One might well wonder, as one watches the world premiere of Precarious at Mosaic Theater, whether playwright Steph del Rosso has written a climate-crisis play masquerading as a mother-daughter-crisis play or a mother-daughter-crisis play that’s actually a climate-crisis play. The two themes, though assiduously interwoven, can seem at odds: a micro and a macro stuck together for dramatic convenience, not because they’re an intrinsic whole. Only near the end do we get the depth of del Rosso’s rendering of the maternal-terrestrial connection — that transcendent metaphorical dimension of which Alice Walker once wrote:
We have a beautiful
mother,
Her green lap
immense,
Her brown embrace
eternal,
Her blue body
everything we know.
Framed by an intense urban soundscape, the humorously earnest play takes place amid the warm earth tones of a modest Brooklyn apartment, the home of Tillie and her boyfriend, Drew, a young-thirties couple striving to build a future. Tillie temps at a law firm while Drew tries to finish a screenplay. They seem genuinely in love. But the normality of their lives is utterly disrupted by the surprise arrival of Tillie’s spry, septuagenarian mother, Vi, an obsessive environmentalist who worries about planet-warming gases, microplastics, and everything else hurting the earth. Picture a becalmed island that gets hit by a torrential storm, and you’ll have some idea. The tension, especially between Vi’s insistent ecologist convictions and Tillie’s easygoing everyday life choices, quickly reaches a hilarious pitch that sustains the show … until everything changes.
The way del Rosso’s writing depicts this tension is really interesting. The byplay in her dialogue can be characterized as comically oppositional: One character says something, the other refutes it, and suddenly a funny moment happens — one that, as often as not, elicits an eye roll or a WTF look. The actors playing the young couple are particularly adept at this. Tillie (a much-stressed yet grounded Zoe Walpole) and Drew (a calmer and more conciliatory Jonathan Del Palmer) have the appealing rapport of two people who have lived together harmoniously for four years and are now coping with a nosy, nuisance, uninvited family member as best they can. Tillie and Drew really don’t want to be uncivil or unkind to her … but Vi is a lot.
She is someone who gets an alert on her phone from Inside Climate News, “Because 1.5% of the Greenland ice sheet has melted. That’s 55 Trillion tons of ice, just Poof. Gone.”
Kimberly Schraf’s performance as Vi is a marvel of nuance and grit, endearing in her single-minded dedication to the planet. Though she took the wrong subway on her way to Tillie and Drew’s, she’s no ditz. Her convictions about taking small steps to forestall climate collapse and her honest empathy for the earth are real and unassailable, even as they give Tillie and Drew grin-and-bear-it agita. The running jokes about Vi’s germophobia and aversion to plastics, nylon, air conditioning, and other petrochemical pollutants can at times seem self-parody about ecological purism. But more is going on than a send-up of sanctimoniousness. As the play proceeds, Vi’s emotional identification with the earth becomes more and more the play’s gravitational core and its powerful raison d’être.
Jaki Bradley, the director, gets both the script’s delight and its depth — and our attention to her work is richly rewarded.
Scenic designer Misha Kachman gives Tillie and Drew a simple, homey living room and kitchen and a cleverly adjacent bedroom. At the point when a climatological crisis occurs (which comes as no surprise, really) — it’s a stunning cataclysm of power failure and flooding and thunder and lightning — the stagecraft artists (Minjoo Kim, lighting designer; Kenny Neal, sound designer) pull out the stops in that wonderful way special effects can halt the heart and change the course of a storyline. Then there’s a beautiful moment after the storm that may not only alter your view of the play but also shift your own relation to mortality and the planet.
Vi is sitting in sadness, somewhere outdoors in a woods, with her daughter, reckoning with her years on earth, and getting a little worked up.
VI: … I’m disappearing.
Just like the ice caps
And the mountain glaciers
And the barrier and recreational beaches …
TILLIE: Mom just breathe, breathe
VI: But if I breathe then I’ll calm down and if I calm down then I’ll throw in the towel and I don’t want to be one of those old people who throws in the towel
The precarity of which Steph del Rosso writes is both personal and planetary. And her new play makes vividly real for both Vi and us that precious conjunction.
Running Time: Approximately one hour and 35 minutes, no intermission.
Precarious plays through June 28, 2026, presented by Mosaic Theater Company, performing in the Sprenger Theatre at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H St NE, Washington, DC. Performances are Thursdays – Saturdays at 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays at 3 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m.; Intergenerational Matinees: June 11 and 18 at 11 a.m. Purchase tickets ($42–$70) online, at the box office (202.399.7993), or on TodayTix. Mosaic discounts are available at mosaictheater.org/discounts.
The Precarious program is online here.
Precarious
By Steph Del Rosso
Directed by Jaki Bradley
CAST
Jonathan Del Palmer: Drew
Kimberly Schraf: Vi
Zoe Walpole: Tillie
CREATIVE AND PRODUCTION
Misha Kachman: Scenic Designer
Minjoo Kim: Lighting Designer
Jeannette Christensen: Costume Designer
Kenny Neal: Sound Designer
Aoife Creighton: Properties Designer
Shayna O’Neill: Stage Manager
Sierra Young: Intimacy and Violence Director
Chelsea Radigan: Casting Director
Isabella Tapia: Assistant Stage Manager
SEE ALSO:
Mosaic Theater Company to present world premiere of ‘Precarious’ (news story, May 2, 2026)
