These were the thoughts running through my head in the days following the turn of the new year.  And it was perfectly timed, as I was about to head to the Dragon’s Egg in rural Connecticut to host a 3-day retreat to begin developing MARS (a play about mining).  I could put my new resolutions to the test.

Before the retreat, all I knew about MARS is that it would be an all-male piece combining dance and fight choreography, a soundtrack of live percussion, and a story inspired by Appalachian coal mining.  I recruited my friend Stephanie Pistello, (an activist and expert on Mountaintop Removal coal mining) to be my assistant director and dramaturg.  I gathered seven actors and two drummers.  I bought the food and gas and made a loose agenda, giving ample time for rest and play—all part of my new commitment to take better care of the artists who generously give so much of their time without pay.  I relinquished as many expectations as possible.

I have conducted several developmental retreats in the past, each time redesigning the process and schedule, learning from the last.  I felt confident in my experience.  Add this to my new year’s resolve, and the kick-ass ingredients and participants involved in MARS, and I became cocky.  I drove headlong at the retreat, positive that the workshop would be exciting, inspiring and smooth.

Instead, I was smacked in the face once again by the beginner’s unknown.

Collaboration does not demand amiability, but it does require that everyone be on the same page, to stay focused and energized at the same moments, to be working toward the same goal.  And it requires a leader to articulate this goal, to create a safe and productive atmosphere in which to take risks.

But at the beginning of creating a new piece, the only thing I feel is disorientation.  The questions– both about the play and the process– heavily outweigh the answers.  I’m never quite sure what exercise or assignment will be most useful, what research will prove most inspiring and how much to push my collaborators.  The initial plunge into Day 1 is refreshing, but immediately I realize the waters are murky.  My fellow swimmers can’t yet see each other clearly, and I can barely find my own way, let alone lead them toward a more pellucid pond.

Suddenly, all of my experience and confidence goes out the window.  Suddenly, the resolutions I made on January 1, 2012 are as complex and overwhelming as the ones I made on January 1, 2008.  Now as then, the unknown triumphs: What is our goal?  What are we trying to do, exactly?  How do we know what to keep, and what to leave behind?  And how the heck do I, as leader of this ambiguous voyage, properly set a course?

Sometimes I get lucky, and the choices I make when matched with the group I am working with coincide copacetically, and the disorientation we all feel at the onset transforms into a collective drive.  We leave the retreat feeling exhilarated, full of inspiration and on the same page.

But disorientation can also lead to confusion and frustration.  I can leave a retreat feeling unsure of what we made, whether it was good, whether I want to keep collaborating with these people.  Was the time I took away from my daily life worth it?  Did we accomplish something?  Do I feel fulfilled?  Is the project as it stands something I want to continue with?  Or do I need to begin again?

This retreat, the first of three initial developmental workshops for MARS, landed somewhere between the copacetic and the confused.  We came away with many seeds planted, rich ideas stewing and a better understanding of how to proceed.  What was created–and those creating it–was undoubtedly awesome.  But the process was not smooth sailing for everyone; there were clashes of taste, assignments that didn’t sit well, and too much free time.   I became plagued by a feeling of irresponsibility.

I remember the moment when I realized my parents didn’t know everything.  It was shocking, because as a child (a professional beginner) I assumed that crossing the threshold into adulthood meant acquiring all knowledge, all confidence and all strength.  I mistakenly equivocated experience with omnipotence.  As a result, I grew up secretly assuming I would eventually undertake my own rite of passage, at the end of which lay the riches of maturity that would be offered to me by a private club of winking elders.  I still find myself seeking a tipping point, hoping I’ll ultimately find steadiness as the uphill climb of youth disappears behind me.

I’ve used the same idea when speaking about Superhero Clubhouse: someday soon we will reach our tipping point when all the painstaking beginner’s stumblings of the last few years will suddenly yield a big, successful future.

But perhaps there will be no such moment.  Perhaps the beginner’s unknown is all we have.  As we work toward becoming a more sustainable organization, it feels important to decipher where to place definitions and what to write in stone, but also how best to stay open to newness, to change, and to mistakes.  Developing original work is incredibly hard.  The models others have created before you don’t necessarily fit; the model you create for yourself may always need revising.  Who we are and what we do is ever-changing.

Similarly, the problems we face with the health of our environment and the survival of our species are not resolved over time; they grow and expand.  New problems arise.  The information we use to make our plays will become obsolete; our knowledge won’t matter as new information replaces it.  Just as true stillness is impossible, finality does not exist.  Yet our society praises certainty, criticizes its opposite.  We spend so much energy attempting to achieve omnipotence, to find firm ground upon which to stand, to prove that we are steady, ready and wise, and conversely quake in the midst of unknowing, proclaiming it weakness.

We can observe the destructive effects of decisions made with an unquestioning mind all around us, every day, from the self-righteousness of politicians and religious leaders to the quarrel-inducing stubbornness of our family and neighbors.  It is the certainty of Monsanto that is allowing us to overhaul plant genetics before we know what kind of lasting effect it will have on our ecosystems.  It is the self-assurance of Masey that is slowly desecrating the culture and landscape of Appalachia.  So often we watch art die at the hand of willful expansion; a restaurant becomes a chain, a band becomes a brand.

Is this growing up?  Does maturity mean relinquishing questions, relinquishing youth, and just charging ahead with the authority that we feel is owed to us after experience?

