I am writing a commission about environmental activism. For those who know me, this may come as a bit of a shock. Yes I recycle and yes I pick garbage off the ground from time to time; and yes I sold my car last summer and I ride public transit when it is too cold to bike to wherever I need to go. But I sold my car because I hate parking in Chicago. I sold my car because I needed the money. I would rather bike than pay the $4 roundtrip for a bus.

I’m not an environmental activist. I don’t fancy myself an activist of any kind. I often find myself as annoyed with “bleeding heart liberals” as I do with ultra conservatives: extremism is extremism, and regardless of the stance, few people listen to people who are yelling. At least I don’t.

My first draft of the play — tentatively called Down To Earth — was completed last month, and the organization sponsoring the play hosted a staged reading of it on Saturday. It went well. Not great: the play’s not done yet. It’s probably two or three drafts away from being something stage-worthy. But the talkback session was phenomenal: instructive, insightful, honest criticism. One of the comments was that there was a disconnect between the intention and the execution. The intention of the play is not my own: this play is in fact a rewrite of a play written by the president of the organization sponsoring the whole project, and he is passionate about the fact that this is the environmental point of no return. Right now. March 2008. If we don’t do something “yesterday,” as he puts it, it will be too late.

I left our meeting this morning trying to figure out how to successfully communicate this urgency. In the latest draft, I had attempted to do so through didacticism; but, as is so often the case with didactic theatrical writing, it wasn’t playing. The preachiness was turning people off. It was turning me off.

I’m on the 156 Bus in Lincoln Park heading to my apartment, and I pass the New Leaf space: I could make myself believe it. I could let myself really see the melting ice-caps and the expanding deserts and the growing number of the environmentally displaced. I could see it instead of understand it.

I’m in my head a lot. I have had many a conversation about how I often intellectualize a situation rather than let myself feel it. A dramaturg’s curse? But if a theatre experience is suppose to be about the growth of all its participants — audience and company alike — then eventually you have to let something in. Eventually I do. And the theatre experience for a writer begins in his head and on the page.

I can’t expect my writing to change anyone’s mind if it doesn’t change my own.