Sun & Sea, an opera by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, arrived in New York City for its United States debut in September. The stage at BAM was transformed into a beach where sunbathers sing about rising sea levels, heat, and extinction in the same breath as complaints about work and charming resort getaways.

The pandemic delayed the opera from traveling to other venues after its 2019 premiere at the Venice Biennale. The real world twisted into the opera’s core concerns even further. Sun & Sea opened just after New York was battered by Hurricane Ida. The timing of it was disconcerting and hyperreal.

Considering the climate crisis always involves questions of time. How much time do we have before it’s too late? Where’s the tipping point? Are we there now? Sun & Sea focuses on our present-day condition, a psychological dissonance of living in disaster while trying to enjoy a day off. I remembered an even-more extreme case of this condition expressed in Beatrice Dahl, a character in J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. The book is set in London in the year 2145. All the world’s major cities have been flooded and transformed into jungle lagoons, iguanas hiss into the night, and the temperature skyrockets to unbearable around noon. Scientists are making the rounds to gather research and to transport the last remaining citizens of London to the safety of the Arctic Circle, the last habitable place on the globe. Beatrice refuses to leave her penthouse apartment despite the reality that her supplies and high-tech air conditioning will only last a few more months and that if she’s left, she will absolutely perish. She repeatedly refuses the men’s advances to save her while embodying a reptilian sex appeal, sipping whiskey and sunbathing at dawn. The men slip into psychosis as Beatrice, like the beachgoers in Sun & Sea, reclines through disaster.

I decided to write her letters as an inquiry into whether this posture is about denial or a radical acceptance of a dying world.

From: 09.24.2021

To: 09.24.2145

Dear Beatrice,

I saw an opera on Friday called Sun & Sea. The piece won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. Its tour was delayed due to the pandemic and storms, but it finally had its US debut in NYC at BAM, before it traveled to other cities that still have operational theaters.

One of the instructions I received before coming to the performance was to wear light layers because it gets hot in the theater. I sort of listened, but I’m also wearing heels—not ideal for standing or getting around at all anymore. There are entire streets that have turned into small lagoons and most of the subways are not in working order.

I got to skip ahead of the people wrapped around the block in a wavy, broken line around giant puddles on the street. Then I went inside to the black box theater, it has a cage-like quality or some type of observation deck. All the audience members stood around a railing and looked down. The whole stage is a beach; it took 21 tons of sand to create the scene. Dotted across the sand are several beach goers wearing a range of pastels and bright colors, lounging on towels and lawn chairs, making casual conversation, playing games and snacking on whatever they have in their coolers. I thought of you, B. In your penthouse looking out at the vast lagoons and oceans that extend beyond your drowned city.

The performance is an hour loop, which elongates it, you imagine it could go on forever. It does in a way. Not the performance but the rising heat and sea—this condition we are in. I have seen so many articles that stress that we still have time to avert total disaster but not much—maybe a decade or two at most. The singing softly begins. It feels like a sweltering afternoon in the scene, but the chorus is gentle.

The libretto goes from sunscreen, vacation, and personal anecdotes to observations about the Great Barrier Reef being bleached and how the sun is getting hotter and hotter. Everyone is languishing. Looking down gives a sense of gravity, like the singers are all pinned to the beach, and are unable to get up and go or change anything.

The ocean isn’t in sight, but the opera singer says that it’s the most colorful it’s ever been, with jellyfish and emerald colored plastic bags. Everyone’s personal stories on the beach twist around the collective experience—inner chatter overpowers the environmental issues that they flit around, which are ungraspable—a hyper object beyond comprehension.

The opera’s vantage point is not quite birds’ eye, or god-like, it’s like I’m watching from a boardwalk, heading down to find my friends as I scan the shoreline for a familiar face. I see a beachgoer with her pitbull making the rounds, catching up with friends. I think of Riis Beach. I only made it out there once this summer with Chavisa and Jeanne. It was a strangely difficult beach day, the umbrella kept blowing away, Chavisa kept stepping on the blanket with sandy feet—I tried to explain that there’s a rule against feet on beach blankets, which she did not understand. I also bled through my suit because I was on my period which wasn’t exactly a big deal considering the beach demographic, but I didn’t feel sexy running into the water to wash the blood off.

