playwrights respond to other plays

Another one to add to reasons why theatres don't touch climate change is that people have held back from staging something that isn't quite good enough. (For a long time, the Full Monty's Simon Beaufoy was writing a climate-change play for the Tricycle, but it never appeared.) But maybe a few not-so-great plays about climate change would get the thing going.

The American playwright Christopher Shinn writes in the introduction to his Plays: 1 that he began his second play after seeing Shopping and Fucking ('I thought it was one of those plays that valorises the thing it claims to critique'.) Shinn says his university tutor Tony Kushner had 'put the idea into my head that playwrights can respond to plays they hate by writing new ones - I think he even told me he wrote Angels in America in response to some stupid Aids play.'

Angels in America appears in our timeline (1993) as the first play in which an angel descends to earth through a hole in the ozone layer.