Bell: mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning]

mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning]
by Gelsey Bell
ISBN: 979-8992283938
Price: $14
Trim Size: 6.5x10
Page Count: 90
Release Date: Sept 2026

mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning] is a performance text for an experimental opera that tells the story of what would transpire if all humans disappeared from Earth, starting in the present day and moving to 1.6 billion years into the future when life can no longer survive on the planet. Five characters guide the audience through the changes on Earth as forests grow back, new species evolve, and the human-made world erodes away. This work is a fantastical and playful exploration into the dire political and ethical contradictions that structure current human relations with nature. Heralded by critics, it was described as “an intimate storytelling ritual, a kind of campfire tale […] sly and sweet, wistful and winsome and altogether lovable” (New York Times) and “daring in both vision and style and utterly unpretentious” (Parterre Box). “The text, set clearly and evocatively, has plenty of wit” (Wall Street Journal). “Bell’s narrative is both plain and rich, like the simplest band of the most refined gold” (New York Classical Review).

CONTRIBUTORS

Gelsey Bell (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary performance creator, composer, playwright, and vocalist. Her recent works include the experimental opera mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning] (2023), commissioned by the HERE Arts Center and presented in the Prototype Festival; Cairns (2020), a soundwalk for Green-Wood Cemetery; the musical one-act “Archaeopteris” (2025), commissioned by Wet Ink; and thingNY’s collaboratively written opera Mouthful (2024). She has released multiple albums, including the recent mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning], Skylighght, and Heads Together. She has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Opera America, Herb Alpert/Ucross, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Japan Foundation, NYSCA, and others. Performance highlights include Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway, Off-Broadway, etc.) and Ghost Quartet, Robert Ashley’s Foreign Experiences and Improvement, Darius Jones’s Samesoul Maker, Alaina Ferris’s The Lydian Gale Parr, Aaron Siegel’s Rainbird, and other works by Jay Afrisando, Kate Soper, Tomomi Adachi, Dan Trueman, and others. She has a PhD in Performance Studies from NYU and has published articles in TDR/The Drama Review (for which she is a Contributing Editor), The Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (for which she is an Associate Editor), Tempo, Performance Research, and others. www.gelseybell.com

Eisa Davis is an award-winning, multihyphenate artist playing across stage and screen. As a performer, writer, and composer steeped in a myriad of aesthetic lineages, she creates emotionally charged work that seeks to liberate us from oppressive notions. An original Broadway cast member of the celebrated musical Passing Strange, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play Bulrusher, and wrote and starred in the stage memoir Angela’s Mixtape (published by 53rd State Press). Other stageworks include ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :||, The Essentialisn’t, The History of Light, Mushroom, Devil In A Blue Dress with Walter Mosley and Warriors with Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Journalist Alan Weisman has worked in more than sixty countries and on all seven continents. His 2025 book, Hope Dies Last, portrays visionaries across the world, determined to find humanity a workable future. His previous book, Countdown, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His international bestseller, The World Without Us, now in 35 languages, was Time’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2007, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Rachel Carson Prize, winner of the National Library of China’s Wenjin Book Prize, and one of Slate’s 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Past 25 Years. He lives in western Massachusetts.