By Bill Marx

Keiko Green’s play about the end of the world is a robust vaudevillian entertainment.

You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! by Keiko Green. Directed by Shawn LaCount. Dramaturgy by Jessie Baxter. Staged by Company One at the Boston Public Library, Central Library in Copley Square, 700 Boylston St., Boston, through March 28.

Kai Clifton in Company One’s You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! Photo: Annielly Camargo

American plays about the trials and tribulations of cancer patients — Marvin’s Room and Wit come to mind — tend to focus on the personal and institutional, often casting a skeptical eye on the inadequacies of medical authorities (tellingly, issues around health insurance rarely come up). What makes Keiko Green’s robust vaudevillian entertainment You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! so valuable is that the script takes cancer, mortality, and grief and treats them, at least in part, metaphorically. After the play’s protagonist, Greg, is diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, he becomes obsessed with the climate crisis. At one point, he insists, “I am the Earth” to incredulous family members. The powerful link between an ailing planet and an expiring man is treated with humor, poignance, show-biz panache, meta-theatrical hijinks, and surreal dream sequences, all of it anchored in clear-eyed insight into the limitations of human beings when confronted with domestic and global disasters, traumas large and small.

The family’s nonbinary child, M (Kai Clifton), serves as emcee/narrator, and they weave together the show’s various segments, offering seriocomic commentary on the internecine turmoil, their father’s difficulty with accepting their identity, and the birth and death of the universe. M works as a bartender at a local club, where they also perform in drag, shows they keep secret from family members. Eventually, M introduces their boyfriend, Will (Nicholas Papayoanou), to their sympathetic mother Viv (Jade Guerra), who is doing her best to make her husband’s remaining time on earth as vibrant as possible, and the rest of the family. Will works in social media for a nonprofit combating climate change and, in one memorable scene, he challenges Greg’s belief that individual actions are enough to mitigate environmental disaster. He underlines, with spot-on facts and figures, how ultra-powerful corporations and military-friendly governments are responsible for maintaining the non-stop despoiling of the global environment.

Climate change is only one strand in End of the World!: another is dramatizing the family’s various reactions to Greg’s health crisis and mania (at one point, he disables all the lawnmowers in the neighborhood), responses that range from sitcom-ish comedy to cosmic pathos and Dadaesque visions (the latter include a support group made up of vanished animals, along with cameos by a gung-ho Greta Thunberg). A lot goes on in this consistently engaging jumble of a play—dealing with the mortality of a loved one and animal extinction, with issues of identity, with planetary doom, with how individuals can best be remembered—as it jumps with playful abandon hither and yon. Somehow, Green’s antic sense of humor, tinged with dark existential vibes, holds it all together.

The challenge for an acting troupe is to keep up with End of the World! ever-shifting tonalities, and the Company One cast members are up to the task. Director Shawn LaCount is fielding a gifted crew of performers, with Papayoanou, Anjie Parker, and Alex Alexander doubling a number of roles (including oversized critters) with amusing skill. Guerra mingles maternal warmth with deadpan timing in her portrait of the understandably frazzled Viv, while Michael Tow’s Greg manages to be monomaniacal yet relaxed — he’s a laid-back obsessive. Kai Clifton’s M rounds the emotional bases with aplomb — sentimentality, nihilism, despair, showbiz panache, and exaltation. LaCount deftly shuffles projections and music to keep the show snapping along, cruising through the occasional rough patch.

l to r: Anjie Parker, Michael Tow, Nicholas Papayoanou, and Alex Alexander in the Company One production of You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World!. Photo: Annielly Camargo

The ending of End of the World! takes a bittersweet turn, choosing to whoop the sweet up over the bitter. Along with a touching call for audience members to commemorate their dead loved ones by speaking their names, there is also an appreciation — from an ameliorative climate crisis perspective — of Greg’s gardening in the backyard. Green taps into Voltaire’s small-scale solution in Candide: meaningful action in an absurd, dying world lies in people rewilding their small plots of ground. There is nothing wrong with recommending this, of course, and the Company One program and the Boston Public Library foyer are stocked with lots of terrific information about “Going Green.” This is an admirable educational outreach effort: Company One should be congratulated and encouraged in its crucial mission to use theater to build “community at the intersection of art and social change.”

But battling at that intersection for the causes of “justice and equality” means taking on the powers that be. I am with Will on this issue — fighting for a sustainable climate will take much more than individuals tending to their patches of ground, good as that is. People will need to confront the heavyweight economic players (international banks and corporations) and irresponsible governments that profit from unregulated environmental degradation. As Will suggests, capitalism should be questioned — is its yen for perpetual growth contributing to killing the planet? There are strong arguments that the answer is in the affirmative. According to recent polls, a majority of young people (the under-35 crowd) believe that tackling the climate crisis will require social and economic transformations, shake-ups in how we live, travel, produce, and consume. Companies interested in serious social change will be talking to audiences concerned with sketching out solutions, and in seeing fat cat culprits placed in the theatrical docket. (For instance, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s 2024 play Kyoto, which dramatizes the 1997 UN climate negotiations that led up to the Kyoto Protocol — from the perspective of an oil lobbyist.)

For now, You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! should be enthusiastically welcomed. It points out, with affecting pizzazz, that protecting the global ecosystem will demand individual research, work, and sacrifice. And that it will take a renewed appreciation of life (earth-wide) coupled with an acceptance of death. In the future, our playwrights and stage companies will reflect the high drama to come — the call for collective action.

Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of The Arts Fuse. For over four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created The Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.