TY - JOUR
AU - Fitzgerald, Jason
AB - Steve Cosson and Michael Friedman already had climate change on their minds when they encountered The Great Immensity. Sitting in a small boat in the Panama Canal, conducting research for a new work on environmental issues for their theatre company The Civilians, Cosson, a playwright, and Friedman, a composer and lyricist, were nearly overtaken by a giant container ship with its name etched in Chinese letters across its side (Peters). The ship’s name would become the name of their musical play, and their memory of being overwhelmed by unmanageable and indifferent forces its governing perspective. As Cosson later described it, the experience taught them that the challenge of grasping the full complexity of global ecological crisis, not only its science but also the “economics, policy, political sides of the issue,” feels “like being in a little boat while a great ship goes by” (qtd. in Peters). This anecdote, an origin story behind The Civilians’ musical play The Great Immensity, which premiered at the Public Theater in 2014, is designed to convey the insufficiency of the individual (or pair) against the unfathomable scale of a worsening climate. Cosson describes the play as a way to undo that experience, “to make something that can seem abstract, like climate change… live a little bit more in the world where this is happening” (qtd. in Evans, “Can a Play”). The relationship between self and world that opposes an individual to a terrifying and singular “immensity” is precisely what Cosson and Friedman aimed to use their stage to represent and to overcome. In this project, Cosson and Friedman are in league with a broader movement to find alternatives to stories of catastrophe, apocalypse, and eschatology that reaffirm the climate crisis as an “immensity.” There is a growing consensus among environmentalist scholars, artists, and activists that apocalyptic rhetorics, whatever purpose they may once have served, now do more harm than good, not because they are unrealistic (as the Covid-19 pandemic, among other recent events, makes clear) but because their scale is abstract and depoliticizing.1 Jodi Dean argues as much in a 2016 essay that blames environmentalist “evocations of unprecedented, unthinkable catastrophe” for what she calls “left anthropocentric enjoyment,” or the “jouissance” of moralizing “observers” (1–2). The “immensity of the calamity of the changing climate,” she argues, “seemingly forces us into seeing all or nothing,” a distorting totality that “fuel[s] the reciprocal fantasies of planetary scale geoengineering and post-civilizational neo-primitivism” (Dean 5). Dean’s argument relies on a familiar model of theatrical spectatorship, with spectators (or “observers”) cast as politically passive. To a certain degree, the same logic informs the plot of The Great Immensity, which maps its main characters’ progression from passive witnesses to active combatants. The plot follows a white middle-class housewife named Phyllis whose documentary filmmaker husband, Karl, has gone missing in the Panama Canal. Tracking him first through a research station there and then to northern Canada, Phyllis discovers that Karl has joined a group of activist teenagers in their efforts to stage their own kidnapping on the eve of the 2015 Climate Conference in Paris. These young people, brought together by the UN from every member country to serve as benign pro-climate “Earth Ambassadors,” have gone rogue under the leadership of an American named Julie and with the help of a group of anonymous, off-the-grid hackers known online as “Ship Spotters.” The children’s goal is to literally ransom themselves, demanding concrete action to protect the climate in exchange for their return from hiding. The play’s dramaturgy alternates between Phyllis’s search and flashbacks of Karl’s slow transformation and political seduction by Julie, until husband and wife finally find each other and Karl says goodbye. The play ends with a stunned Phyllis giving a press conference acknowledging the necessity of her husband’s actions, followed by Karl singing an ambivalent hymn about his choices. This summary does not do justice to the play, however, because it overlooks the irreverent use of minor characters and musical numbers to both comment upon and disrupt the main plot. This tension between narrative and representation on the one hand, and self-aware manipulation of theatrical artifice on the other hand, is the key to this essay’s argument. These tendencies stand in an uncomfortable tension within the play’s dramaturgy that likely contributed to its inability to win over its audiences (the play closed quickly after mixed reviews). Despite its commercial and artistic failings, however, this tension also makes The Great Immensity a useful case study for a materialist poetics of eco-theatre. As I demonstrate below, the degree to which the play depends on narrative and representation reveals the stubbornness of the idea of climate “immensity,” while the degree to which it brings to consciousness the material realities of the theatre reveals a more promising ecotheatrical model that frames the binaries self/other, local/global, here/elsewhere as relations rather than oppositions. If Dean fears a spectatorship practice that pacifies and generalizes, then Cosson and Friedman have unveiled a powerful theatrical strategy of correction. That strategy, in short, is to allow spectators to fall from the ethereal abstraction of catastrophic reasoning and land firmly in their seats. The goal is an aesthetics and a politics that approach the whole from the vantage point of one’s particular location. To return to Cosson and Friedman’s maritime encounter, their story can be understood as not primarily about size or scale but about position, specifically the embarrassment of finding that where one is (a small boat) is not where one ought to be (the container ship, which because it rocks the boat “violently in its wake” is both a source of danger and a site from which to neutralize it [Peters]). What felt like stability becomes instead precarious; without moving from one’s spot, the comfort of place is replaced by the terror of displacement. Cosson and Friedman’s achievement in The Great