Black Women, Health, Environmental Justice And The Transformative Power Of Theater

By Dr. Judy Kuriansky

Above Broadway veteran Joyce Griffen rehearsing “We Are Our Ancestors Reasons for Living” by Cassandra Medley (Photo: Cindy Cooper)

The world premiere of an innovative and powerful new theatrical production entitled ReproEco: Tomorrow Is Now is bringing urgent stories of social justice, reproductive health and Black resilience to the New York stage.

Playwrights were asked by the producers to study the impact of environmental toxins on women’s health. Six plays, interspersed with dance, original music and immersive film projections, are presented, three of which were written by Black women.

The plays are especially important because they place women—and particularly Black women—at the center of discussions about environmental and reproductive justice.

In fact, Black women have historically faced unequal access to health care, greater exposure to environmental hazards and alarming disparities in pregnancy and maternal-health outcomes. Reasons include that their work roles traditionally expose them to household smoke, industrial and water pollution, leading to high rates of chronic illness, reproductive complications, and premature death.

At the same time, they have often been among the most determined organizers, caregivers and advocates fighting for healthier communities.

One of the dramas takes place in Sandbranch, Texas, a predominantly Black community founded by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, residents have endured decades without reliable access to clean, running water, sewage systems, or trash pickup.

This shocking reality in the United States, one of the wealthiest nations in the world, is the backdrop for Always Never Really Here, by Black writer, actor, and producer Alinca Hamilton.

The play is a clash of mother-daughter dreams, where the mother, devoted to helping her community survive, collects and distributes donated bottled water, while her high-school-age daughter announces her dream to abandon helping her mother, leave Texas and attend college in New York where she can enjoy the comforts of daily life.

“You know what I dream about?” Gabrielle asks her mother. “Standing up and taking a shower. Turning on a faucet. Letting water hit my face. Letting water run, Mom/”

Her words expose the threat of environmental pollution on human dignity and a new decent future. 

Playwright Hamilton explains, “Always Never Really Here is rooted in the historically significant story of Sandbranch, Texas, a predominantly Black community established by freedmen and freedwomen seeking independence and opportunity after emancipation, and whose descendants have had to fight for something as fundamental as clean, running water,”

Playwright Alinca Hamilton (Photo: Mel Ashby)

“The piece echoes the fighting spirit we’ve had to carry through generations simply to claim the basic rights we deserve.”

The struggle portrayed in the play is part of a much broader pattern. Across the United States, Black communities have disproportionately endured polluted air, unsafe water, industrial waste and exposure to toxic chemicals. Environmental hazards are not distributed equally but are frequently concentrated in communities already burdened by racial discrimination, economic inequality and political neglect.

Rehearsal with Brielle Webb and Gena Bardwell as mother and daughter in Alinca Hamilton’s “Always Never Really Here.” (Photo: Cindy Cooper)

Hamilton nevertheless refuses to define Black life solely through suffering.

“You can’t tell the story of America without the perseverance of Black folks—how, even through that struggle, we continuously find moments of joy and the courage to dream of a better future,” she says.

That combination of struggle, resilience and hope runs throughout ReproEco: Tomorrow Is Now.

The production is the brainstorm of Lorca Peress, President and founding Artistic Director of MultiStages, a New York City-based multidisciplinary, multicultural theater company in its 29^th year addressing socially consequential subjects, and award-winning playwright and journalist Cindy Cooper, founder of ReproFreedomArts.org, a New York City-based theater and performance platform dedicated to human rights, reproductive freedom, and environmental justice for 24 years.

“I like to integrate drama with a multi-textured mix of mythology, music, and mystery” says Peress, “to engage people’s imagination and emotions and to tell stories that address urgent questions of human rights.

She also likes her work to reflect multiethnicity, diversity, and inclusion. The cast of 8 (playing all 19 roles) are all Black, Hispanic, or Native American.

Peress also likes to address Afrofuturism, a cultural movement that blends Black history and culture with science, technology, and the future. The Black experience is explored through speculative fiction, art, and music to imagine empowered and liberated futures. 

Talkback at Goddard Riverside, New York City (left to right) producers Lorca Peress and Cindy Cooper with playwright Alinca Hamilton (Photo: L. Fusco)

Afrofuturism connects the experiences of Black ancestors with choices facing future generations and asks audiences to consider what kind of planet we are creating and what obligations we have to those who will inherit it.

Drawing upon the traditions of Black midwives, whose knowledge and care sustained generations of women and families especially in communities excluded from adequate medical services, award-winning writer Mildred Inez Lewis’ play Through Water Into Blood, follows a Latina woman, Ellie, in West Virginia who suffers a devastating stillbirth, with the baby alive only a minute and 43 seconds. With her Black birth doula, the two women consider whether toxic chemical exposure contributed to the loss.

In a dramatic moment, in desperation, Ellie tries to climb back into the birth tub to figure out what went wrong. Could it be because her Afro-American husband works in a plastic plant, or that chemical in the water seeped into her placenta.

Lewis intentionally set her play in her mother’s birthplace of West Virginia, although, she said, “our people are fighting climate change everywhere in ways big and small.”   

The play makes a crucial point: environmental pollution is not just shocking statistics but affects the body, fertility, pregnancy, fetal development and the health of future generations.

Environmental justice is therefore inseparable from reproductive justice.

Rehearsal of Lewis’ play “Through Water Into Blood” with Pernell Walker and Darlenis Duran. (Photo: M. Ashby)

Black identity, memory and survival are also presented in Afro-American playwright Cassandra Medley’s We Are Our Ancestors’ Reasons for Living. Also evoking an Afrofuturist style, the play imagines an ecologically devastated world in which the outdoors has become so dangerous that nature can be experienced only virtually.

