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A small military-occupied community sits, waiting, parched of natural water while nearby levees hold the rising global shoreline. Seventeen-year-old twins Alix and Evan pass the time in an empty, abandoned pool with what they are able to scavenge from the abandoned houses, while government official Portia returns to familiar places, her past colliding with the present.

A non-linear poetic play that acts like a postcard from the future, Shorelines is about family and community in a world ravaged by climate change. It also speaks to the inevitable inequality of disaster response and how poorer communities are disproportionately affected by it. A story that becomes more relevant with each passing day, get ready to be immersed in this vivid and vital narrative for our times.

Read a gripping excerpt from the play below.

***

PORTIA
I head out through the main gate and no one stops me.
I walk away from the base, downhill towards the shoreline.

I walk.

Everything is drained of colour
like looking at a photograph of a photograph.
I walk for a long time until I arrive right in front of a barricade: the condemned neighbourhoods nearer to the shoreline.

There’s a gap in the fence and I crawl through.
On the other side, it’s like a different world.
Even the small traces of order that still exist in this town are absent.
The streets are cracked
large pieces of roadway simply missing
gaping holes of crumbling cement and metal rebar.
Houses are in shambles
windows broken
roof shingles missing
cracked foundations, vines growing out of the crevices
pieces of furniture here and there.
I press on.
A few streets over, you can clearly see the outlines of floods etched onto the sides of the houses that are still standing.
I walk among the wreckage.
The sky is grey and night is starting to fall.
I know I should head back to the base
head back to the relative safety of the other side of the barricade, but I walk until I see it:
the Mercury Tower Apartments.

I walk to the other side of the tower. 
I count out the floors
          five
          six 
          seven
On the seventh floor
I count the windows
          ten
          eleven
          twelve
I can almost see the blue and grey curtains billow out
but, of course, there’s nothing there except a hole where a window used to be.

My bedroom.
The bedroom I shared with my cousin Simon.

I walk behind the tower.
The door is hanging precariously off its hinges.
I slip in through the opening
right onto the landing of the back staircase.
The cement steps are cracked, held up by a rusted metal frame. 
I look up, and above, there’s only total darkness.
I take a flashlight from my pocket and aim it upwards:
only a few more steps, and then nothing.

The staircase is completely missing.
Someone must have drilled through it to steal the metal rebar.

No way up.

On the landing,
a lone cockroach scuttles from one pile of wet trash to another.
I exit the building.
The sky is dark, and in the distance, thunder rumbles.
Rain starts to fall, muffled by the spongy ground.
One of those evening storms with hail and wind.
We used to get them all the time when I was younger.
I could see them blow in from the water from my bedroom window on the seventh floor.

On this side,
in the shadow of the Mercury Tower, 
there was a pool.
It was this place’s only luxury.

A pool.

I walk towards the pool
ignoring the rain that’s getting stronger.

I just need to see it again.

The sky is getting even darker now
there’s a slight haze to the air
and a metallic smell wafts from the ground.
Lightning rips the sky open, the thunder is deafening.
All around me rain falls
heavy curtains of water.
I can’t see anything.
Another bolt of lightning
even closer this time.
I need to take cover.
I look behind me.
I can’t even see the tower in the rain.
I double back in its general direction.
I walk as fast as I can
bracing against the wind
my body catching in brambles and branches.
It has to be close to here.
And suddenly,
my feet are carried away in a mudslide.
I can’t feel solid ground under me
my hands helplessly try to hold on to something
          roots
          vines 
          branches 
          breaking.

And I fall.

I land hard on my leg
pain shoots all the way up to my hip
          crack
          bone
my knee gives out
right arm bracing for impact
my head slams forward
          darkness.

***

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