Immensity is to discover, in spite of the story they devised, a theatrical strategy for translating just this experience of displacement into a non-apocalyptic understanding of ecological scale. This approach, fundamentally Brechtian in nature, keeps in view the process of theatrical mediation in order to link the theatre’s co-presence of material and object to the real-world interrelation between the dis and the placement of climate catastrophe. Scale and displacement are foundational and interconnected terms for ecopoetics. As the best forms of environmental journalism (Elizabeth Rush’s Rising comes to mind) and environmental justice campaigns (the Dakota Access Pipeline protests) demonstrate, climate politics are well served by an attention to place, since it is through crises of position that everyday life is punctured by ecological deterioration. As sea levels rise, weather patterns change, and familiar flora and fauna disappear, more and more people are finding themselves, like Cosson and Friedman, in a place that has become another place entirely. Yet because these transformations are caused by a cascade of events beginning seemingly everywhere else than where one stands, a fetishization of the local can be counterproductive. As Ursula K. Heise has argued, an awareness of global ecological and political systems, and of the histories that have produced them, is required if one is to make climate change more than a localist issue—more than, say, an impoverished relationship to place that can be repaired by individual (often consumerist) actions that do functionally nothing to ease biodiversity loss or cut carbon emissions (50–57). Such a systemic perspective makes The Great Immensity among the more valuable climate change plays to the extent that it not only yields an ecological relationship to place but also forges conceptual and sensual links between the local and the global, the domestic and the political, to transform the “immensity” of climate change into a dynamic relationship between places and their representations. Heise’s call for an eco-cosmopolitanism motivated by a felt sense of deterritorialization, an understanding of how one’s alienation from a familiar sense of home is driven by global forces, is therefore a basic assumption of this essay’s reading of The Great Immensity. Place is equally important to a still-emerging tradition of ecological theatre studies following the work of Una Chaudhuri, who argues in Staging Place that modern drama’s long confrontation with realism should be understood as a confrontation with what she calls geopathology, “the problem of place—place as problem,” caused by modernity’s disconnection from the natural world (55). The condition’s chief symptoms are an obsession with exile and heroism, and a related twinning of home and homelessness in realist plots (1–6). Samuel Weber complements Chaudhuri’s theatrical poetics of place by arguing in Theatricality as Medium that the theatre’s means of signifying is rooted in the particularity of place, since unlike other art forms, theatre “entails a place in which events take place” (98). Because those events, at least in the mimetic theatre, happen elsewhere than the place of performance,2 a tension arises between narrative and staging that Weber describes in terms of Aristotle’s fateful prioritization of muthos (plot) over opsis (theatrical mediation). What Weber calls theatricality, or the manner in which theatre mediates,3 may therefore be understood as the navigation of this tension between performance and narrative, between place (the stage and its materials) and displacement (mimesis). Weber thus intensifies Chaudhuri’s claim by arguing that the theatrical medium places in order to displace. Weber goes on to draw from this theory of theatricality a tradition of what he calls “staged stories.” Because they privilege their “middles” over their “beginnings” and “endings” (Hamlet is his paradigm, Brecht his hero), staged stories call attention to the artifice of narrative and so imply the value of irresolution, of understanding without closure. Inspired by this concept, this essay traces how the temptation to offer such closure, by imagining that either the right action or the right attitude could resolve the climate crisis, results in a number of anti-theatrical tendencies that prevent The Great Immensity from, in Donna Haraway’s words, “staying with the trouble,” or “learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (1). These “configurations” bear a family resemblance to theatre, which is always at once here and elsewhere, in a tension that can be either embraced or disavowed by its makers. The first two sections below demonstrate the ways that The Great Immensity inadvertently reifies climate change’s “immensity” by telling stories that refuse to be “staged,” by disavowing the material circumstances of the world of the plot and, relatedly, the material circumstance of theatrical performance. In this resistance to being placed, The Great Immensity aims for Haraway’s “vanishing point,” offering the aesthetic equivalent of abandoning Cosson and Friedman’s small boat in a desperate leap for the powerful container ship. The final section demonstrates that, by contrast, the play’s most effective moments exemplify the application of Weber’s staged stories to a dramatic representation of climate crisis, calling attention to the messy work of mediation, theatrical and otherwise, through which we know and engage with our ecological reality. In this, the aesthetic equivalent of choosing not to abandon their ship, Cosson and Friedman open the door, if only a crack, to a new relationship between theatre and environmentalism. Activism Unstaged The play’s opening scene provides the conceptual context for the Earth Ambassadors’ action. The lights open on a projection screen hanging above the playing space, below which stands Julie (at the Public Theater, the screen was visible for the entire performance and ran the length of the stage4). In song, Julie describes the images that appear above her. Pictures of flooded Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy are followed by jellyfish proliferating in the acidifying waters around the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant, the