Within that altered world, women from different generations confront what humanity has lost—and what is worth saving.

“Ancestors is a fantasy-nightmare of what I fervently hope will not be the ecological future of our planet,” Medley says. “As an African American writer who loves to travel the world, Ancestors is my opportunity to place my personal fears within an Afrofuturism context.”

Actors Pernell Walker, Brielle Webb, Joyce Griffen, Gena Bardwell will be featured in Medley’s play set in virtual Ghana (Photo: M Ashby)

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Celebrating the Great-Great Granddaughter in Medley’s play in rehearsal, with Brielle Webb and Joyce Griffen (Photo: M. Ashby).

The production’s other plays approach environmental and reproductive justice from different perspectives.

In Cindy Cooper’s play Until the Change Comes, Black and Latina members of a young consumer-branding team of potentially hazardous products begin questioning the ethics of their work after a fictitious encounter with Theo Colborn, the pioneering scientist who warned about endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

Rehearsal with Brielle Walker, Jean Brookner and Darlenis Duran in Cindy Cooper’s “Until the Change Comes.” (Photo: M. Ashby)

Diane Breeser uses humor and farce in Figments, which follows a Native American woman married to a Black man, who, after learning she is pregnant, confronts her environmental anxiety during a comical nightmare about microplastics. The use of farce makes the exploration of practical ways expectant parents can protect themselves and their children more feasible.

Rehearsal of Diane Breeser’s play “Figments” when the couple, played by James Alton and Becca Worthington, find out they’re pregnant (Photo: M. Ashby)

Laura Shamas’s Priorities transports audiences into a dystopian future, where two African-American gynecologists and a Native American midwife meet secretly to determine which pregnant patients can escape to a safer environment amid wildfires, toxic exposure and ecological disaster.

“My play is a warning,” Laura Shamas says. “Make these issues a priority now, or soon it will be too late.”

Joyce Griffen as Dr. D in a rehearsal of Laura Shamas’ dystopian play “Priorities” (Photo: M. Ashby)

As someone who has spent 23 years involved with the United Nations and advocating for women and girls, environmental protection and the Sustainable Development Goals, I find the production deeply meaningful. My work with African leaders and communities has repeatedly shown me how access to water, sanitation and health determines whether women and girls can live safely, attend school and pursue opportunity.

This is evident in my work with the First Lady of Sierra Leone in her project “Hands Off Our Girls” which calls out any violence against women and girls.

Water, sanitation and hygiene—known internationally as WASH—are central to Sustainable Development Goal 6, which calls for clean water and sanitation for all by 2030. It was also named as their theme at the annual meeting of the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which I attended last February.

Further, a friend of mine, Dr. Adaeza Okika, an Afri-American, serves as a Senior Adviser and Deputy Permanent Observer of Water and Sanitation for Africa, an intergovernmental and civil society organization cooperating with the UN.

Issues about Africa are meaningful to me in years of work in innumerable ways, including as a co-founder of a Girls Empowerment Camp in Lesotho, advocacy against AIDS on a media tour of radio stations with groups of children, doing psychosocial workshops in Sierra Leone during Ebola, serving on the board of the United African Congress, authoring articles, co-producing and moderating many webinars, and events at the UN and elsewhere, about Africa, serving as advisor to the Mission of Sierra Leone to the UN and as policy advisor the His Excellency Sidique Wai, Ambassador of Sierra Leone to the United States, and as a contributor to the Africa edition of Business Traveler magazine.  .

The production arrives in New York during the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly in September and overlaps with UNGA Healing Arts Week and Climate Week. Its timing places these theatrical stories within an international conversation about health, climate change, sustainable development and the role of culture in advancing social progress.

The plays also embody “cultural diplomacy” of which I am a proponent—the use of art to encourage understanding, dialogue, and peace. Arts, music, and theater can achieve what formal speeches, dry diplomacy, and policy documents cannot, by transforming an abstract crisis into a visceral human experience. In September, I will participate in the annual Arts4Peace program in Budapest, produced by my good friend, the former Ambassador of Hungary to the UN, Katalin Bogyay, with whom I co-founded Women4Diplomacy International, which promotes cultural diplomacy.

The six plays are interwoven with dances choreographed by Jennifer China and performed to original music by award-winning composer Sun Hee Kil.  The dances embody water, earth, breath and rage, transforming environmental threats into visceral expressions of bodily vulnerability and resistance. The dancers convey the human need for protection from toxins, pollutants, microplastics, “forever” chemicals (that do not break down), and contaminated water, air, and soil. Their movements reinforce one of the production’s main messages that bodily autonomy must include the right to inhabit a safe and healthy environment.

The producers of ReproEco value storytelling to inspire reflection and conversation about these intense topics, especially about Black females, like the young girl in the play “Always Never Really Here, who dreams of the day she can stand beneath the running water of a shower.

ReproEco: Tomorrow Is Now will present 12 performances from September 9 through October 4, 2026, at the Theater at the 14th Street Y, 344 East 14th Street, New York City. For schedules, tickets and additional information, visit https://multistages.org or reprofreedomarts.org/reproeco/

Dr. Judy Kuriansky is a New-York-based clinical psychologist, professor, first responder to world disasters, journalist, founder of Women4Diplomacy International, advisor to the Mission of Sierra Leone to the UN and representative of the International Association of Applied Psychology. She is a contributor to Black Star News.