Review of <em>The Great Immensity</em>

Abstract

In a 2010 interview conducted by Sarah Kozinn, Steve Cosson, cofounder and writerdirector of the Civilians, a New York City– based investigative theater company, notes that one goal of the company is to avoid producing a “theater of assurance” in which audience members “get to experience some conflict so that the world [they] want to believe in is restored” at the end of the performance (197).1 Rather, Cosson says, the company is interested in using theater to dismantle “overly narrow preconceptions of how people work, how the world works, how social systems work” (196) and to “encourage people’s doubt and curiosity” (197). This nonreassuring approach to theater is particularly well suited to the company’s climate change musical The Great Immensity, which premiered at the Kansas City Repertory Theater (February 17– March 18, 2012) and was performed most recently at the Public Theater in New York City (April 11– May 1, 2014). In choosing climate change as a topic for theatrical investigation, the Civilians pose questions central to both environmental humanities scholars and climate change scientists: What kinds of discourse and form facilitate understanding immensely complex earth systems processes? How might particular modes of discourse and form enable humans to confront, rather than deny, the material consequences of changes to these systems? More specifically, The Great Immensity interrogates key elements of climate change discourse, including extinction and lastofitskind narratives and the related topics of charismatic megafauna and the iconicity of the polar bear; sea ice loss and the polar regions as barometers of climate change; the relationship between climate change and the in-