Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater by Theresa J. May

Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater is a dynamic calling in of the American theatre to serve as an imaginative, empathetic, and multivocal advocate against environmental destruction, environmental racism, and climate change through ecodramaturgy. Theresa May's book, which can accurately boast of being the "first book-length ecocritical study of the American theater," engages dozens of theatrical works produced between 1871 and 2015. Earth Matters on Stage is a significant, powerful text primarily due to May's approach: thoughtful readings and analyses of each piece of theatre in relation to the prevailing environmental ethos of the era it is presented in, ranging from complicity in environmental degradation (explicit onstage through the mid-twentieth century, at least) to the emergence of a counter-discourse onstage advocating for a relational, interconnected ecological viewpoint and advancing efforts for environmental justice and decolonization.

May is the author of Salmon Is Everything (2019) and co-founder/artistic director of the EMOS Ecodrama Playwrights Festival. Her eco-critical text is densely populated with frameworks and ways of knowing drawn from a small but burgeoning community of ecodramaturgy artists and scholars, including Wendy Arons, Una Chaudhuri, Downing Cless, Nelson Gray, and Sarah Standing. Earth Matters on Stage defines the practice of ecodramaturgy as trifold: "(1) examining the often invisible environmental message of a play or production, making its ecological ideologies and implications visible; (2) using theater as a methodology to approach contemporary environmental problems (writing, devising, and producing new plays that engage environmental issues and themes); and (3) examining how theater as a material craft creates its own ecological footprint and works both to reduce waste and invent new approaches to material practice" (4). While May does not focus this book's efforts on producing materially sustainable theatre, she has made resources on this topic available elsewhere, including as one of the authors of "Ecocriticism in Theatre and Performance Studies: A Working Critical Bibliography (1991–2014)" on the Theater Historiography website.

Utilizing close readings of various approaches (structural, thematic, character analysis, origins, staging, and so on), May calls forth the environmental messaging of seventeen plays from the past 150 years within seven chapters. In chapter 1, she considers Horizon by Augustin Daly (1871) and Wild West: The Drama of Civilization by William F. Cody (1886), pieces of theatre that support military occupation of Indigenous land and promote white supremacy and ecological violence through the extermination of people and animals. In the second chapter, May analyzes The Girl of the Golden West by David Belasco (1905) and The Great Divide by William Vaughn Moody (1906). These plays serve as apt metaphors for a reclamation of the "biblical garden," calling forth semblances of the Judeo-Christian Garden of Eden as a reason for expansion and land-management strategies (8). The conservation and preservation movements reflected in these plays depicts a "utilitarian or scenic" binary thinking with continuing impacts on the environmental policies of the United States (8). Chapter 3 is concerned with technology and industrial capitalism, the source of the exponential growth of resource mismanagement on this continent. May considers Dynamo by Eugene O'Neill (1929) and the Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspaper's Triple-A Plowed Under (1938) and Power (1937). In the latter texts, May points to the interlocked nature of the welfare of workers and society to the welfare of the land.

Shifting approaches, in chapter 4 May considers a possible call and response between two pieces: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1943) and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949). Her analyses show the former as a celebration of settler-pioneers, the termination of tribal sovereignty and the seizure of tribal lands, and a clear post–World War II antiradical standpoint, while revealing the latter as a "warning about the mental and spiritual, as well as environmental, impacts of consumer capitalism" (9). May amplifies the growing dissonance at this time in the United States regarding the population's relationship to the ecological landscape.

In chapter 5, May highlights plays that connect the environmental and social problems of the 1960s and '70s: A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (1959), Bernabé by Luis Valdez (1970), and Buried Child by Sam Shepard (1979). These pieces represent a shift in the concept of ecology to include urban habitation and its many violations against people and nature. In the following chapter, May deals primarily with plays addressing environmental justice: The Kentucky Cycle by Robert Schenkkan (1992), Heroes and Saints by Cherríe Moraga (1994), and Alligator Tales by Anne Galjour (1996). Playwright positionality emerges as a fruitful point of inquiry regarding the decolonization of land and theatre within this analysis.

In the texts presented in the first six chapters, the ethos of frontier ideology is frequently amplified onstage, reorienting the theatre as cause for great harm in this country, contrary to its frequent socially progressive and self-congratulatory identification. May's central argument is that the onstage enactment of settler colonialism (the foundation from which environmental destruction originates on this continent) assisted the catastrophic project, but through the reclamation of the stage for an ecologically conscious, relational theatre, the stage can transform into a location of imaginative and innovative repair (269). The final chapter of Earth Matters on Stage provides a window into how to remind theatregoers of their relationality with one another and the natural world.

This final chapter, "Kinship, Community, and Climate Change," amplifies plays that explicitly address climate change, rounding out the transformation from an American theatre complicit in environmental destruction to one that is a potential space for its reckoning, imagination, and healing. By highlighting Indigenous, Black, and Latinx creators in the second half of the book, May exemplifies her assertion that theatre "can powerfully connect the dots between climate change, racism, sexism, and economic injustice through stories that resist environmental and cultural imperialism by amplifying the voices of those most affected by environmental risk" (240). The final chapter also offers a structural analysis of what theatre can do to demonstrate relationality and interconnectedness by looking closely at Marie Clements's Burning Vision and Chantal Bilodeau's Sila. May applauds these plays for their "imaginative connections between temporally and spatially disconnected effects of climate change" in order to yield "collective imaginative research into the lived experience of climate change" (241). This analysis serves both as an amplification of what many talented theatremakers are already creating and as a call to action for those hesitant to utilize the stage as a significant part of their environmental activism.

May transcends her goal of demonstrating how an ecodramaturgy theatre praxis is an essential component of a robust fight to halt climate change and environmental racism, while simultaneously gesturing toward a decolonized theatre. Her core audience is "anyone who has faith in the power of stories and the role of the arts to illuminate, inspire, and actualize an ecologically just and interdependent future" (14). As a reader who falls under this category and continues to encounter these plays and theatrical works of their eras, her analyses are essential to opening up an ecodramaturgical means of creating and reflecting on theatre. Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater will compel any student, scholar, practitioner, and theatre-maker to ask how theatre can make a tangible impact on the world around them.