Or, why did they rip apart that sapling? 

3Views sent three team members – Sarah Rose Leonard (SRL), Emma Orme (EO), and Maddie Rostami (MR) – to see Are we not drawn onward to new erA, a featured production of Under the Radar Festival presented at BAM. Read on to hear their thoughts about gibberish, voluntary extinction and the role of art in political action.

‍

SRL: What did you expect going into the show? 

EO: I had no idea what I was walking into. Sometimes I make an effort to educate myself very little because it leaves me more open to surprise. But it also meant that I didn't even process the fact that the name of the show was a palindrome. I had no sense of the structure of the show. I picked up none of the hints, so it felt kind of nice to experience it really fresh. What did you think, Maddie?

MR: I had only read the brief description on Under the Radar’s website in which they did reveal the palindromic nature of the title. So that was the through-line that I kept searching for as the play began. But otherwise, I didn't have a ton of expectations. I was like, "Okay, this is a weird European theater group. A palindrome is involved. I think it's going to be physical." The website also said “no language.” 

So when the actors started speaking at the beginning of the play, I tried to wrap my head around how that fit in with the “no language” note. Is this a made-up language? Is this an Eastern European language? But maybe it doesn't really matter because the nature of the piece is physical anyway? Fifteen minutes in, I was still like, "Hmm, this isn't entirely what I expected.”

What about you, Sarah? I mean, I feel like you dragged us along to this...

SRL: Ha! Like Emma, I didn’t give myself context. Under the Radar is one of the few places I can see international work. So whenever they show work from abroad, that's the first thing I choose. I've missed international work so much and it's my favorite thing to push my brain against, which is especially true when I'm stuck in a mental rut reading plays from American playwrights, which is how I've been spending my time the last 10-odd years as a dramaturg. So it's very fun for me to be like, "Well, maybe I know nothing at all about theater" because international work has a completely different context for who it's made for. 

But also a lot of the work that is at Under the Radar is made for a touring audience. It has a specific aesthetic of “palatable enough for Americans,” “not too weird,” and “good for a wide variety of audiences.” Okay, so what happened to you as you watched?

EO: I was in the midst of moving apartments and transitioning jobs, so since December, I have been absorbed in a bubble of my own and had limited engagement with the outside world. I walked into this show in an unplugged, trance state, and this show sucked me back into space and people and time, and it was a lovely invitation back in. I was mesmerized the whole time.

I was mesmerized by this language—thinking there was a European language I'd never heard before and trying to figure out what it was—and by learning the aesthetic and movement language of this piece. It placed me in a nice in-between space, that Under the Radar-type, interdisciplinary, international work does, where I am watching it somewhere between how I would watch a play and how I would watch a piece of dance.

I felt at peace in that in-between space. Normally, I feel like my theater brain tugs at me and is like, "What's going on? What should I be understanding?” But during this piece, I felt open to giving over to the abstract nature of the work, and I wonder if that's just because I had consumed so little and engaged with so little for the days prior that it felt like a perfectly slow and strange invitation back into life.

MR: I love that idea of it being an invitation. I am from Silicon Valley and a lot of what I have seen in the “more experimental” theater scene in the Bay has been, "How can we use technology in edgy ways?" and really being a little bit over the top about it all. This show felt like such a wonderful break from that. It was a use of technology that was highly effective and that you didn't see coming.

To sort of make the “trick” of the show more explicit for readers…Act One happens. The actors, in plain dress, speak in what we presume to be a gibberish language. They're walking slightly off-kilter. There's pulling where there should be pushing. There's backward movement in moments where you think, why aren't you just walking forward in that direction? Maybe, it's weird European dance theater. Then there's a couple of moments where we hear English and you're like, okay, we're probably going to come back to that. They build this giant statue. They cover the stage with trash, fill the stage with smoke, so you literally can't see anything. Then one of the actors comes out and announces, "We have to bring things back to the way that we were." And then, they do...

A screen comes down and we re-watch the same actions that took place on stage, but in reverse. It becomes evident that the gibberish language is actually just English in reverse. The craft of having to have that very precise pronunciation of absolute gibberish language in order for it to be English when played backwards was such a thrilling part of the trick too, in addition to the pulling and pushing playing out.

SRL: The apple regurgitating! An actress is eating an apple in part one and then she regurgitates it and creates a whole apple. That was fun.

MR: And there's the plastic bag trick! When the play is shown back to us, one of the actors on stage possesses the magical ability to levitate the bags out of existence and all of the other actors are trying to do it and they just can't. There's all of these goofy moments of humor that you absolutely miss in the first act because it's in gibberish and reverse and it's like they're just making the stage messy.

EO: There’s the particular physical language when we are exiting a hug that we don't totally want to exit. Seeing that in Act One read to me as two people who actually want to fuck or make out, but really they didn't want to let go of each other because they were going to be leaving each other for good. These tiny little magical moments were enough to make the show beautiful and whimsical and engaging. 

The moment when that woman comes out and announces the prompting question to begin Act 2 interrupted me before I got bored, and then I was delighted to watch the show we had just seen in reverse for the entire 30 minutes again. I found the pacing quite successful, but thematically…the show is about climate change and asks how we proceed once we really feel and see and process the irreparable damage we’ve done to the earth. What they proposed —voluntary human extinction, essentially— was surprising to me because that idea is pretty niche, even among climate activists. So it was interesting to me that that was the most tangible proposal they offered on what humans could really do at this juncture. 

