Three dozen climate negotiators and scientists were at Lincoln Center the other day, in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, to see a performance of “Kyoto,” about the landmark 1997 treaty on greenhouse-gas emissions. It was a bittersweet reunion for “Team Climate U.S.A.,” as Sue Biniaz, a State Department lawyer for more than thirty years, put it, while addressing the group in the lobby after the show. On the one hand, “we usually work in total obscurity,” she said. “So to make it the subject of an incredible play is really, really nice for us.” On the other hand, “we are no longer in that business.” The Trump Administration eliminated the department’s climate-negotiation office in April, a few months after announcing its withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
The play stars Stephen Kunken as an oil lobbyist named Don Pearlman, who addresses the audience at the outset. “I think we can all agree on one thing,” he says. “The times you live in are fucking awful.” Then, with a smile, he adds, “The nineteen-nineties were freakin’ glorious!” His cynicism in playing the Saudis against the Tanzanians and the Chinese is matched only by his hunger for cigarettes. (The actual Pearlman died of lung-cancer complications in 2005, at sixty-nine.) Yet Kunken gives the character a roguish charisma, in his tireless defense of American freedom, that Biniaz couldn’t help observing was arguably fictional. “Don was not nearly as charming in real life,” she said, to knowing laughter.
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The cast and the forlorn climateers mingled. Biniaz remarked that she was struck by how well something as ostensibly dry and technical as multilateral negotiation translated to the stage. “There’s a certain performative aspect to the negotiations where you might have to appear more frustrated or angry than you actually are,” she granted. “There’s also kind of an onstage-offstage aspect. It’s, like, ‘Oh, So-and-So is just so annoying.’ You’ll say, ‘Yeah, but offstage he’s really a nice guy.’ ”
Kunken, for his part, felt that the core theme of the story—arriving at consensus—was an apt metaphor for live theatre. “Doing a play is coming to an agreement,” he said. “Every actor wants to tell their character’s story: this is my moment. And another actor says, ‘I know, but, if you do that, then you’re missing this set of beats for me.’ You’re in front of an audience, and any single person on any given night can pull the focus by doing something extraneous.”
Tim Lattimer, a former deputy office director at the State Department, and a longtime environmentalist, asked Kunken if he was familiar with the Scott Freeman studio, an acting school. “Oh, sure,” Kunken said.
“Scott and I did high-school theatre together,” Lattimer said. “I’ve had people say I shouldn’t have been a scientist.”
A memorable scene in the play depicts the various international delegations arguing over punctuation marks in a singsong cadence. The real-life negotiators praised this as an illustration of the art of “constructive ambiguity,” allowing each country to declare slightly differing interpretations of victory. “The Chinese negotiator, my counterpart there, was named Su,” Biniaz recalled, referring to Su Wei. “We were the two Sues. We one time had something without commas, which is how I wanted it. And he said, ‘I accept that, if we add a comma,’ because his English was so amazing that he knew that that would give him a slight advantage. It was like playing tennis with someone who’s better than you—forces you to up your game. And every time I was with Su, even though this was not his native language, I felt like I had to be completely in the zone.” She added, “One of our major principles is called common but differentiated responsibilities. So I wrote an article called ‘Comma but Differentiated Responsibilities.’ ”
One of the playwrights, Joe Robertson, mentioned another Chinese negotiator, an academic named Shukong Zhong, whose command of English was such that he translated Charles Dickens in his spare time. “Dickens was viewed as sort of the epitome of the terrors and excesses of Western capitalism,” Robertson said. “So he was very popular in China.”
“Professor Zhong was amazing,” Biniaz agreed. “He would always argue for principles before you could start negotiating. He would talk about ‘In China, when a housewife makes a rice meal, she starts with rice.’ Our guy was Dan Reifsnyder at the time, and he would have some other metaphor, about how, when he cooks, he usually starts with a recipe. The whole room was just watching the two of them go back and forth.”
“A duel of metaphors,” Robertson said.
“All about the kitchen.”
Joking, one of the ex-negotiators asked Joe Murphy, the other playwright, if they were going to tackle the Paris agreement next. “This is the first of a trilogy!” Murphy replied. “Yeah, the next one’s like ‘The Empire Strikes Back.’ Copenhagen: everything collapses and it’s a disaster.” Then would come Paris, as “Return of the Jedi,” a bit of optimism before, well, the fucking-awful present. Tim Lattimer raised his hand. “Can I just say thank you for doing it in this theatre and not the Koch Theatre?” ♦