Maldives islands “sinking down into the sea,” a hungry polar bear, an island of plastic in the ocean, and the drying Sahel in Africa (3–4). The world Julie presents is fragmented and unknowable, at once “wide” and “so small,” full of “pieces of people’s lives … scattered in the mud.” As the connections among the depicted scenes grow more labyrinthine, both the slide show and the song speed up until Julie is out of breath and collapses into a stutter: “This is a picture of/A picture of/A picture of—” Like a perverse parody of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the scene translates the crisis of scale experienced by Cosson and Friedman in their small boat into a crisis of images. It is no surprise, then, that when we next see Julie, her view of her situation resembles most closely that of Guy Debord, critic of the society as spectacle. After having received, with the other Ambassadors, a “media boot camp” about how to “tell a good story” through blogs and videos, she expresses disenchantment with images. Complaining that the “eyeballs” streaming her videos are “not actually doing something” but “just watching,” she renounces figuration itself: “I don’t use metaphors,” she insists, “I always mean what I say” (19, 39). Debord’s famous critique of how “fragmented” representations of reality, “detached from every aspect of life,” become an apparently “objective” worldview “mediated by images” remains a rich theoretical resource for understanding the failures of contemporary ecomedia and environmentalist logics, as scholars like Jim Igoe and Nicole Shukin have demonstrated (Society 7). Through the character of Julie, then, The Great Immensity announces a critique of an image economy that pits environmentalist spectacle against environmentalist progress. Karl’s story, too, begins with his alienation from filmmaking after his latest Shark Week special, which argued that “the oceans are dying,” was recut by the Nature Channel “into ‘scary sharks’” (Cosson 19). By the time he meets Julie in Panama, Karl confesses, “I don’t have much faith in TV in general” (18). Disillusioned by their experiences with visuality, the two are narratively made for one another. In the process of running from the visual, though, Julie and Karl run from the theatre—even, quite literally, from the stage itself. The entire structure of The Great Immensity is built on an opposition between visibility and absence, between that which is staged and therefore compromised because it is subject to theatre’s power of displacement and that which is absent and so authentic and whole. Absence is thus continually treated as a source of power and authority. Karl decides to create his rogue Shark Week documentary after realizing that “the relative absence of sharks” in the oceans “is an indicator that something is deeply wrong” (19, my emphasis). The sharks’ absence prefigures the decision by Karl, Julie, and the Earth Ambassadors—all the protagonists except Phyllis—to disappear. Karl’s absence in turn drives the plot, during which we only see him in flashbacks or film sequences until he and his wife finally meet, in the only scene when he is physically onstage and inhabiting the narrative’s temporal “present.” Among Karl’s parting words is his observation that “once you leave the world, it really opens up a lot of possibilities” (85). The Ambassadors’ fake kidnapping exemplifies this logic, since Julie (who increasingly appears only on video as the play progresses) and her compatriots defend it through two interrelated assumptions: First, that human children are “the most charismatic megafauna of them all,” and second, that if “people care when something goes away … they care even more when they can believe … [it] will come back” (46–48). Phyllis’s search for her husband, and her terror at the prospect of such loss, is meant to prefigure the experience about to be inflicted on the international community and to verify that the action will have its intended effect. If the representational economy of images, videos, and blogs is deemed useless in the war against global warming, then the abandonment of that economy—going offline, offscreen, off the grid, and offstage—may hold the answer. That the characters’ war on visuality extends to a war on theatrical representation is not inevitable. Handled differently, the material presence of stage performance might have been valorized against the dislocated flatness of the image. At times in the New York production, Mimi Lien’s set design and Jason H. Thompson’s projections suggest this potential, as in a comically exaggerated “promo for Shark Week” or a deliberately amateurish music video of the Earth Ambassadors’ treacly “theme song” (15, 25).5 More broadly, though, the screen hanging above the playing space ignites a phenomenological war between stage and film, with the former decidedly disadvantaged. As Arnold Aronson has argued, and as the production demonstrates, not only does a projected image inevitably draw the eye more than onstage activity, but a screen image turns all that is onstage into the background for the projection (91–93). Because that image is “from the past” and therefore displaced from its material existence, a “tension is created between the unlimited bounds of the projected image and the architectural realities of the stage,” which renders the dis-located and “dead” realm of the screen image more attractive than the limited materiality of theatrical space (89, 92). Who can blame Julie, Karl, and their collaborators from running headlong into such boundless and un-placed spatiality? The one set of characters who only occupy that boundless non-place are the “ship spotters,” the “para-national revolutionary group of amateur enthusiasts” who collaborate digitally to track the movements of ships around the world, and whose representatives appear as avatars on the production’s screen but never on its stage (Cosson 42). They are the most powerful force in the plot. Both anonymous and stateless, they comprise a “hive mind” with powers of sight denied the average citizen (38). In a song that earns several reprises, they insist that “we are everywhere/and we see everything” and “we are more powerful than nations … we are legion” (42, 45). Absence