I was fascinated by the more poetic offering they made, which was to reframe our ideas of progress and destruction. Humans think about all of the work we've done living on this earth as progress, as forward movement. But the progressive portion of the show—the part that actually moved forward—resulted in destruction. The regressive portion of the show—the part that moved backwards—undid that damage. So I think the beautiful poetic offering there is that we, as a society and as individuals, need to do what might feel to us like destruction in order for us to move forwards. We need to remove the things that we've built that we’ve historically framed as progress in order to offer the earth real salvation.

While watching, I was really actively cobbling together that interpretation and was interested in their choice to use forwards and backwards motion, literally, as the language for talking about climate change. Those ideas were intellectually compelling to me while I was watching the show, but ultimately made very little impact on me, how I think about climate change, and how we as people are to engage with the earth in its current state. If I hadn't had this conversation with you all structured into my life, I might not have returned to thinking about the show again at all.

SRL: I hung out with my friend Jerry Lieblich the day after seeing the play and they were like, "Oh, it really stayed with me afterward." So I started thinking about what stayed with me. And I realized that I kept thinking about seeing the tree sapling torn apart onstage. How it was put together on the screen in the second part, but I knew it was there, torn apart, right behind the screen. 

Also…there's so much bad climate change art, just tons. Part of my day job right now as a live events producer at KQED (Northern California’s NPR/PBS member station) is creating events for the climate/science desk. I've been trying to make climate change events that are entertaining, and people want to go to on like a Thursday at 7 for $15. I’ve been looking at art because of course I would like to bring in art about climate change. Most of the pieces are saying "Do something," but there's not enough about what there is actually to do.

The notion of collective action that this piece showed was correct, but this anxiety is living in us because we don't know what to do. If we all have a little bit more guidance and organization around climate activism, I think we'd all feel a little bit less helpless, but we're all helpless because our systems don't help us know what to do. I produced an event about what to do about climate change with our climate reporter Laura Klivans and she says that “what to do” is hard because it's so big and it has to be personal. You have to think, what do you actually want and what are you good at? And then you have to find an organization that connects with the thing that you're interested in.

All of our climate events should have concrete ways that you can learn about a nonprofit you can plug into your local community that's actually making effective change. I crave efficiency. That's what I left the show thinking about. I was like, I'm so glad this exists, and it means nothing. And also you've ruined a tree.

MR: I had a similar reaction to your understanding of the tree. Bringing it out even one step further, the company was able to reverse everything and this idea of voluntary extinction or collective action was really effective up until the very last moment.

But when that screen went up for the bow, not only was the sapling still destroyed, the statue was still there, there was still some residual smoke, there was still trash on the ground. There was this combination of deep hope in how collective action could do so much, and celebrating the craft of the performers, contrasted with the absolute destruction that was still on stage as those actors took their bow. It left me with a little bit of hopelessness. Like, yeah, we did all these steps and in many ways, we made some progress, but the damage has still been done or the damage is still there.

I understand that the intent of the piece was that you leave seeing that beautiful sapling left on the stage. But that’s not actually the last image that we see. The last image is a curtain call with the destruction there. So yeah, I'm curious about what would happen if there wasn't that curtain call moment. If the only thing we actually saw was that sapling and that apple on the tree, and that's where we left things.

Maybe the actors don't come out for a bow because they're extinct.

EO: It feels like the second half of the piece was almost a juvenile fantasy of how we can respond to climate change: “let's just put all the trees back together and throw the bag upwards into the sky and there will be no more garbage on our earth.” 

There was also something relieving about watching a fantastical alternate universe in which that's all we have to do. We just have to press reverse on everything—find all the killed trees and put them back on the earth where they initially were. I suppose the prominent thread of climate activism that focuses energy on giving land back to indigenous people is sort of similarly founded in a reversal. But generally, I feel like there isn't a lot of degradation that can be undone. 

I know art isn’t responsible for providing us with actionable tools for change, unless it's art activism or political theater. But there was something frustrating to me about the fact that I'm not so sure what this piece said in the end about climate change and what I'm to do about any of it.

SRL: I don’t think art is the best medium for spurring action, but I think it’s a good medium for processing our emotions. I saw Gelsey Bell’s opera at HERE two days after seeing Are we not drawn... and that tackled climate anxiety through rich emotionality, and wild imagination remained at the forefront of its concept. I processed through that piece as she led me through sung-through emotions, made me laugh, made me breathe. That’s what I want from my climate art: a space to feel. And in my day job, I want to create spaces where people leave and they know what to do as an antidote. 

Anything else you want to mention before we wrap? 

MR:  Are we not drawn… got me thinking about how we can get activism in our own lives. Like, what stakes do we need to reach to get people to buy into the problem? Or what solutions do we need to pose to get people to say, "Yes, I am ready to invest in something that would be radically different than our current path."

Because once everyone bought in, even if there were some dissenters, they were able to make a change in whatever version of this universe they were in. I see so often living in New York, everyone's like, "Well, we don't really need to recycle because recycling in the city is fake.” Maybe it is  true, but what happens if it isn't? What happens if everyone is able to say, "We could create something new and every New Yorker is going to do it." Is that a utopia? Yeah, probably. But what is the tipping point that wouldn't make it a utopia, that could make it a reality? That's a question that I think this play got me thinking about in a new way. 

EO: I want to keep seeing work that tries to engage with the complexity of climate change. I do, in the end, appreciate having seen one piece that attempts to do so poetically and non-literally. 

And I wish Under the Radar tickets were more affordable.

Intro image courtesy of The Public Theater