Staging Dystopias of Desire and the Poetics of Grief

I’m not a fan of dystopias. Talk of “the apocalypse” makes me cringe. As one of the founders of the Earth Matters on Stage Ecodrama Festival (EMOS), a North American new play festival that recognizes new work on ecological themes, I’ve read way too many dystopias. Quirky post-apocalyptic theatrical fantasies too often seem indulgent, classist, and riddled with white privilege. “Whose apocalypse?” I want to ask with the words of Kyle Powys Whyte ringing in my ears: “for many Indigenous people in North America, we are already living in what our ancestors would have understood as dystopian or post-apocalyptic times.” Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Indigenous Africans, who were forcibly removed from their homelands and brought to North America, have already lived through an apocalypse. As if fear alone can help us prevent catastrophe, dystopian futures—replete with species extinctions, irreversible loss of ecosystems, and severe rationing—are visions of a future conjured by the settler imagination. Maybe what’s at the heart of my longstanding aversion to dystopia is resistance to taking a hard look at the depth and breadth of my various forms of privilege, which are dependent on the ongoing settler-colonial violence.

Yet, as carbon levels in the atmosphere approach 420ppm, and as global temperatures are already set to continue to rise 2.5 degrees Celsius over the century, imagine we must. Climate change requires what sociologist Kari Norgaard calls “a revolution of our shared imagination.” Norgaard calls on artists to help us “imagine the reality of what is happening to the natural world,” and that includes what is happening to us. Recently, two plays have done that so powerfully that I’ve gotten over my genre bias and fallen in love with what I’ll call “dystopias of desire.” In these plays, the settler-derived imaginary of destruction, damage, demise, and individualism is transformed into care, love, family, and kinship, bearing witness to theatre’s role as a generative life-giving force.

Transmissions: Giving Grief Its Ceremonial Due

Jessica Huang’s Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying, directed by Melissa Foulger at Theatre Emory in Atlanta, Georgia, won first place in the EMOS Ecodrama Contest in 2022. Founded by myself and Larry Fried in 2004, EMOS is a consortium of artists, educators, activists, and scholars who believe that theatre must respond to the environmental crisis. The festival celebrates new dramatic work that engages global and local ecological issues across cultures. Typically, the EMOS festival is hosted by a university in partnership with local regional theatres and community organizations. EMOS has been hosted by Cal Poly Humboldt, University of Oregon, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Nevada-Reno, the University of Alaska-Anchorage, and most recently, Emory University. Since its inception, EMOS has raised new voices and new plays to critical attention.

Postponed due to the pandemic, EMOS 2022 was hosted by the Emory University Playwrights Center under the leadership of Lydia Fort. EMOS received over three hundred new play submissions—double that of previous years—perhaps a result of the pandemic or the rising specters of a changing climate. The five finalists all pointed the way forward with intersectional plays that centered Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) and LGBTQIA characters and their communities.

Through the labor of The Being, grieving is understood as active work.

Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying is a tale of grief and global warming through the intersecting lives of Earth’s inhabitants. The play takes place in a hypothetical 2045, an envisioned future where a diverse group of human and non-human characters cope with the daily tasks of living in a changed and changing world. The play asks us to consider our relationships to survival and inexorable loss. Will we defend our privileges as long as we are able?

In Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying, Huang spins a theatrical vision of the world to come if industrialized nations do not take unified action. In the Midwest of the United States, where the play is set, temperatures have spiked, food is scarce, and humans pursue a nomadic existence. The action follows Katrina and Carla, two women from two different generations who struggle with ethical dilemmas related to resource use and kinship with other animals. Katrina meets the last Canadian lynx, who follows her toward colder weather in order to survive. Carla meets The Being, whose job it is to mourn the slow death of Earth and each creature that has become extinct.

The character of The Being runs the risk of invoking a stereotypical (Western) visage of Mother Nature (and its racist and gendered assumptions). Huang has already resisted that generalized Nature by constructing a character with specific aims and desires: to pay homage to each and every specific creature lost to what Elizabeth Kolbert has called “the sixth extinction.” Played by gender-fluid actor Trevor Perry, the Being defies saturated notions of Nature as they interrupt habitual perceptions of socially constructed difference altogether. The Being, as embodied by Perry, recalibrates perceptions of the self as fluid, not encapsulated by normative binds and boundaries that impinge on identity, be those strictures rising from gender, ethnicity, race, body, or species. The Being invites us to make the leap from the presence of gender fluidity to a vision of self that defies all white Western social constructions of difference, including that we (as humans) are separate from, say, a lynx.

Through dialogue composed of Huang’s breathtaking poetry, The Being honors and grieves each lost creature because they love them. Love, and the remembrance of the uniquely dazzling expression of life’s possibilities that each lost species represents, is what drives The Being to carry on. In this way, Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying carries out a ceremonial remembering and grieving in relation to loss of land and loved ones that is a necessary response to climate change. Ashlee Cunsolo Willox and others have argued that collective grief has the “potential to expand and transform the discursive spaces around climate change.” Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying gives climate grief its due, reminding us that grieving is not only a personal act, but a political necessity.

As affective embodied knowledge, grief and grieving intervene in ways that defy boundaries and borders. Through the labor of The Being, grieving is understood as active work. The Being’s labors of love, and the diverse casting of the play as a whole, might inspire affective connections to the myriad ways, for example, that United States white supremacy, ongoing colonialism, climate change, toxic cities, and gun violence are systemically related. Grief as embodied labor-made-ceremony, legitimized, and publicly expressed through theatre, calls attention not only to loss of species, but also to the murder of Black, trans, immigrant, Indigenous women and others. Like Huang’s The Being, parents, siblings, communities, and kin everywhere struggle with loss at apocalyptic proportions (even as I write, there have been three mass shootings in the United States in two days). Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying thus becomes an enacted litany of lives lost—naming the names and honoring the dead.

Somewhere: Embodying Kinship beyond the Human

Somewhere by Marisela Treviño Orta is making rounds at college and regional theatres. I was fortunate to see it staged at Middlebury College in Vermont, directed by Olga Sanchez Saltveit. Somewhere is “a world we hope never to encounter but which looms far too probable,” the director writes. With almost all the insects gone, the world is beginning to fall apart as crops fail and people struggle to hold on to their ways of life. Cassandra and her brother, Alexander, are tracking the last monarch butterflies in the world as they head to the west coast. Their path intersects with a truffle farm where a small group of people are hunkering down for the oncoming collapse of society. When the scientists inadvertently ride their bicycles onto the farm, the survivalists are conflicted about whether to share resources or shoo the urbanites away with a rifle. This sounds like a familiar damage narrative, yet expectations of damage and demise are transformed in performance. The human interactions are genuine, sometimes funny, and often poignant; and plot complications and the director’s choices transform this human drama set in a feared future into an embodied exploration of kinship.

Alongside the world of humans, another world is equally troubled, struggling, coping with rapid changes. “The world is shared with nonhuman beings known as Kin,” Sanchez Saltveit writes, “living beings, relationships sustained on generosity and reciprocity.” Middlebury College is located on N’dakinna, homeland of the Western Abenaki. Taking her cue here from Indigenous writers Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi), Joy Harjo (Muscogee/Creek), and Vera Longtoe Sheehand (Elnu Abenaki), Sanchez Saltveit gave theatrical presence to this Indigenous perspective through actor-dancers who moved fluidly between scenes, representing not only the butterflies but also a strange mycelium, or fungus, which is moving like new veins through the soil, infecting water and air.

The performance invites us to set aside fears of demise and instead feel into the connections that uplift community, reciprocity, and interdependence.

The survivalists, who are dependent on truffle foraging, try to unearth the Armillaria ostoyae to prevent it from killing the tree roots on which truffles depend. Ironically, Douglas firs—the trees planted by settlers bent on fast timber profits—are the most vulnerable to the pathogenic properties of this poison fungus. For reasons that have to do with the powerful ongoingness of life’s commitment to life, the fungus has begun to infect and kill humans as well as trees. The character of Corin (played Ryan Ulen), a grandson of early Oregon settlers who “owns” the farm, becomes infected. We learn that the fungus also took Corin’s father who “was covered in these pale pink flowers that were blooming up and down his body… growing out of him.” And there were others: a neighbor who was “being grafted onto the tree or the tree was grafting onto him… he was becoming something else. He and the tree.” Yet the morbid threat of what the human characters perceive as infection is expressed through the non-speaking but ever-present dancers as life-sustaining energy: transforming, becoming, changing, and forward-moving. The audience see the larger vision of a web of relations—of kin—that encompasses characters, performers and audience. In this way, the performance invites us to set aside fears of demise and instead feel into the connections that uplift community, reciprocity, and interdependence. The staging of Corin’s death, in which the flesh of earth become his own, dissolves the rugged individualism that his heritage represents in favor of kinship and connection: we are part of life’s commitment to life.

Meanwhile, entomologist Cassandra and her brother continue to follow the journey of the butterflies. So great is her curiosity and desire that while she is sleeping, butterflies flock to her and lay their eggs in her body. In this way Cassandra becomes a very material ally as her own flesh assures the survival of the butterflies. This sci-fi turn is not merely metaphoric. Orta writes a world in which “evolution speeds up,” and “changes that take millennia happen overnight,” she noted in a post-show discussion, “which science tells us can happen.” Humans are part of a larger body of life, where a woman’s cellular structure is utilized and reborn as winged butterflies; is a man’s flesh so very different from a tree or a butterfly? Indigenous artists often depict the wholistic interconnections of human and nonhuman as bodies within bodies; life-giving water flows through veins, wombs, rivers, and clouds, nourishing all as part of a single body. This is why what happens to the land, happens to us. Here’s the mind-bending service of dystopia: to invite us to imagine and lean into the larger body that we are part of and within in which our agency is both small and important.

Ultimately, Somewhere is a vision of desire, not demise, in which humans struggle, yes, but also give way to new possibilities of being, being-in-relation, and uplifting a new, larger form of hope. Nowhere is that hope more apparent than in the actors themselves, who immerse in the world of the play and its sobering experiences with a palpable and celebratory vigor. Sanchez Saltveit underscored the open-hearted courage of her student actors as they plunged into the sometimes-shattering world of the play and emerged with greater generosity and compassion for one another and those who are, now, already in harm’s way as a result of climate change.

Dystopias of Desire

As the realities of climate change transform the daily configurations of our lives, they also make demands on our collective imagination, reshaping understandings of what it means to be human in the span of geologic time. Sociologist Norgaard argues, “imagine the reality of what is happening to the natural world…imagine how those ecological changes are translating into social, political, and economic outcomes, and […] imagine how to change.” In short, we must imagine our own transformation. When theatre of dystopia is used as a communal space to tell stories of renewal and resilience, to grow compassion and nourish kinship as a central value and tenet of the future, it serves as this necessary force of transformation.

Dystopia driven by desire—desire for justice, for community, for healing, for the ongoingness of life rather than its destruction—can reimagine the relationships between and among communities (human and otherwise) and places (material and imagined) even as they continue to be at risk. Imagining into the lived experience of what might be coming is something we must do, and theatre can help us do it with open hearts and generosity of spirit. Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying and Somewhere take us into a revolution of our shared imagination in which desire for love, kinship, wholeness, and justice supersede litanies of damage and demise.