is not just the ship spotters’ condition; it is also their mission. They not only execute the fake kidnapping, they also intervene at crucial plot moments to lure Karl and to thwart Phyllis’s rescue attempts. Because they are “everywhere” and “legion” they are simultaneously nowhere—indeed, they deliberately obscure the sources of their digital transmissions. They therefore mirror the leakage of theatrical performance into the realm of circulation that Walter Benjamin calls “textuality” and Una Chaudhuri rewrites as “spatiality” (Chaudhuri 267n2). Chris Morash and Shaun Richards describe in dialectical terms the way the “accumulation of” various remediations of theatrical performance, such as the “publication of reviews and play scripts” and the writing of “theatre histories,” “reconfigures the temporally and spatially specific form of performance into the temporally and spatially diffuse form of print,” and by extension of the photographic or cinematic image (18). The ship spotters represent the utopian dream of this dialectic’s suspension, the permanent abandonment of theatrical performance in favor of becoming like film (and digitality), unrooted and unmoored, streaming or playing everywhere and living nowhere, dead but perennially visible. Ironically given the Debordian critique of the circulating image that grounds the plot, this dream extends the crime of the spectacle by making placement impossible. In effect, the ship spotters are a counter-“immensity,” as disembodied and free-floating as the enormity of climate change. They imply that the only viable opposition to climate change is to abandon one’s identity along with one’s home in subordination to a troublingly totalitarian apparatus. This allergy toward place explains why the Earth Ambassadors’ scheme is so unsatisfying as an activist stunt. Ecoterrorism typically works by drawing attention to (and, in the process, reframing) particular places, in order to make visible the institutional and mechanical structures that enable carbon emissions and other forms of environmental violence (Pellow). Jodi Dean herself extols the value of “Blockadia,” Naomi Klein’s name for “organized political struggles against fracking, drilling, pipelines, gas storage,” and so forth (4). By contrast, the Ambassadors’ self-withdrawal exposes no broader systems of power working against the environment, their retreat from place leaving the “immensity” of the crisis intact. Their political praxis, which assumes that climate change is a thing that can be fixed, an immensity that must be solved by an immensity, turns the theatre into a funhouse reflection of its own powerlessness. Despite itself, then, The Great Immensity translates into (anti-)theatrical terms the limitations of an apocalyptic imagination of climate crisis. Refugees from Realism In its reliance on narrative, The Great Immensity represents a turning point in the work of the Civilians. The company’s preceding productions, beginning with Canard, Canard, Goose? in 2002, were much more resistant to narrative closure. With The Great Immensity, Cosson decided for the first time to compose a fictional story to serve as the play’s spine. He has said little about this decision except to describe it as “terrifying” and necessary (Cosson and Hopkins). Yet the tale he devised, a joint conversion narrative for both husband and wife, suggests one explanation—a dramatic movement from a form of climate ignorance to a form of climate knowledge allows the horror of the “immensity” to be neutralized and the possibility of a reliable future to be preserved. The giant container ship of climate change becomes not a threat but the background to a process of ethical growth. Cosson thereby accomplishes his stated goal of bringing climate change to “the world we know is real” by bringing the phenomenon into the theatre we know is realist, if by realism we mean the theatrical genre that asserts a fully realized setting as both foundation and background of a subjective reorientation to the future (Chaudhuri 62–63). With this understanding of Cosson’s project, it is possible to appreciate the degree to which the story of Karl and Phyllis is compromised by both the dramatic world that surrounds it and the materiality of the production that stages it. The protagonists of The Great Immensity signal not the reassertion of realism but rather the failure of that reassertion, a failure made inevitable by the uprooting force of ecological change on Karl and Phyllis, who are rendered refugees from a genre that can no longer save them. This displacement from genre manifests as a disavowal of place and material circumstance, as though the characters were ghosts wandering, dislocated, through their own story. While geopathology, the discursive construction of place as a problem, is not the exclusive property of realist drama, Chaudhuri makes a strong case for it as a grounding principle for the genre. Geopathology depends upon a conflict between a modern “‘poetry of progress’—or of movement, of development, of change” and “the magnetic power of place” that conditions identity (56). What results, in modern realism, is a “victimage of location” by which “the previously ‘given’ factualness of ‘where one is’ is subtly transformed into a matter of ‘where one finds oneself’” (63). Put simply, for the modern geopathological subject, the grass is always greener. Henrik Ibsen’s protagonists provide the paradigm: “when he is where he should feel at home … then does he sense himself most deeply out of place” (65). To call Karl and Phyllis refugees from realism is therefore paradoxical, since realist heroes are refugees at heart. In short, home anchors realism’s drama of escape. In The Great Immensity, the anchor is missing. Phyllis’s singular aim—to bring Karl “home”—is the attempt to find that anchor (Cosson 81). She struggles in vain to bring Karl back to realism’s privileged location, the place where his existential longings most properly belong. Karl is a quintessential geopathological protagonist. Alienated from his profession as a filmmaker, he seeks to find himself by running both from both his wife and his employer, the latter of which has sent him to the Panama Canal to make a documentary “about high tech