Healing the Earth, One Play at a Time

In February of 2017, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival got some great news: Director of Literary Development and Dramaturgy Amrita Ramanan and I received a Bly Creative Capacity Grant from the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas to bring an environmental lens to the practice of dramaturgy at OSF and across the field, a practice we now call greenturgy. Dramaturgs, as defined by LMDA, “contextualize the world of a play; establish connections among the text, actors, and audience; . . . and create conversations about plays in their communities.” What better way to use our craft to help save the world?

For me, the path to greenturgy began in April of 2013 when I met with Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, to get his advice on how theatre could most effectively engage around the climate crisis. OSF had already taken steps to become more environmentally smart: In 2007, a group of employees had formed the Green Task Force, which focused on making our business and artistic practices more planet-friendly, whether using less toxic chemicals in our Scene Shop, installing LEDs in spaces across the campus or selling compostable water bottles in our theatres. But we had not yet folded similar efforts into the art itself, which seemed essential. Because OSF is a destination theatre—for example, a 6-hour drive from the Bay Area—our carbon footprint is daunting.

Leiserowitz and I had a lot to discuss—the failure of the environmental movement to address mainstream environmental concerns, the Six Americas study his group had undertaken to map Americans’ beliefs about climate change over time and the broader challenge of addressing the perception of many Americans that they are somehow separated from their environment—a perception that had grown since the Industrial Revolution brought more American workers indoors. And of course we talked about the importance of stories in reaching hearts and minds.

As director of American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle, OSF’s multi-decade program of commissioning and developing 37 new plays about moments of change in United States history, my first response was to commission a play that looked at the historical relationship between Americans and their natural world. In 2015, American Revolutions Associate Director Julie Dubiner and I did just that. We commissioned playwright Idris Goodwin, who took as his starting point the U.S. Department of War’s sending surveying teams—a scientist, and artist, and a soldier—across potential paths of the transcontinental railroad in the 1850s. The resulting play, The Way the Mountain Moved, will open in July of 2018, directed by May Adrales. 

Theatre about the environment is not new. New York University’s Una Chaudhuri coined the term “eco-theatre”—plays and performances that engage with the subjects of ecology and environment—as early as 1994 and, with Theatre Without Borders, co-created CLIMATE LENS, “a network of theatremakers and culture workers ​who ​pursue an imaginatively expansive approach to the phenomena of climate chaos” in 2017. University of Oregon’s Theresa May started writing about theatrical ecocriticism in 1999, and co-founded Earth Matters on Stage, an ecodrama playwrighting competition in 2004. Playwright and translator Chantal Bilodeau founded the widely used Facebook page Artists & Climate Change while also helping to lead Climate Change Theatre Action, a worldwide series of readings and performances of short climate change plays. Double Edge Theatre in Massachusetts, one of Amrita’s former artistic homes, centers the environment in all its practice. The Civilians, an investigative theatre company in Brooklyn, received funding from the National Science Foundation to create and tour The Great Immensity, a musical focused on climate change and biodiversity conservation. Featuring music and lyrics by American Revolutions commissionee Michael Friedman, the show premiered at Kansas City Repertory in 2013.

The effects of climate change have begun to impact artists and audiences directly, whether the flooding from Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy or, closer to home, the drought and wildfires in the West. OSF canceled 11 outdoor performances due to smoke in 2013, 2014 and 2015 and more this year. Still, dramatizing a challenge that, even with these environmental events, still feels theoretical to many, about an effect that unfolds on such a huge canvas of time and geography, is difficult. Artistic directors and other theatrical gatekeepers sometimes shy away from “issue plays,” so most  U.S. theatres still have not seen climate change acknowledged on their stages. Even as OSF and other theatres try to fight another great challenge of our time, white supremacy, we know that the positioning of these two challenges as separate is one of the central problems. Environmental justice is social justice, and white supremacy sits at the center of centuries of environmental and therefore human degradations. As Americans increasingly perceive their natural world as separate from their daily lives, many American theatremakers perceive environmentally themed plays to be separate from the day-to-day job of theatremaking, the fight for a more humane world.

Maybe the resources will present themselves so the field can see another project on the scale of American Revolutions—37 new plays about the environmental crisis, examined through the variety of lenses the crisis requires, seems like a damned good idea. But until then, here is the question we are left with: How can we use the work we are already doing to help solve the climate crisis?

Figuring out the practice of greenturgy started with thinking about a scene in Robert Schenkkan’s All the Way, one of our first American Revolutions commissions. President Lyndon Johnson, desperately trying to get the final votes necessary to pass the Civil Rights Act, calls Nevada Senator Howard Cannon. Johnson has the perfect trade to make—if the Senator will vote for cloture, Nevada will be included in the Central Arizona Water Project, which oversees certain Colorado River entitlements. The trade works, and the Civil Rights Act is passed.

Of course, what was only a few lines in a remarkable play marked a moment of enormous consequence, part of a long history of over-allocating Colorado River water that, along with drought, now threatens the survival of parts of the American West. What if, instead of letting the moment pass, we talked to audiences about what it meant, focused their attention on the decisions we make that impact our environment? And that opened up more doors—every play takes place in a specific environment, whether the play acknowledges it or not. Every character has a relationship with nature even if, as Leiserowitz pointed out, they did not necessarily recognize it in their lives.

In developing the idea of greenturgy, these are questions Amrita and I use:

• What is the broader environment of our work, whether manifested onstage or not?
• What are the parallels between the natural world of the play and where the play is being produced?
• What are the environmental impacts of the choices made by characters (intentional, anticipated or otherwise)?
• What are the connections—literal and metaphorical—between the natural world of our plays and the various natural worlds of you, our audience?

At the LMDA conference in June, Amrita and I led a boot camp for 40 enthusiastic dramaturgs, expanding on our ideas and hearing new ones. Over the next few months, we will develop an online toolkit as a springboard for dramaturgs and other artists across the field to incorporate environmental examinations in their practice. This year our Education Department, which holds approximately 900 events a season, began including these and related questions in their curriculum. At a Festival Noon in August of 2016, we talked with audience members about the 2017 season plays, and we watched audience members’ eyes light up. Whether talking about the potential loss of the islands that Odysseus travels in the Odyssey, or the rose in Beauty and the Beast or the human struggle to control life in the face of larger forces that lies at the heart of so many plays, the environment is in every play. We just have to look.

2018 will bring us more opportunities for conversation. Two plays—The Way the Mountain Moved and Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s Snow in Midsummer—have strong, intentional environmental themes. But what about the cowboys and the farmers in Oklahoma!? The fur trade in Manahatta? Will the nightingale and the lark always sing for young lovers as they do in Romeo and Juliet?

As we keep growing and expanding this practice, we need you. Whether or not you attend an OSF-sponsored conversation about a play you see, we know you will talk about the plays you see with your friends and family. Hold greenturgical questions with you when you do that. Lift up our natural world as you talk about these created ones. And, of course, throw the net wider— look around you every day. The collective action required to turn back climate change and other environmental degradations starts with seeing our deeply interconnected world, and how gorgeous it is, and how important it is to everyone that we save it.