Eugene weekly., May 21, 2009, Page 10, Image 10

ANNIE LIEBOVITZ
PERFORMANCE ARTIST RACHEL ROSENTHAL
WORDS TO
CONNECT
AND HEAL
Ecological theater takes over
the UO campus By Suzi Steffen
A
river runs through the fl oor
of the theater. Is it blood
running through veins; sap
running through trees; the
electrical impulses that
connect past to present, the planet to the
people on it, the living to the dead?
Kind of heavy questions for the little
space on the UO campus. But those
involved with the Earth Matters On Stage
festival can’t wait to take them on. The
answers will shift and change with the
two award-winning new plays produced
during the festival in the even newer Hope
Theatre.
A good night of theater can transform
an audience, not to mention those involved
with the play. The characters — turning,
dancing, grieving, fi ghting, loving — cut
through defenses to touch tender, anguished,
human hearts. In what organizers call this
“ecodrama” fest, a good night of theater
weaves strands of community and awareness
into the transformative artistic experience.
Nothing’s quite complete at a university
unless it comes with analysis, and Earth
Matters doesn’t fall short either on
performance or on thoughts about how
to understand that performance. During
the 11 days the festival runs, it offers
something for just about anyone who cares
about the planet. Festival director and
theater prof Theresa May can hardly keep
10 MAY 21, 2009 EUGENE WEEKLY
track of the massive schedule even with her
considerably organized spreadsheets and
web page (www.uoregon.edu/~ecodrama).
Times and plans and a cycle of events pack
the hours.
Bring a highlighter when you snag the
program. The festival teems with ideas about
theater and the planet: a talk by a pioneer
of performance art; professional theater
folk from Portland and Ashland; ecotheater
experts; a day devoted to environmental
theater by Native Americans; workshops,
speakers, yoga and performance art. If you
missed the UO’s Metamorphoses, there’s
even a special revival production in the
Robinson Theatre on May 24. The (literal)
tons of water onstage will look different,
the actors moving through the pool cast
in an altered light, under the glow of the
festival’s gaze. And LCC revives Tom
Stoppard’s Arcadia for Memorial Day
(May 25) and the night after.
But let’s get back to that river, the plays
that lie at the festival’s beating heart: two
full scripts picked out of the pack submitted
to the Earth Matters competition. Each
centers around love, tenuous connections,
loss and a thin thread of hope. The
competition’s fi rst prize winner is Song of
Extinction by EM Lewis, and the second
prize is Atomic Farmgirl, by C. Denby
Swanson.
The idea of ecodrama isn’t new. In 2004
at Humboldt State University, Theresa
May and her husband/collaborator Larry
Fried (now a familiar face in Eugene’s
theater scene) put on an Earth Matters
whose core was a festival of new plays. In
the UO’s case, an international playwriting
competition brought in 158 scripts. From a
narrowed group of fi nalists, outside judges
selected the winning plays.
Song of Extinction has piled up various
awards since its fi rst days on the competition
circuit, the most recent American Theatre
Critics Award at the recent Humana
Festival. Lewis describes it quickly as “a
play about a boy who is dealing with the
death of his mother and the teacher who
reaches out to him and reluctantly ends up
trying to help him,” but that’s not how the
play began its life.
“There are several big science initiatives
for playwrights out there,” Lewis said
during a phone interview. Apparently, plays
with working scientists in them aren’t as
common as scientists and engineers would
like. “I thought, ‘I should write a science
play!’ and ‘Wow, I don’t know anything
about science,’” Lewis said. But suddenly
all of the characters appeared in her head.
“I had no idea where they were going to
go, but from that fi rst crystal moment, I
knew who they were and who they were to
each other,” she said. “Then it was a matter
of following their journeys through the
course of the play.”
Instant characters notwithstanding,
Lewis did plenty of research to understand
those characters and their intentions.
There’s 15-year-old Max, a musical genius
who carries his viola wherever he goes; his
mother Lily, who writes high school science
textbooks and who’s dying of stomach
cancer; his father, Ellery, a biologist who
researches insects in the Bolivian forest; and
Khim, Max’s high school biology teacher,
a survivor of genocide in Cambodia. And
there’s industrialist Gill, whose company
has bought the forest where Ellery’s insect
lives and who plans to log it, providing
work and clearing land for many Bolivians.
The idea of jobs vs. the environment isn’t
new to Lewis, who grew up in Oregon and
heard all of the arguments of the late 1980s
and early 1990s. Song of Extinction is set
in Portland. Lewis, who now lives in Santa
Monica, Calif., was raised near Woodburn
and Salem on what she calls a “fourth-
generation family farm.”
A real-life fourth-generation family
farm, this one in Eastern Washington,
features in the second play, Atomic
Farmgirl. Playwright C. Denby Swanson
adapted the multi-character play from Teri
Hein’s book of the same name. Anyone
who listens to or reads the news of our area
will know some details about the Hanford
Nuclear Reservation, not to mention a bit
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