gadgets.” (Instead he’s “running a little experiment of my own … the ‘fuck that’ experiment” [10].) His decision to join the Earth Ambassadors provides him a sense of purpose and an excuse to choose permanent displacement as a way of life. But the smoothness of that journey is marred by its ambivalent relation to the cause he joins: With the teenage activists removing themselves from visuality, it is never explained how they intend to use a filmmaker. When Phyllis protests to Karl that “they can do it without you,” no reason is given not to believe her (85). Karl’s response—“I’m going because I want to”—confirms his narrative arc by ceding her point. Karl, in fact, is never shown being a hero, or even exerting that much agency. Instead, Julie plays him like a puppet, “feeding” the film footage he has been shooting in Panama “into the [ship spotters’] hive mind”—the content of which films comprises half the scenes of The Great Immensity’s first act—until “it all lined up” to allow Julie and the ship spotters to convince Karl to join them (39). After being the unwitting medium (rather than author) of the play’s plot and spectacle, Karl’s final solo, as critic Nicole Merola has observed, “trails off at the end—with dangling narrative threads, with an incomplete sentence for its last lyric, and with an unresolved melodic line as its last sound” (4). Phyllis’s accusing question to Karl—“You get to be action hero guy?” (Cosson 84)—brands Karl’s narrative as an unsuccessful performance of a generic formula. Phyllis follows up this question with another: “And what about me? Do I count?” Her sense of irrelevance is another way in which she and Karl attempt to carry on the geopathological tradition of realism. As Laura Levin explains in her feminist elaboration of Chaudhuri’s work, realism regularly represents women as “formal extensions of the domestic space” that “provide the conditions for male self-generation” (21). In The Great Immensity, the backgrounding of Phyllis, through which she represents the value of being rooted in place against the heroic (male) desire for deterritorialization, translates into a radical and punishing visibility that renders her a victim of the play’s anti-theatricality (since where absence is privilege, being stuck onstage is a liability). Phyllis has more stage time than any other character, is the driver of the play’s scenic dramaturgy (since the play follows her across North America), and, unlike Karl and Julie, she is never mediated on the video screen above the stage. She is also the play’s least obscure character. Whereas Karl’s motivations are the inscrutable object of the detective plot, and other characters’ private lives remain outside the audience’s attention, Phyllis is allowed to hide nothing. Her desire to go home is transparent, monomaniacal, and presented as a personal failing. Combined with her radical visibility, this characterization uncomfortably recalls psychological realism’s investment in the figure of the hysterical woman (Diamond 25–32).6 She is allowed one secret, which she confesses before the act break—that she and Karl have been having fertility issues, that she fears she wants a child more than he does, and that they spent their last phone call fighting about it (Cosson 43–44). As staged at the Public, her confrontation with Karl finds her center stage between him and a man, Charlie, who up to that point has been a good Samaritan but who now, revealing himself part of the conspiracy, threatens to shoot her. “Don’t point that at me. You wouldn’t,” she insists; “Are you sure?” he replies (85). Meanwhile, Karl hands her a thermos containing his sperm. “So you can have a baby,” he gently explains. “I know what sperm is for,” she protests, “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” Karl’s reply: “The less you know the better” (83). As a reward for her transparency, and for risking her safety in two unfamiliar countries, Phyllis is abandoned by her husband, reduced to a reproductive machine, forcibly kept ignorant, and physically threatened. Phyllis’s final scene finds her reciting, hostage-like, the moral arc of the play in a press conference addressing her husband’s disappearance. She acknowledges, with both bitterness and admiration, that “we were all set up. To be here. In front of these cameras. Saying this. Our tears, making it real for you” (88). She is thus both subject and object of sacrifice—object because Karl sacrifices her as price for the life he has chosen, subject because she must sacrifice the life she desires for his—and the narrative’s—“action hero” plot. The unsatisfying nature of Karl’s journey, and the play’s treatment of Phyllis, are each predicated on a disjunction with the concrete circumstances of the play’s world. Phyllis’s ignorance of place is explicit. Focused as she is on bringing Karl home, she acknowledges the places she visits only as means to an end. “We’re really in the middle of the Panama Canal?” she asks in Barro Colorado Island, “I’d always pictured it like a canal” (6). She is wary of every new sound and smell, and alternately annoyed and terrified of the snakes, bats, and mosquitoes who invade her space (43–44). When the scientists she meets try to teach her about the ecology and geological history of Panama (27–29), she remains stubbornly uninterested. She finds Churchill, Manitoba, her location for the play’s second act, even less welcoming than Panama, as she is forced to navigate a hotel without service staff and a train that is regularly late because the melting permafrost makes “the tracks … unstable” (58–60). Karl’s unclear job description with the Earth Ambassadors and his miscalculation about the circulation of his footage are further examples of the narrative’s disavowal of position. These inconsistencies are symptoms of a deeper, and more problematic, narrative logic that translates the climate crisis into abstractions, specifically “world” and “humanity,” that are by definition unplaceable. “This world is possible” is the slogan Karl and Julie create for their protest, and it is repeated throughout the play as a refrain (39). The generality of this “world” enforces the middle-class American worldview of the play’s white protagonists, for whom the status quo is not marred