The day deserved a utopian redo, but I idiotically evaded the other invitations I received that summer. It was hard for me to carve out a space for pleasure. It felt stressful, automatically thwarted by being laced with anxiety. I’m unsure of whether this was what the opera singing beachgoers felt, or if any of the little thoughts that creeped into their vacation day disturbed their sunshine.

Summer, 2020 was so bizarre that I didn’t feel any of this. The pleasure I found was coupled with sharp pain, and the experiences that were intoxicating, seemed magical as they emerged in isolated weirdness, suspended and unable to be catalogued into the ordinary world. Chavisa took me to Robert Moses beach that summer and we ended up skinny dipping—the water was lilac and pink, the sky, stained with sunset, and a deer with enormous antlers emerged on the shore to watch us in a hallucinatory blessing. But this summer felt like a jammed machine, something that was screaming desperately to be returned to its former state amid dysfunction.

They were right, it was hot in the theater. The heat’s inescapable, I won’t be able to stand it when it gets worse. But I’m not sure what I would do. My thoughts return to you, the question of whether you embody denial or if in your refusal to join the rest of the remnants of humankind huddled in the Arctic Circle, you’re the only one who’s accepting the situation for what it is—in your willingness to sublimate alongside the environment, to relax into your own extinction.

What I’m saying is, I’m not sure staying in your penthouse is more absurd than fleeing to the Arctic Circle. But I do question who exactly made it to the Arctic Circle for humankind’s last go at life on Earth? And what great swaths of people were left to burn.

That’s the thing about this beach, despite the differences between the workaholic, the philosopher, the wealthy mommy—they’re all a certain class that won’t be hit first as far as the consequences of climate disaster are concerned. That goes for me as well. Even though I can see the crumbling around me, I’m in a protected biosphere. Maybe there’s a type of neurotic entitlement, a naïve trust that the womb-like spheres of protection will always envelop the beachgoers, will envelop me and you. Having to move on from these shelters would be an admittance of their fragility and that’s well, upsetting for people who haven’t really had much else to deal with.

I felt like you were next to me at the opera, observing with the scientists that hover around you the moment in which the world tipped into accelerated catastrophe. They scribble in their pads about this hologram of an anthropological study—trying to ascertain the psychological state we had during this time to allow the whole planet to slip through our fingertips.

After vacation,

Your hair shines,

Your eyes glitter,

Everything is fine.

With love,

Jillian

Nabila Dandara Vieira Santos as the Chanson singer in the BAM Fisher presentation of “Sun & Sea.” Photo: Richard Termine

From: 09.30.2021

To: 09.30.2145

Dear Beatrice,

You’re the last woman in London.

Your city has been evacuated save the scientists and a few recluses. I’m sure you don’t like to be called that, you’re stylish with your black bikini and emerald silk shirt throw to accompany your perfectly manicured blue nails, you don’t embody the raggedy implications of the word recluse—but I suspect you are counted among them.

The descriptions of your morning routine sound glamorous, although presently, that lifestyle would be highly unsustainable for me. Of all the recent calamities both macro and personal, I’ve managed to hang onto my job. So, cocktails in the morning, sunning on the terrace and flipping through an icy 40-year-old edition of French Vogue that’s been stored in the freezer for safe keeping—wouldn’t really work for my schedule. But I understand things have to change around what the weather allows. If it gets to 130 degrees around noon you must live it up at dawn. Beatrice, you’re the type of irreverent femme that I find relatable. I’d be interested in seeing the edition of Vogue, 40 years old for you would be the year 2105 and I wonder what the fashion trends were.

Writing to you has solved this issue of the unknown but it’s installed another quandary—what choices will I make when the inevitable occurs—another unknown. No one really seems to be talking about anything important. People are more invested in keeping things the way that they were a few years ago. I feel the world turning fast as I lie back on the beach and sink into banal worries about art reviews, when I will take a day off, and what lesbian gossip is going around. It feels like a silly performance that I participate in, sometimes with reluctance, even anger, and other times with complete ease—like when I went to the theater.

With love,

Jillian

From: 10.10.2021

To: 10.10.2145

Dear Beatrice,

The person I started seeing is a personal trainer. We really have nothing in common and it’s unclear whether we are just fucking or dating, and we are sort of sexually incompatible. She’s just really a top, and I like a little bit more of an exchange. I suppose I identify as a switch. But we did have this one night together where we had hot sex. I gave up resisting. I let her have me in this way I haven’t allowed in a while, I just melded into the bed and begged her to keep kissing me, keep kissing me. In the morning we had sex again and she held me and covered my mouth with her hand when I came. I was surprised it felt sweet instead of harsh.

I avoided her after that and was unsure of whether I’d hear from her again. But she texted me when I was in Mexico standing in the cathedral that Cortes built from the stones of Tenochtitlan. The cathedral is sinking rapidly into the ground, it’s on a slant which is strikingly noticeable when you peer down the hallway and look at the chandeliers, all unevenly leaning to the right, then you see the sinking and feel the disorientation.

I was wine-buzzed and text-flirting with her. She told me that she was walking her dog and could cross the Manhattan Bridge to meet me. Perfect. I bounded out of my apartment again to walk up Canal Street. By this time of night Chinatown is dead, save a few workers trying to maintain the water levels and street cleaners spraying bleach to combat the sewage that comes with every flood. This is something I find really striking about this neighborhood, that it can be so intensely packed and then as soon as the clock strikes 11 it’s hollow and cleared out. The only thing open is the 7-11. I reached the bridge and sat at its mouth on a concrete slab. It was lit up orange, bathed in blinking emergency lights.

I was thinking about Christo & Jeanne-Claude and how I was sad to miss L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped in Paris. I imagined the Manhattan Bridge pouring shimmery fabric onto itself like a waterfall of self-containment and protection. I was thinking about the possibilities of projecting onto this structure what I couldn’t see across the ocean. I was also thinking about how writing about L’Arc via watching videos on YouTube might even be a more prescient approach for this time. I was transfixed when she appeared with her lanky Doberman.

We darted across the street and into that little park off the bridge where my friends and I pissed in the bushes during the 2020 protests. We went into the middle of the plasticky and bright acid-green AstroTurf and smoked a joint surrounded by the spongy snake-like maroon running track. The dog kept jumping into the inky sky like Cerberus—the hound of Hades. Her skinny thigh-high boot legs acted like vaulting springs, throwing her up to the moon and her teeth gleamed in its pale light.

We left the park after I ran out of steam talking about the bridge, the sex we had a few weeks earlier and how difficult it is to connect with people now.

We held hands and floated down Canal and when we reached Mulberry, we saw all the colored lights from the festival, a neon-soaked cave beckoning us to enter a siren song of color with the carnal detritus of the day—bitten funnel cakes strewn on the concrete slicked with powdered sugar, confetti and sticky spilled booze and lemonade on the trash lined street. We pivoted into it quickly. Our faces gleamed with pink, red and yellow halos as we walked by the temporarily abandoned wooden game stalls. All the rides had been turned off. We had to watch that the dog didn’t sneak anything sweet into her mouth. I wanted to kiss her, but a man suddenly popped out of a booth and offered us a bag of free zeppole, which we refused despite how stoned we were.

I grabbed her hand and said, "this is so romantic…"

I was smiling, beaming, my body was leaning into her as the lights were dripping their candy-colored-ness into me. But, instead of echoing back the sentiment she quipped, "your romanticism is trapped in the 20th century…"

Long Island Expressway shut down during Ida.Tommy Gao, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

I thought about what you told me, B, that the scientists of your time believe that the world is hurdling backwards into the Triassic era.

This time is difficult to grasp, so maybe turning to the past is the only gesture we know how to make. But the gesture backwards isn’t satisfying. It’s hard to attain any real pleasure that doesn’t feel like a clunky revisitation. I know she was teasing me but her offhand comment spoke to something that I was struggling to articulate. I was offended that she interrupted the moment. I wanted her to play along, to fall back in time—to a type of New York myth in combination with unfurling lesbian love. It’s unclear if she’d languish on the beach or flee to the last bits of temperate weather. I don’t know her that well.

The ability to be swept away isn’t the same as laying down and taking it. I’m always trying to measure my strength and this question of which of these two avenues to walk down is a real headfuck.

