Ecologies of Theater (review)

Bonnie Marranca begins her book with “I have always wondered what Gertrude Stein meant when she called a play a landscape” (xiii). In these words it is already possible to foresee the style and preoccupations of the essays that will follow; the tone of Marranca’s writing remains personal, as her criticism outlines a broader vision of the aesthetic and ecological concerns she traces within contemporary theatre. We can claim that Ecologies of Theater (1996) is a continuation of the undertaking started in The Theater of Images (1977). Marranca’s earlier interest in images has now been redirected into a more general interest in the “utopian and visionary strain in late-twentieth-century performance” (xv). This new collection of essays covers nearly twenty years of theatre history. The oldest, entitled “All the Football Field’s a Stage” (1976) is devoted to Mabou Mines; the most recent, “Theater and the University at the End of the Century” (1995) presents a bitter reckoning of theatre studies, in which the withdrawal of the theatre from the center of intellectual activity has led to the marginalization of the field within the contemporary academy.

Ecologies of Theater represents for Marranca a “kind of trope around which to organize thoughts of a speculative nature” (xv). She conceives ecological theatre as that which designates the stage as a “cosmic” space, where the signs of the outside world are filtered by the creative imagination of the artist. Marranca embraces a certain kind of idealism—both organicist and holistic—that guides her to a new spirituality: “It was important to inquire into the relationship of mind and spirit as a formal issue before I could find the way to an ecology” (xiii). Though she claims to be writing “against the hazy pollution of theory” (xv), theory is not absent from her text, as becomes evident in the introduction. She invokes Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), and Gertrude Stein, whose ideas she passionately endorses in an opening chapter suggestively entitled “Presence of Mind” (1995).

Marranca’s focus on ecological and naturalistic imagery is especially productive in “The Mus/ecology of John Cage,” where Marranca describes Cage as one who “documented the sounds of the world” and turned “music composition into an ecology” (26). The same metaphor is continued for Robert Wilson’s work, especially in the “archival” nature of Wilson’s The Forest (1988), where his creation of a diverse bestiary gives performance a “sense of cosmology” (39). In “A Cosmography of Herself: The Autobiology of Rachel Rosenthal” (1993), the author finds some of the best examples of the “ecological condition of contemporary life at the end of the twentieth century” (59): Rosenthal’s Grand Canyon (1978), Gaia, mon Amour (1983), The Others (1984), L.O.W. in Gaia (1986). “[B]ecause nature and culture cannot be disjoined into separate environments” (68), the perfect epistemological synthesis of Rosenthal’s performance is as a kind of “ecosophy.” Marranca describes Rosenthal, whom she calls “the Heraclitus of the performance world” (68) in terms of her “autobiological” use of form and her “autoecological” practice; her concerns with animal rights, animal liberation, the body, and the ageing process make for an “ecofeministic” performance.

The cartography of Ecologies of Theater is vast: we encounter essays on “Maria Irene Fornes at Sixty-two” (1992), the pantheism of “Isak Dinesen in Three Parts” (1988), “Meredith Monk’s Atlas of Sound” (1992), as well as on the “fundamental aestheticism” of Mabou Mines. A visit to Image World: Art and Media Culture in “The Century Turning” (1990) gives rise to an interesting commentary on the drift of images through the world. We begin to understand Marranca’s profound concern with “pollution” in “Despoiled Shores” (1988), a chapter on Heiner Müller. Müller inspires Marranca to reflect on the history of violence, and on how, in his plays the ecological analytics of topography and displacement transforms itself into rhetorical devices describing disaster and tragedy.

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