by the forces of displacement, neglect, and violence that support the institutions enabling global warming. Meanwhile, flattening the Earth Ambassadors into metonyms for “the most charismatic megafauna of them all,” humans, extends the play’s broader attempt to figure the threat posed to “this world” as extinction. A song called “Martha and the Lemur,” which tells the story of the last passenger pigeon and the last member of a golden lemur species, is thematically reprised by Karl’s final song, in which he “feel[s] like the last living man” and imagines how “without us the world will still go” (Cosson 89). Karl thus replaces himself with a free-floating and transhistorical “humanity” whose endangerment threatens not any future but futurity itself. It is also no coincidence that Karl and Phyllis’s confrontation takes place at the “Dene Village,” the site of the forced relocation of members of the Sayisi Dene First Nation, whose expiration in the late twentieth century is remembered as a genocide by its few survivors (77–81).7 The death of Indigenous people is intended to prefigure, like the passenger pigeon, the threatened extinction of a now implicitly white “humanity,” thus obscuring the continuing interrelation of colonial expropriation and environmental catastrophe. The plot of The Great Immensity, therefore, eschews the messy complexity of material conditions, the geographic and historical differentiations that make concepts like “world” and “humanity” insufficient tools for bringing climate change’s immensity down to earth. The disjunction between the realist narrative and its material context culminates in Karl’s surprise delivery of his sperm. The conscription of Phyllis into reproduction—through an IVF treatment that, of course, must take place offstage—is meant to complete Karl’s geopathological journey from homebound husband to hero of humanity, as he produces the material that will synecdochically guarantee the continuance of the species. In performance, therefore, one would expect the scene to be either triumphant (for Karl) or disturbing (for Phyllis), but in either event serious. Instead, at least at the Public, audiences laughed at the absurdity of the whole proceeding. Because Phyllis is decidedly not Eve, and her childbearing is irrelevant to the scale of the problem being addressed, the allegorical meanings that structure the play’s plot lose their rhetorical force at precisely the moment when they are called upon to dramatically satisfy the play’s audience. Karl’s narcissistic short-sightedness about his wife is part and parcel of his broader denial of the specificity of situation—a denial that is required to sustain the characters’ narrative arcs despite the circumstances in which they are made to play out. Staying in Place At the same time, the failure of the sperm delivery scene is a sign of the success of The Great Immensity’s achievement, which stands alongside the play’s anti-positional, anti-theatrical plot. This is the degree to which the play renders a “staged story,” a mode of dramatic presentation that harnesses the tension between plot and representation to privilege narrative middles as more than routes between beginnings and endings. While the play’s narrative marks its break from previous Civilians productions, the play as staged story marks a continuity with the company’s prior work and derives from its working methods. Using techniques adapted from the London-based Joint Stock Company, the Civilians devise plays by interviewing multiple subjects on a topic, from which “themes and commonalities … naturally emerge” (Kozinn 189). In their first decade of work, the company combined these interviews and the insights they inspired into a series of dramaturgies that rejected a “message” and a “theatre of assurance” in order to face “what we don’t know or what we can’t know or the limitations in how we think” (196–97). Sarah Kozinn has described these early plays as offering “an open-ended journey rather than a conclusive story with a beginning, climatic [sic] middle, and resolution” (192). This language echoes Weber’s description of staged stories, which “do not seek to recover a self-contained meaning” (194) but instead draw attention to the materiality of theatrical performance. In a way, the built-in inconsistencies in Karl’s story, framed for the spectator as the attempt to create an “action hero guy,” serve this purpose by drawing attention away from the narrative and toward its presentation. So too does Phyllis’s refusal to engage with the places she inhabits, even as her movement from south to north carries the audience to each locale. So too does Mimi Lien’s set design, which for most of Act One consists of tall, disconnected metal slatted panels that disappear above the proscenium. The design forestalls the illusion of total visibility offered by the three-walled interiors of realist drama, instead emphasizing the encroaching of the wild and unmapped into the narrative space. For The Great Immensity the company interviewed scientists from three locations: Barro Colorado Island (BCI) in Panama (the setting of the first act of the play); Churchill, Manitoba, in Canada (the setting of Act Two); and the Princeton Environmental Institute (where Cosson and Friedman developed the play’s early drafts [Peters]). No surprise, then, that looking beyond the play’s plot centers not only place but also its minor characters, nearly all of whom are natural scientists and many of whom are not white. Because they stand outside the narrative and never relocate (movement is restricted to Karl, Phyllis, and the Earth Ambassadors), they model a hard-earned commitment to place, holding on to local knowledges and relating the local to the global. By contrast, Karl’s leap into the nihilistic arms of Julie is also an escape from the scientists he meets at BCI, while Phyllis, only dimly aware of the upcoming Paris summit, finds the scientists “depressing” and blames them for her husband’s transformation, even as she depends on them to find Karl (Cosson 13–14, 29). One of those characters, a Colombian paleontologist named Marcos, is among the first to connect the local to the global. In a musical number called “We Are All Panamanian,” Marcos convinces Karl that