Seth Shelden, general counsel and United Nations liaison for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, will perform in the upcoming production of “Treaty: A Play About How Not To Blow Up The Planet” at The Foundry.

• PHOTO BY DARREN ORNITZ FOR ICAN

WEST STOCKBRIDGE — The popular perception of nuclear arms policy is almost wholly inaccessible — experts, generals and heads of state making decisions a million miles away from the quotidian.

The reality, however, is that most people affecting change in the prohibition and disarmament of nuclear weapons are just ordinary folks doing their jobs. Playwright Chris Thorpe met one of them, Véronique Christory, in a bar, and subsequently learned that lesson firsthand.

As the senior arms control adviser for the International Committee for the Red Cross, Christory was instrumental in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, introduced and passed in the United Nations in 2017 with the aim of creating a legally binding document to prevent any further creation, stockpiling and testing of nuclear weapons.

The Treaty was recognized as momentous when the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that year, but work remains to be done. The “happy accident” of meeting Christory opened the door for Thorpe to learn more about the process — and more importantly, the people — behind those decisions.

His new play, “Treaty: A Play About How Not To Blow Up The Planet,” depicts just that, exploring the tensions and relationships that form between disarmament advocates and diplomats on the world stage and the impact that everyday people can have on policy.

The play will be staged as part of a residency at The Foundry in collaboration with Ground UP Productions, with performances 7:30 p.m. June 5 and June 6. A panel discussion featuring actor, general counsel and United Nations liaison for ICAN Seth Shelden and other nuclear disarmament experts will follow the performances.

The play comes as Thorpe is concurrently touring the United Kingdom with his solo show on the topic, “Talking About The Fire.” Among the aims of both shows, he said, is an impetus to start a dialogue among regular folks about the fact that “nuclear weapons and the situation we’re in is not normal, and it can change.”

Portraying nuclear disarmament advocates on the human level is a step in that direction, he said.

“The really defining and admirable and demystifying thing about the people who move in the world that we’re talking about in terms of nuclear arms and nuclear arms control is that they’re really g— ordinary in the same way we are,” Thorpe said. “That in no way diminishes the work that they’re trying to do or the knowledge and skills that they bring to bear, but once you understand that … it brings them right next to us.”

The audience begins to recognize, Thorpe continued, that the pressures on activists and the shape of their conversations aren’t so different from our own.

It’s a world that Shelden knows well — he played a large role in the development of the treaty, and will play a more dramatic one in the production at The Foundry. In addition to his career as an intellectual property attorney, Shelden has several acting credits in both film and theater.

But it was during his time as a Fulbright Fellowship at Toyo University in Japan that his “passing sort of intrigue” with nuclear weapons policy became a vocation: He learned that the United Nations was considering treaty negotiations for prohibition at the same time that he was visiting the sites of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After that, he knew he had to get involved.

In presenting the play to The Foundry’s audience, he hopes to convey the power that ordinary people have in reaching the right people and changing minds with compelling narratives. As part of the script, he starts by likening the auditorium itself to a conference room at the United Nations.

“They’re just rooms with people in them, and this is also a room with people in it,” Shelden said. “Ultimately, policy is just made by people in rooms. I think if you’re from the U.S., as I am, you have this sense of the enormous bureaucracy it takes to make policy, and the idea of approaching leaders as ordinary people feels so Sisyphean … this process, for me, has been every day reshaping that cynicism.”

In the play “Treaty,” Shelden will take on a role normally played by Thorpe himself — the guy in the bar who falls into this world almost by accident. The script focuses on a specific moment in the Treaty’s development that was “emblematic” of the tensions between advocates and state diplomats, he said.

Many of those tensions, Thorpe said, come from “gaps” within people involved in the conversation.

“If you’re representing national interests, quite often you have to develop this discipline to be able to say things that you do not, in fact, believe yourself,” Thorpe said. “Your function is quite a long way away from your humanity, and that’s a kind of necessary gap you have to maintain.”

He contrasts that with the work of Shelden and the nuclear disarmament advocates, who are allowed to “collapse” that gap and work toward something they personally believe in.

The play’s production is another avenue for Shelden to continue that work — in particular, the mission of reframing the way people think about nuclear weapons, and their options for impacting their development. He mentioned ICAN’s 652 partner organizations around the world as entry points for joining the cause.

The key, Shelden said, is recontextualizing the presence of nuclear weapons in the world — away from viewing nuclear weapons as arms of state security on the word of generals and world leaders, and toward an understanding of the “cross-border, cross-generational” effects that their use would create on the word of doctors, climatologists and scientists.

And above all, the conversation needs to be reframed to give the largest voice to the people who are going to be most affected: ordinary folks.

“It’s not so sophisticated that ordinary people shouldn’t have a say,” Shelden said. “In fact, they’re the most important people of all in this calculus — it’s their lives that are at risk.”

IF YOU GO

What: “Treaty: A Play About How Not To Blow Up The Planet”

Where: The Foundry, 2 Harris St., West Stockbridge

When: 7:30 p.m. June 5 and 6

Tickets: $25 advance; $30 at the door

Reservations: 413-232-5222, thefoundryws.com