WWU grad student Kelsey Tribble opens up about grief, global catastrophe and her new play, 'The Silent Zoo'

What is the relationship between the mass grief of global catastrophe and the private, intimate grief that arises in the wake of something like a sister’s suicide? 

This is the question WWU graduate student of English Kelsey Tribble asked herself in the early stages of writing “The Silent Zoo,” her newest play. 

“The Silent Zoo” premiered June 12 at New Prospect Theatre in Bellingham, was well attended, and elicited laughter and knowing groans throughout its two acts. There were tears on the cheeks of audience members in the final scenes, and the audience rewarded the cast with an enthusiastic, well-earned standing ovation at curtain call. “The Silent Zoo” doesn’t feel far off from a professional screenplay, so don’t be surprised if you find a future version of it streaming on your favorite platform in the coming years. 

Tribble is a first-generation college student who earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from University of California at Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in Qu, Jeopardy and onstage at the Children’s Museum and Theatre of Maine. Tribble is the current managing editor of Bellingham Review and a recent recipient of the Graduate Research and Creative Opportunities Grant funded through Western’s Office of Research and Sponsored Programs. Her research interests include the contemporary mass extinction crisis and related phenomena like global warming; relationships between humans and the more-than-human world; artificial intelligence; nonlinear time; and the transformative potential of grief, love and other messy embodied states.

WWU: Tell us a little about “The Silent Zoo.” 

KELSEY TRIBBLE: This whole thing started around grief. On a personal level it seemed like the only way of confronting one kind of grief (global catastrophe) has been to confront the other (loss of immediate family member).

I was in the process of mourning my own personal losses. And somehow, I didn’t have the courage to look at the mass extinction without confronting my own grief that I’d been too afraid to look at. 

Humans couldn’t live in a world where they’re the only animals. At the same time humans are making the world we live in uninhabitable, we’re also perfecting technologies — creating really sophisticated fake humans for ourselves to interact with.

In “The Silent Zoo,” two lonely strangers download the same AI companion app. Cal and Justine are both grief-stricken individuals who turn to Lumina, a family-friendly AI companion, for help. Cal thinks he needs help rebuilding his life after losing his wife, child and job. Justine turns to Lumina for friendship and emotional support following the death of her twin sister. Under Lumina’s guidance, Cal starts a new job at the Silent Zoo, where Justine already works. 

None of the characters really understand what actually goes on at the Silent Zoo. But its website says it’s a place where the line between life and death expands and the line between survival and extinction dissolves. 

WWU: Can you tell us a little bit about how you brought extinction studies, affective ecocriticism and theater together? 

TRIBBLE: It’s been about 67 million years since the last mass-extinction event. Experts agree we are in the sixth mass-extinction event right now or rapidly entering it. The difference right now is this is the first one caused by human activity. 

“The Silent Zoo” is set in a future world in which — rather than trying to preserve species and keep them from going extinct, they’re trying to bring them back once they’ve already gone extinct.

I wanted to do something interdisciplinary with my time as a grad student at Western. Why do nonfiction essays when WWU has all these resources for doing something collaborative? 

I just started having these visual images and musical ideas related to the play, so I wanted to bring those ideas to life.

WWU: Did you write the music score for this play? What kind of experience do you have as a musician/composer, and what has that process been like for you?

TRIBBLE: I composed the main theme music, which occurs at the beginning and end of the play. 

My old friend Justin Benz, whom I’ve been playing music within various projects since 2017, took the idea and ran with it, creating several variations on the main theme that can be used as transitional gestures and suggestive flourishes throughout the score. 

He also composed another musical interlude, very different from the main theme, that occurs a few times throughout the score. 

Justin and I have also been playing with Brock Muench (percussion and sound effects for the score) since 2017. A couple years ago, we started playing with Arnold Gailo (a multi-instrumentalist who plays keyboards for this project), so the four of us all work well together. 

This is my first time getting to sit and pet the dog and provide feedback and ideas while they play without me. I have to admit, as much as I enjoy playing music, I’ve really enjoyed being in more of a composer/director/dog petter role with this score. 

I’ve never been a virtuosic player of any instrument, though I’ve dabbled in many (guitar, keyboards, vocals, drums, and clarinet) since childhood. I’m better at coming up with musical ideas, songwriting and wrangling people together. 

So, this has been an opportunity to focus on the aspects of music that come most naturally to me. It’s been a blast, and Brock, Justin and Arnold are all musical geniuses, so I feel really grateful that they’ve been willing to do this project.

WWU: I often think of Natalie Diaz’s quote, “If I write a poem, the poem is the least of what has happened.”  In creating “The Silent Zoo,” what happened for you beyond the production on the stage?

TRIBBLE: This is a good question, and it feels daunting to try to answer, but I’ll take my best shot. 

Since this project began in late summer 2024, I knew grief would be a focal point. Eventually though, largely thanks to a spiritual film class with Eren Odabasi and my final project for that class, which grappled with the work of Ingmar Bergman, I realized the play was perhaps more concerned with the fear of grief than with grief itself. 

But then I started to wonder about the real nature of grief, this monstrosity that I seemed to fear facing, especially after my professor Lysa Rivera mentioned she’d once heard someone say something like, “Grief is just love with nowhere to go.” 

This led to an epiphany one morning as I walked along a path I’d tread countless times before from south campus to the Humanities Building: 

Maybe all my grief is just love, and maybe love doesn’t actually need a subject or an object — it doesn’t need a trajectory or direction. It can just be, and I can just be in it. 

I didn’t need to fear love after all, because it’s something I have access to within myself, so I can’t be cut off from it. 

I know that might sound like it should go on a Hallmark card, but it was revelatory for me. 

So, I think I’m less afraid of grief now, and therefore less afraid of love. And because of that, I have a new framework for engaging with the mass extinction event that continues to unfold around me. 

Instead of fearing loss and averting my eyes from what’s happening, I can lean into love and see where that approach takes me. 

There’s a moment in the play when Cal (an aspiring writer) talks about how maybe instead of just writing shitty novels about nonhuman animals, he could actually do something to help them — or better yet, he could help them by day and write his novels by night. 

And in one way or another, all these characters are extensions of myself. Like Cal, I’m starting a new chapter in life, with my graduation last week and with plans to get lighter on my feet. 

Pascale Sanok, the wonderful actor who plays Justine, recently told me that her family member works in the field of primate conservation, mostly with gorillas, and she said she could connect us, so who knows. 

My bachelor’s degree is in anthropology, and I particularly love physical anthropology and studying the connections between humans and other primates, especially other members of the Hominidae family, also known as the great apes. And I’ve always suspected grad school would largely be about making new connections and allowing new doors to open. 

So, I’m curious to see what will come next if I center my internal wellspring of love as my North Star, rather than fixating on the sense of being cut off from love, or fearing being cut off in the future. 

WWU: What has your experience with mentorship been like in your graduate program at Western?

TRIBBLE: I have loved the mentorship I received here; I want to mention Associate Professor of English Stefania Heim, my committee chair — she's been incredibly supportive and insightful in the guidance she’s offered me. 

I’ve gotten priceless mentorship from Associate Professors of English Theresa Warburton, Eren Odabasi and Greg Youmans, Professor of English Dawn Dietrich and Professor of Theatre Mark Kuntz. 

The capstone committee process has been my favorite part of the program. It gave me the chance to work closely with faculty mentors on a project that I designed for myself with their extremely helpful input.

Learn more about Western Washington University’s graduate program in English studies. 

Allie Spikes covers the WWU Graduate School and Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies for University Communications. Reach out to her with story ideas at spikesa@wwu.edu.