Panama is the trigger for modern human evolution. Once in tectonic place, Panama blocked off the Atlantic from the Pacific, creating the Gulf Stream that structures the modern global climate, shifting Africa’s weather from tropical to desert and, so, requiring early hominids to travel on two feet (11). By concluding with the irony that “we cut it in half … this place Panama/that made us” in order to accommodate “global trade and corporations and emissions,” Marcos points out that Panama is center rather than outpost in the globalized economic system, with the changing climate that accompanies it (12). Marcos’s story prioritizes deep time over the play’s present-day narrative, and it explodes a Eurocentric map of history by offering an under-appreciated Panama, at the doorway to the global South, as the key to human evolution. After this reframing of the center-periphery relation, the second act targets ecotourism, a strategy of representing certain places as commoditized nature in order to draw resources and awareness to ecological concerns. In response to ecotourism’s failure to generate broader eco-consciousness and its tendency to exacerbate ecological damage (Figueroa), The Great Immensity offers a counter-staging of “the polar bear capital of the world” (Cosson 4). Upon arrival, “Charlie, a guy in Churchill” musically populates his hometown not with cuddly polar bears but with people made “crazy” by massive snow dumps and potentially fatal animal encounters (57–60). In the next scene, we find the Earth Ambassadors being addressed by a local ecologist named Emmanuelle and a retired American salesman named Pete, who is now the “head of a polar bear organization” (61). Pete, a non-scientist who waxes sentimental about the bears’ charm, epitomizes ecotourism’s commercial logic: “I can take everything I know about how to sell a product,” he boasts, “and use all that to get people to care about what’s happening to the polar bears” (62). Emmanuelle suggests he place stickers of “an emaciated polar bear” on gas pumps with the note, “When you drive your car here in Toronto you’re actually killing a polar bear in the North” (62). Pete defensively responds that the same ingenuity that led to “cell phones” and “computers” will inevitably invent “answers” to the climate crisis, to which Emmanuelle chides: “Americans are very optimistic people… But see, if you are too optimistic you might not notice that you are in the middle of a crisis” (63). This comic sequence, built on competing ideas of how to represent Churchill’s bears, is a stinging critique of applying marketing strategy to environmentalist politics. While the play’s earlier signaling of a Debordian attack on ecological spectacle was paired with a plot that extended the symbolic damage, here spectacle is answered by comically calling attention to the dialectic of place and its representation. In addition to the theatrical problematization of its two primary settings, The Great Immensity also interrupts its plot in a more straightforward way—with musical numbers that stop the story in its tracks. “Climate Summit Suite,” for example, sends Karl and Julie offstage so the rest of the cast can present the history of international climate summits as a satire of institutional inefficacy, as each UN gathering fails to achieve anything meaningful (21–22). Contrary to the idea that the modern musical theatre is “integrated,” Scott McMillin has demonstrated that book and song occupy “two orders of time” in “tension,” that the former “represents the plot or the action” while the latter “interrupts” the former (6–7). Musicals, in other words, exaggerate theatricality by drawing attention to the incompatibility of plot and spectacle. Brecht was drawn to the form for this reason, as is Cosson, who uses Friedman’s music to “create … [his] argument … then flip it around and give [the audience] a different perspective … and build a critique of that into the show” (qtd. in Kozinn 196).8 Many of Immensity’s numbers, like “Climate Summit Suite” and “Martha and the Lemur,” are also comic, creating a fragmentation in tone as well as narrative. Furthermore, the play’s musical numbers are a privileged site for calling attention to the interrelation of place and presentation. Two songs are of particular interest. The first is “The Great Immensity,” sung early in the second act by an anonymous “dock worker” who personifies the container ship The Great Immensity—the same ship Cosson and Friedman happened upon near the Panama Canal. “I am the ship they call The Great Immensity,” the singer intones, whose “journey is long/around and round I will go/to bring you all the things you need from here and there to everywhere” (Cosson 68). While he sings, as the stage directions indicate, “the actual ship ‘the Great Immensity’ [is] projected alongside him.” The scene juxtaposes the abstraction of the play’s title with the real-world object that shares its name, rendered simultaneously by a photograph and a human actor, thereby colliding multiple levels of representation. The ship-as-character gives a theatrical visibility to the international relations of “global trade” described by Marcos, through the routes the ship travels and the cargo it transports. The ship also stands outside the narrative (it is implied, but never confirmed, that the Earth Ambassadors are hiding onboard), unaffected by and unable to intervene in the plot, an angel of history that is also its fuel. In contrast to the ship spotters, who “are everywhere” and so can never occupy a place, the ship’s fate is to take up space without a place to call its own, always either moving through the ocean or temporarily docked but aiming to leave. It is the theatre that allows it to take a place. The disorienting displacement that is the condition of globalization, and the carbon emissions and ecological destruction it causes, are therefore represented not through a story but through a radical and multi-layered act of mimesis that bears little resemblance to Julie’s denial of metaphor or her romanticization of invisibility. The second notable musical number, and the play’s most successful exploitation of its theatrical resources, is called “Charismatic Megafauna.” In the middle of the first act, a torch