A Review of Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era

Ovid’s Metamorphoses divided the ages of man into metals, degrading in preciousness and value along a timeline of both technological progress and moral corruption. A golden age of peace gives way to a silver age of agriculture, then to the bronze and iron ages of mining, warfare, and conquest.

Parables like Ovid’s tell of a rift that erupts between humankind and the environment that sustains life, a fault that cracks open as soon as we set ourselves apart from the “natural” world and widens over time. There’s the expulsion from the garden in the Book of Genesis. There’s The Lorax. There’s The Giving Tree. Humanity, especially under the pressures of progress, takes more than it gives while mourning a sense of loss out of the other side of our mouths—the loss of a better way to live.

To assign a material to our present age, one obvious candidate would be plastic: cheap, synthetic, nigh-impossible to unmake or undo. But what if by some alchemy we could turn not lead but polyethylenes into gold again? Or better yet, into soil, grass and clean air? To do so, would we have to get rid of the obvious additive: humanity? Ourselves?

This is the trick that Belgium-based company Ontroerend Goed tries to pull off in its palindrome play presented at Under the Radar Festival, Are we not drawn onward to new erA, raising questions that it never fully answers. Like its title, the play is ingenious and poetic, and like its dropped article, something is missing.

This is one of many works I’ve seen that, when grappling with the ungraspable complexity of climate change, clings to simpler tropes from parables and children's stories. The play begins with the plucking of an apple from a tree set off-center in the void of the stage. Over the course of half an hour, the tree is trashed, its branches stripped violently by a muscular man in sweats (Jonas Vermeulen). Plastic bags rain from the ceiling; the stage fills with smoke. A statue is raised. Brief
alliances are formed and disputes settled between characters that first appear as types—a child-like man with a balloon (Angelo Tijssens), a couple (Karolien DeBleser and Michaël Pas), a businesswoman (Kristien De Proost), the muscleman—but their exchanges are unintelligible.

An audience member sitting behind me, dismayed, whispered, “Is this whole thing going to be in Flemish?” But the actors aren’t speaking Flemish (or German, or French). They seem to swallow their words, to inhale rather than exhale; I remember the palindromic title, and I understand the game.

Spoiler alert: the ensemble of actors is speaking and moving in reverse. In the second part of the play, a scrim descends and we watch the first half again on video, now played backward, now in English. The characters agree that, despite the difficulty, it is upon them to restore the world and to remove themselves from it. The smoke is sucked back in, the plastic bags float up and away, the actors tear down the statue, the branches are grafted back onto the trunk. The stage is emptied again, but for the tree.

In the first half, suspended in the tension between the recognizable and the inscrutable, the audience’s attention hangs on every move, hunting for meaning, rewarding anything intelligible with laughter. The problem is that the reward of the reveal—the replay—is an entirely cinematic pleasure, not a theatrical one. The occasional slog of Act One is not compensated fully; its delights, in reverse, become anticipated punchlines, especially if you’ve gotten the joke before the switch.

Sitting in the theater, I imagined the endless rehearsals for this show—the company huddled around a laptop watching footage of themselves playing in reverse, refining their diction and movements word by word and gesture by gesture so that the palindrome works backward and forwards. This kind of work would be impossible without the technological aid of instant replay in the rehearsal room. From process
to product, this feels more like a video work, rather than a theatrical one. Its pleasures, to me, were conceptual, although the virtuosity of the performer’s physical and vocal performance is undeniable, and there’s magic in watching the litter and fog accumulate and clear away.

But what of their concept and what it says about the problem at heart? At various points, sometimes directly to the audience, the characters acknowledge the impossibility of the solution they propose—undoing. “I don’t care if it’s impossible”, “I’m sorry if it’s impossible”, “Possible or not, we have to go from here.” The conceit relies on the company’s cleverness, while its message depends on their guileless sincerity. Not that these things are mutually exclusive—cleverness and
sincerity—but there is a tension between the ingenuity of their methods and the disingenuousness of their tone.

In my notes, I wrote, “small impossible triumphs.” I believe it's worth witnessing the small, impossible triumph of these performers’ work, the remarkable clarity and precision of what they made together. But for me, both the work and its message were not enough. I am tired of parables and children’s stories. I am tired of simplifying the problem. I am not drawn onward by pretending that we can go back.

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Intro image courtesy of The Public Theater