House, Divided
 La Tempestad
 The Ballad of John Wesley Reed
 Girl Science
 The Allure of Oriental Wisdom
 Memorial Day (formerly Varia)
 Pride of the Lion
 The Dostoyevsky Man


 Monica for Chanukah
 Angie and Arnie Sanguine
 Edward and Ellie Supine
 The Lion Eats His Lunch
 The Lion in His Lair
 The Lion Leaves His Mark
 Prayers


 But Who's Counting?
 Emma Goldman Imagines the Millenium


 Just Before the War Between the Plates
 I Can Handle That


 Talking  with Lee Blessing

...with Tom Coash
...with Mary Fengar Gail
...with Richard Kalinowsky
...with Jamie Pachino
...with David Rambo
...with Jason Sherman
...with Naomi Wallace
...with Tom Gibbons
...with Dick Goldberg

ECO-DRAMA: IS IT HERE AT LAST?
By Wes Sanders (excerpted from an article)

It was a mother in her early 30’s, her young daughter beside her in my row of the audience at the Earth Matters On Stage (EMOS) New Play Festival in September, 2004, in Arcata California, who threw out the provocative challenge that led to this essay: “I am a biologist and a writer,” she said. “I left theater a long time ago. I think about Orion Magazine, which showcases so much art but never deals with theater. At the same time, you all [theater people] are off in your own world. Is theater something that just happens in a box? When I think of the earth, I think of a one-to-one relationship with the cosmos, like that numinous sense I get when I go to the beach.”

It does not take an ecological scientist to figure out that the kind of feelings our young biologist/writer is alluding to do not readily lend themselves to theater, which thrives on conflict and action. Perhaps that is why a lot of eco-drama—when it does occasionally appear— is political, dramatizing the conflicts among groups with opposing ideas about and stakes in what the relationship between nature and human society should be in particular times and places.

There is certainly plenty of material in this political area, however, so one still wants to ask: Why has it taken so long, during this era of emerging environmental consciousness, for voices in the theater to be heard in significant numbers speaking out about the earth? Certainly in literature and the visual arts there has been a great flowering on top of the piled-up detritus that has been mounting since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but theater has offered only the occasional exotic flower. But can it be that environmental playwrights, actors and directors are at last beginning to find their voices? In asking whether eco-drama is finally coming into its own in this essay, I will be focusing on the EMOS Festival because these plays strike me as representative of the U.S. as a whole. There were 147 scripts submitted, from literally every region of the country; the winning plays came from Philadelphia, Chicago and California, and the criteria for “eco-drama” provided a balance of inclusivity and rigor which made the term “eco-drama” meaningful. Larry Fried, one of the Festival’s Co-Directors, said that in such a play, “there is an ecological sensibility or aesthetic presence that is in some way conscious on the part of the playwright. It doesn’t have to be focused on environmental issues as such, but has something integral to it about the non-human world and human beings’ responses to it.”

Two kinds of eco-drama have emerged over the last 25 years, which is the period during which I have been writing, acting and directing in the genre (if one can call it a genre), and therefore the period during which I have been paying attention to it. The two kinds of eco-drama are (1) those in which the ecological subject-matter is the explicit center of the play, and (2) those in which ecological themes are “embedded.” Explicitly environmental work generally has a clear political agenda, either a specific program and movement behind it or a critique from which it is not difficult to infer a recommended set of actions…. The other kind of eco-drama, that in which the ecological themes are “embedded” in other subject-matter which occupies the foreground, are much less likely to have a political agenda.