singer laments her addiction to viral images of large carnivorous animals facing death and extinction. The addiction is framed as a romantic, pseudo-sexual compulsion by a woman who has “always fallen for unavailable types” and so is drawn to “big tall charismatic megafauna … who’ll never cheat because he’d rather eat me” (25). The song completes the dark logic of her relation to her animal fetishes: “If one of us must go,” she sings, “I can’t deny/It’s such a beautiful sorrow/To watch you die” (26). Much like the skewering of ecotourism in the second act, “Charismatic Megafauna” skewers the decades-long strategy of promoting affective relationships with animals to sweeten conservation efforts.9 The scene’s satire inverts the priority of images that typically accrues to charismatic megafauna, making visible the singer-as-spectator rather than the animal. The singer’s role as spectator depends on the displacement of the animal by its fetishized image, since the megafaunas’ primary attraction is that they are “unavailable types … who’ll never call” and “can’t love at all” (25). This displacement, and the singer’s self-awareness of the privilege of her position and its consequences, provides the number’s dramatic force. Since the enticement to keep looking depends on the animals’ impending doom, an apparent relation of affection becomes instead a relation of vampirism. Again, a Debordian distrust of spectacle is answered not by the repudiation of spectatorship (the singer does not renounce her love affairs and shut off her screen), but rather by the staging of a relation of displacement. What makes the scene especially chilling is that the violence it foretells exceeds the play itself, since the song’s potency depends upon audience members’ recognition of their own narcissistic enjoyment of charismatic megafauna. And in the singular address by the fatal lover—she watches “you” die—the signifying route between the death of a species and the death of an individual member of that species is revealed to be not the smooth transfer from abstract to concrete on which the concept of charismatic megafauna depends. The violence inflicted on real, individual polar bears gains a referentiality not available in the “Martha and the Lemur” number, not to mention Karl’s final solo, where representations of the “last” passenger pigeon, the “last” lemur, and the “last” human being are forced into equivalence with their respective species, and with each other. Conclusion In scenes like “Charismatic Megafauna,” “The Great Immensity,” “We Are All Panamanian,” and Emmanuelle and Pete’s skirmish over the polar bears, as well as in the confrontation between characters’ (especially Phyllis’s) ideas of the places they visit and the realities they encounter, The Great Immensity reveals the power of staged stories to de-immensify climate change. These scenes defamiliarize the tense interrelation of places and their representations, thus making the most of theatre’s ability to stage displacement, the double awareness of where we are and where we thought we’d be. They suggest an alternative answer to the hapless Julie of the opening scene, overwhelmed by the disconnected images before her. While the plot suggests that all images are lies and that truth resides in the heroism of joining a kidnapping-and-ransom story, these more theatrical elements within the play suggest that being lost is actually being found, that the task before Julie is to confront the transformation of her sense of world and to understand the circuits that communicate that transformation to herself and to others. The diagnosis that Debordian spectacle grounds popular understandings of environmentalism is useful and necessary, but it requires a theatrical, non-Debordian cure, one that does not eject spectators from the material stage but allows them to recover their position as spectators, to see their separation from one another and from the ecological systems that sustain them in such a way as to face those relations and so learn to navigate them. Weber illustrates this potential by referencing, as it happens, another story about a boat, this one found in Bertolt Brecht’s essay “On Chinese Drama and the Alienation Effect,” a surprisingly ecological meditation on a Peking Opera performer mimetically steering a boat along a river. For Brecht, the theatrical power of this staging depends on granting attention to the water that separates the character from her loved one, rather than to the narrative that aims to reunite them (Weber 22–30). Following Brecht’s insight, Weber divines in this sequence “an allegory of theatricality as medium—not as a medium of representation, but as a medium that redefines activity as reactivity, and that makes its peace, if ever provisionally, with separation” (28–29). What Weber calls “separation” also describes the embarrassment Cosson and Friedman felt at standing apart from the container ship that nearly overtook them. The Great Immensity is most successful when it tries not to overcome but rather to make peace with that embarrassment, to “stay with the trouble” by facing the fear of the insignificance of one’s place. As Una Chaudhuri reminds us, “no heroism of departure can redeem the wasteland to which the world has been reduced” (250–51). Better to confront the insufficiency of one’s rootedness—in other words, to stay in the boat. Footnotes 1 For a diversity of perspectives on the limits of apocalypticism, see Buell, Lilly, Haraway, and R. Evans. 2 A similar process is operative even in non-mimetic theatre (Chaudhuri 267n2). 3 Within the contradictory history of the term theatricality, Weber favors what Davis and Postlewait call “modernist theatricalism,” or the granting of self-consciousness to the stage and its conventions in reaction to realism’s attempt to suspend attention to the theatrical apparatus (12-16). 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TI - Climate Staged: The Place of Theatre in The Great Immensity
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isab027
DA - 2021-03-29
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/climate-staged-the-place-of-theatre-in-the-great-immensity-FBhd0K02DU
SP - 556
EP - 575
VL - 30
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -