me think of that New Year’s party, where by the end of the night, I was annoyed and saddened that all my friends weren’t as worried as I was. But the truth is they were. It just didn’t mean that everything else in their lives had to stop. Maybe finding joy and all the other nuanced emotional experiences during our time here is even more important amidst something as overwhelming as the climate crisis. To quote Bryn, I wanna live with all of the things inside me—the dread, the excitement, the loneliness, the romance, the fear. I think we all do.