Excerpt:
“Sometimes a one-page pamphlet translated into two languages isn’t the best way for people to receive information, but a song about go-bags played on the synth is…”

Edgemere Farm was born out of a climate catastrophe and community resilience. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, volunteers transformed an abandoned, flood-damaged, city-owned plot into a lush organic garden.

One day in mid-September, the half-acre site in Far Rockaway, New York, underwent another makeover: For an hour, it became a chai shop. Two hundred people gathered to watch a performance of Flood Sensor Aunty, an hour-long play written by local urban planner and theater artist Sabina Sethi Unni. She stars as an humanized flood sensor — a tool that detects high water levels and delivers that data to a publicly-accessible map. 

Sethi Unni’s anthropomorphized device clashes with her chai-shop coworkers and dreams of becoming a movie star. A pair of lovelorn city health inspectors, an attention-seeking city council member, and a rain god running a cult out of a cramped one-bedroom apartment round out the cast.

Many people associate urban flooding with cities like New Orleans and Miami. But it’s becoming more frequent further north, too. Thirty-four of the 43 people killed when Hurricane Sandy pummeled New York City in 2012 drowned in storm-surge flooding, many of them in low-lying neighborhoods. The rain that followed Hurricane Ida’s march up the coast in 2021 killed 13 people, 11 of them in basement apartments. Even a heavy downpour like the one New York experienced in July can inundate homes and threaten lives. 

Flood Sensor Aunty strives to educate people about the threat by combining absurdist comedy with practical advice for surviving disasters yet to come. It celebrates the power of the community to overcome crises, while providing audiences with useful, tangible tools like free flood alarms and headlamps provided in collaboration with the city’s Office of Emergency Management and local nonprofits. The play explains how to access 311 and make a disaster plan — through a synth-heavy, brightly-costumed, Chappell-Roan-referencing extravaganza performed in parks, warehouses, and, on at least one occasion, a boat.

Sethi Unni talked about her work at Climate Week in September and recently performed her play in Boston. She hopes to take on other dramatic topics, like community board meetings — and wants to see more artists tackling the climate crisis with humor and hope.

Grist caught up with Sethi Unni to discuss public art as disaster preparedness infrastructure, Facebook pages and gossipy families as artistic inspiration, and just what a flood sensor is, anyway.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity…