Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater by Theresa J. May

Abstract

Reviewed by: Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater by Theresa J. May Morgan Grambo EARTH MATTERS ON STAGE: ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT IN AMERICAN THEATER. By Theresa J. May. Routledge Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance series. New York: Routledge, 2020; pp. 310. Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater is a dynamic calling in of the American theatre to serve as an imaginative, empathetic, and multivocal advocate against environmental destruction, environmental racism, and climate change through ecodramaturgy. Theresa May's book, which can accurately boast of being the "first book-length ecocritical study of the American theater," engages dozens of theatrical works produced between 1871 and 2015. Earth Matters on Stage is a significant, powerful text primarily due to May's approach: thoughtful readings and analyses of each piece of theatre in relation to the prevailing environmental ethos of the era it is presented in, ranging from complicity in environmental degradation (explicit onstage through the mid-twentieth century, at least) to the emergence of a counter-discourse onstage advocating for a relational, interconnected ecological viewpoint and advancing efforts for environmental justice and decolonization. May is the author of Salmon Is Everything (2019) and co-founder/artistic director of the EMOS Ecodrama Playwrights Festival. Her eco-critical text is densely populated with frameworks and ways of knowing drawn from a small but burgeoning community of ecodramaturgy artists and scholars, including Wendy Arons, Una Chaudhuri, Downing Cless, Nelson Gray, and Sarah Standing. Earth Matters on Stage defines the practice of ecodramaturgy as trifold: "(1) examining the often invisible environmental message of a play or production, making its ecological ideologies and implications visible; (2) using theater as a methodology to approach contemporary environmental problems (writing, devising, and producing new plays that engage environmental issues and themes); and (3) examining how theater as a material craft creates its own ecological footprint and works both to reduce waste and invent new approaches to material practice" (4). While May does not focus this book's efforts on producing materially sustainable theatre, she has made resources on this topic available elsewhere, including as one of the authors of "Ecocriticism in Theatre and Performance Studies: A Working Critical Bibliography (1991–2014)" on the Theater Historiography website. Utilizing close readings of various approaches (structural, thematic, character analysis, origins, staging, and so on), May calls forth the environmental messaging of seventeen plays from the past 150 years within seven chapters. In chapter 1, she considers Horizon by Augustin Daly (1871) and Wild West: The Drama of Civilization by William F. Cody (1886), pieces of theatre that support military occupation of Indigenous land and promote white supremacy and ecological violence through the extermination of people and animals. In the second chapter, May analyzes The Girl of the Golden West by David Belasco (1905) and The Great Divide by William Vaughn Moody (1906). These plays serve as apt metaphors for a reclamation of the "biblical garden," calling forth semblances of the Judeo-Christian Garden of Eden as a reason for expansion and land-management strategies (8). The conservation and preservation movements reflected in these plays depicts a "utilitarian or scenic" binary thinking with continuing impacts on the environmental policies of the United States (8). Chapter 3 is concerned with technology and industrial capitalism, the source of the exponential growth of resource mismanagement on this continent. May considers Dynamo by Eugene O'Neill (1929) and the Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspaper's Triple-A Plowed Under (1938) and Power (1937). In the latter texts, May points to the interlocked nature of the welfare of workers and society to the welfare of the land. Shifting approaches, in chapter 4 May considers a possible call and response between two pieces: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1943) and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949). Her analyses show the former as a celebration of settler-pioneers, the termination of tribal sovereignty and the seizure of tribal lands, and a clear post–World War II antiradical standpoint, while revealing the latter as a "warning about the mental and spiritual, as well as environmental, impacts of consumer capitalism" (9). May amplifies the growing dissonance at this time in the...