Most off-Broadway actors work side gigs as bartenders, baristas and waitstaff to make ends meet. Seth Shelden’s survival job is preventing nuclear war.
An actor by training, Shelden works as general counsel and United Nations liaison for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, where he was a member of the team that won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. This weekend, he will channel his international diplomacy job when he performs in an innovative new show called Treaty: A Play About How to Not Blow Up the Planet at Town Hall Theater in Middlebury.
Equal parts theatrical play, documentary storytelling and dialogue with the audience, Treaty dives deep into the high-stakes world of nuclear disarmament negotiations. The script was written by Chris Thorpe, an Englishman who, after performing a one-man play in Europe, had a chance encounter in a bar with Véronique Christory, senior arms adviser for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
“He got a little obsessed with this world of nuclear disarmament and got himself into some very important rooms and made friends with some very important people,” said Kate Middleton, the play’s director.
Middleton, who attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Shelden, divides her time between Leicester, Vt., and New York City, where she is executive artistic director of Ground UP Productions, a nonprofit theater company she cofounded in 2005 with fellow UNC grads.
Though Middleton has lived just south of Middlebury for 15 years, Treaty is her first collaboration with Town Hall Theater. She sees the venue becoming a “satellite new works outlet” for off-Broadway plays such as this one.
About 40 percent of Treaty involves breaking the fourth wall, Middleton explained: The show’s narrator — “Thorpe,” who is portrayed by Shelden — engages the audience in conversation. And because the state of the world and nuclear arms negotiations are constantly changing, so, too, is the script.
Aside from two fictional characters, one of whom represents a nuclear-armed NATO country and the other, a less powerful nation in the southern hemisphere, Treaty is factual and current up to the day of the performance. The play’s other two characters are real people: Thorpe and Christory.
“It’s not a threat play or scary,” Middleton said. “It’s meant to be informational and break down the wall of communication about [nuclear weapons] that has gone silent since the 1980s.”
The Middlebury performances of Treaty, which has been staged only six times before, will also feature a panel of nuclear disarmament experts. Among them are Shelden and the real Christory, who is flying in from Geneva, Switzerland.
Middleton noted that the U.S. and Israel’s escalating war with Iran only adds to the play’s timely and urgent message. Even before the Middle East conflict began, the symbolic Doomsday Clock was set to 85 seconds before midnight, the closest it’s ever been to signaling nuclear catastrophe.
Audience members won’t be pressured into becoming activists or even participating in the discussion, Middleton said, but “it’s the smaller conversations that lead to larger conversations that change the minds of small towns, that change the minds of larger cities, that then change the world.”
This article appears in March 25 • 2026.
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