Having trapped romanticism may be at the root of why people won't leave their drowned cities. Maybe this is about you and me, B. I always say that I’d stay put in New York and, if worse comes to worse, wash cyanide down with champagne. Generally, when I say this to people, it pisses them off. But every now and again I get someone who agrees and tells me to invite them when I break into the bar downstairs and have a party as the waters rise. I don’t know if I would flee to the Arctic Circle in the last roundup before I was abandoned with the iguanas, the skin blistering heat and an old way of thinking that doesn’t fit into where we currently are.

Is it my lack of imagination that has me turning to the past, making me more preoccupied with revisitations rather than creating newness in the swamplands we occupy? Having nostalgia for the 20th century seems to be a very 21st century thing to do.

The walls of the festival grew flimsy like scrims on a film set. We made out anyway. Twirling out of the lights and into the shadow of the scaffolding and flood barricades by my apartment building. I disappeared into her, into just wanting. But I went upstairs alone, laid down super stoned, pinned to the bed with thoughts on the simulacra—my romanticism punctured. I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept going back and forth, racking my brain to figure out where I land on the scale of seeking pleasure and seeking denial as shelter.

I definitely believe in love. I’m just not quite sure yet how to shake off the scene of the former world.

With love,

Jillian

Eglė Paškevičienė as the Complaining Lady in the BAM Fisher presentation of “Sun & Sea.”Photo: Richard Termine

From: 10.24.2021

To: 10.24.2145

Dear Beatrice,

I’ve been having these dreams lately. They’ve been driving me a bit insane because when I wake up, I feel exhausted like I haven’t slept at all. I’ve struggled with insomnia on and off for most of my adult life, usually at high stress points and I’ve always had nightmares of excavation, trying to escape, running through labyrinths, and diving into dark green oceans but nothing like this. I’m plunged into the landscapes you have mentioned in your letters.

You’ve stopped sending them. At this point I know writing to you is performative. I know that it probably hasn’t ended well for you—one way or another. This will be my last letter. I’ve become consumed by imagining potential scenarios of your demise, of which there are many. You are vulnerable as the last woman and the cocoon of your wealth is a thin veil.

I’m not sure which level of disaster would stamp out the pontificating I indulged in the last letter I sent you. I questioned if I would stay put like you did for so long. I’ve been thinking there are only two options, either to stay lounging on the beach, or to flee, to stave off the problem for as long as possible. I never considered the third option, to run towards it. The water pulls me like a sweet song.

Remember the opera I told you about? I dream of it too. But instead of the beach and the singers I look down over the rail at the black luminous disc of a lagoon. The height of the theater grows to a skyscraper, the wind is harsh, hot and opaque gas swirls in the sky, muting out the glimmering outline of a gigantic sun. It’s hazy but it lights everything up and I see that the buildings have turned to limestone cliffs, and that I am standing alone in this landscape—the last woman in New York.

The eclipses are coming soon.

The woman from the other night lives in a tall tower. I’m not sure I’ll see her again. I don’t think it was anyone’s fault really—just a misalignment, maybe from us trying too hard. The magic of the other night couldn’t be replicated, and I know that this might contradict the times, but ease is what I’m after, as far as spending time with another person is concerned. I actually saw her after Sun & Sea.

She told me she would wait outside the theater on the stairs, but she wasn’t there when I got out of the performance. It was a letdown. The singing from the opera was still in my ears, especially the Vacationers Chorus:

THIS YEAR THE SEA IS AS GREEN AS THE FOREST.

I headed towards Downtown Brooklyn. The streets were piled with the things people were throwing out from the floods. I kept thinking about how foolish I was that I wore heels, how foolish I was to want her to be waiting for me. It was partly for convenience because we were going to an event that night and I didn’t want to be late, but it was also about manufacturing a romance and an ease.

As I walked away from BAM, I turned to look at the theater and imagined it completely underwater. I saw myself jumping off a boat in scuba gear with a line, rigged with artificial light. I’d enter the building like a cave. The theater’s an addition to the new Atlantis. The words of the libretto haunt the interior waters.

BOTANICAL GARDENS ARE FLOURISHING IN

THE SEA—

THE WATER BLOOMS.

OUR BODIES ARE COVERED WITH A SLIPPERY

GREEN FLEECE,

OUR SWIMSUITS ARE FILLING UP WITH ALGAE,

EMPTY SNAIL HOMES, SWOLLEN SEAWEED,

FISH REMAINS,

AND ALL KINDS OF SHELLS… ♦