The play which was runner-up in the EMOS Festival’s playwriting contest—Girl Science, by Larry Loebell, dramaturg of Interact Theater Company in Philadelphia—is an excellent example of this kind of “embedded” eco-drama (the term is the playwright’s own). In the panel on eco-drama, Loebell said, “Girl Science is “spaghetti”—a play about the entanglement of people and ideas and inconsistencies as they overlap and twist around—some attempt to thoughtfully engage a lot of stuff is...the model that I have in mind.” With apologies to the playwright, I find it helpful to think of this play as a quiet though intense three-ring circus, with the performers moving fluidly from one ring to the other when the stories demand it. Sometimes two rings are going at once. Ring # 1 is the sexual/professional relationship of a young female historian of science--who wants to write a biography about her important but overlooked microbiologist aunt—and her older professor-lover who wants her to do instead a third project ‘under’ him, and therefore discourages her. Ring # 2 is the arena in which the hopeful biographer—who hopes to get tenure out of this publication—cajoles her aunt into (a) agreeing to the project; then (b) co-operating in interviews which entail her telling everything about her life as a scientist, including the springs of it in the most private corners of her past. Ring # 3 depicts 1925 and the more recent past, when the aunt’s father and her young suitor were alive. Johanna (the aunt) has devoted most of her scientific life
to studying pollution in the river which runs in front of her family’s house. In a series of flashbacks, we learn that a good deal of her dedication to the river comes from her feeling of responsibility for the death of a suitor, a young man who wouldn’t heed her warnings and tried to skate on it when it was only half-frozen: “JOANNA: There was too much coal dust in the river. It lowered the freezing-point.” Strongly drawn by this romantic angle, which she has to drag out of Johanna, the biographer-niece Lois makes it the “thesis” of her book, only to have her ex-lover, who is a senior member of her department and has delayed her consideration for tenure until the academic press reviews the book, hands her a list revealing the names of the coal-investors who were on the Board of Directors at the time of the boy’s drowning. Johanna’s father Samuel turns up on the list. Johanna has failed to mention this critical fact to Lois, which ”makes it look like she covered up a crucial fact, altered the story to protect her family from shame.” Her shot at tenure is lost. When Lois finally gets Johanna to talk about why she lied about her father by omission, Johanna says “ I knew in my heart that boy drowned because of what my father knew but did not say. Some truths are worse than you can imagine. And after all of that, I still wanted to make something good of it. I wanted to fix the broken thing, as if I even could. I have worked on that all my life, every day. This river, its relative health, is my penance.”

Girl Science is, in its realistic surface and in the prevalence of debate about issues as the engine of its dialogue, almost the kind of well-made play one would expect from Ibsen, except there are no act-divisions and several scenes take place in both the past and the present at once, to show how “present” these memories are for Johanna. The pollution of the river cannot be said to be the theme of Girl Science—instead, the struggles of an early woman scientist to be taken seriously as a researcher, the remarkably similar struggle of a modern graduate student in the history of science to get out from under an abusive relationship with her mentor, the correct role of personal revelation in a scientific biography, the struggle of a young woman to reconcile her father’s guilt for the death of her suitor with her reverence for the same father—these are the presenting themes of the play. And yet there is no doubt that by the end of the play, the crime against the river and then the redemption of the river through Johanna’s dedication and unswerving scientific discipline, have presented us with an embedded moral trope of great power: What we have all done to our environment is dreadful, but—so far, at least—much of it can be reversed. In the foreground of the play, Lois’s career as an academic has been arrested, the book will probably get panned, Johanna’s father will be exposed, but in the background, as it were drowning out all this twittering, is the redemptive relationship between this river and the woman who saved it with her life’s work. Thus although the embedded approach eschews an agenda, it is capable of telling powerful stories about our relationship with the natural world.

So, returning to my original question: is eco-drama here at last? Are we seeing exciting, trenchant, well-written and -performed plays in sufficient numbers that we should pay attention? Certainly Theresa May and Larry Fried, who intend to hold their Eco-drama Playwrights Festival again in 2006 and at least every two years after in Humboldt County, CA, believe we are.

And there are definite stirrings in other parts of the forest: Marda Kirn, former Artistic Director of the Colorado Dance Festival and now Director of Eco-Arts in Boulder, is putting together an Eco-Performance Conference and Festival for 2006. Girl Science has won a Sloan Foundation grant for further development, Odin’s Horse (another EMOS play) is being seriously considered for production both in Chicago and Humboldt County, and The Shadow of Giants (from Del Arte) is on its way to major tours in San Francisco and the East Coast.

As Brecht said, in a famous poem: In the dark times, will there be singing?
Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.