I posit, much as the Buddhists do (and Anne Bogart in her January blog), that the beginner’s mind is vital to creation.  Beginning again (and again and again) is essential to development, not a hindrance to it.  To not assume, to not expect, to not even know… That is the place from which creativity arises and collaboration can occur most profoundly.

And so my revised resolution–for a new year, a new world, new projects and a new Superhero Clubhouse– is to begin again.

I am about to begin working with eighteen 5^th graders at Bushwick’s PS 123, guiding them in writing eco-plays as part of The Bushwick Starr’s second-annual Big Green Theater program.  Based on my experience with last year’s program, I have prepared my lesson plan, gathered my materials and thought deeply about how to approach this new group of professional beginners.  But ultimately, when I arrive in the classroom, there is no telling what will happen.  Will they be excited about the project?  Will they participate in the exercises?  Will they even like me??

For those who don’t know the Biblical tale of the Three Kings, here’s a simplified version: A child who has been prophesized to become the Jews’ Messiah is born in a barn to a poor, virgin couple.  News spreads of this miraculous birth, and people travel to Bethlehem (five miles south of Jerusalem) to see the alleged King of Kings in person.  A troupe of wise men (often understood to be a trio on account of their trio of gifts, and often representing the three known continents– Europe, Africa and Asia), head west on camelback, following a star that they interpret to be their guide to the child.   In Jerusalem they encounter King Herod who, fearing a rival heir to his throne, orders the wise men to investigate the validity of the prophecy and return to him with information.  The men reach Bethlehem and kneel before the child, a significant gesture reserved for royalty.  Then they present their famous three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh.  After paying their respects, they do not return to Herod, but depart and disappear.  Herod, without knowing that Jesus and his parents have already fled to Egypt, orders the slaughter of all the newborn babies of Bethlehem (just to, you know, be certain).

In my own version of the Epiphany, the wise men offer their royal gifts to this child born into poverty, the baby opens his eyes, looks around at his mother and father, his new shepherd friends, the animals giving their warmth and straw, all of these faces surrounding him with reverence, supporting the leader he will become, and Jesus turns back to the gold, frankincense and myrrh and says: “No thanks, kings.  I have everything I need.”

Cheesy?  Perhaps.  But doesn’t it seem hypocritical, allegorically-speaking, that the child who would one day condemn wealth and materialism would accept these valuable gifts?  What message does it send to a budding religion’s early congregation?  And to us in 2011, can’t we use the story to justify our wasteful obsession with buying stuff?  Rather than bringing stuff to Jesus, it seems to me a greater gift from the wise men might have been returning to Herod and making up some yarn that the Christ thing was a hoax, thereby saving all those innocent baby Bethlehemians from being knifed.

What I’m forgetting, of course (aside from the fact that babies can’t speak and that Herod probably would’ve killed those tots anyways), is the symbolism of the gifts.

Before culture called them kings, the men bearing the gifts to Jesus were called Magi; wise astrology-priests whose supernatural knowledge of the heavens allowed them to follow a moving star (must have been a planet?) to a small town barn simply on the word of a prophecy.  “Magi” is where the word “magic” comes from; in fact, many contemporary Christian cultures still believe the Three Kings to be the immortal, magical figures responsible for visiting the homes of children and bringing them gifts once a year—yes, they are predecessors of Santa Claus.

The Magi were wizards and medicine men, the original scientists, back when religion and science were synonymous and sorcerers were royalty (side note: ironically, it was the rise of Christianity and it’s interpretations in the West that turned Magi into Pagans, sage confidants into evil outcasts).  Whether or not they were actually kings, it’s important to the story that the men be wise, that they have a connection to the occult, and that they offer these particular gifts.  Otherwise, the gifts have no symbolic meaning; instead, they are steeped in it.

Gold is a precious metal used as currency, decoration, and jewelry (i.e. crowns).  Frankincense is a tree resin used to make incense and perfumes, commonly lit during church services.  Myrrh is a versatile resin with a multitude of applications, including medicinally and as an embalming fluid.  These items were extremely valuable in the 1^st century and commonly given to kings.  Presenting baby Jesus with such items recognizes his inherited royal status, and this action alone endows the gifts with a great deal of significance.

But the meaning intensifies if the gifts, as they are sometimes read, stand for the three phases of spirituality: Gold as the crown of an Earthly king, Frankincense as the essence of priesthood, and Myrrh as the elixir of everlasting life.  Delving deeper, the gifts could also symbolize one of the most poetic metaphors in Christianity: the Holy Trinity, the belief that God exists simultaneously in three parts: a human son on Earth (Gold), a priestly father in Heaven (Frankincense) and an ethereal Holy Spirit (Myrrh).  These weren’t merely gifts to a king or a prophet; they were gifts to a god.

I am not a religious person.  But I am a theater artist, and a gift-giver, and therefore I am interested in the meaning of this famous gift exchange, to better understand how I fit into the legacy of this tradition.  What made the Magi’s gifts meaningful is that they were explicitly celebrating three things at once: a man’s worth, a king’s respect and a god’s power.  Because of the meaning the Magi bestow upon them, the gifts come to symbolize the essence of the receiver; in a way, the gifts are the receiver.  And this is the lesson of the story, to me: a gift can be a long journey, it can be a box of gold or the encouragement of a community, but it is always a symbol, a gesture intended to represent the recipient, to honor them.  How do we honor one another with the gifts we give?  How do we choose gifts that best represent those who we respect and love?

Inspired by the gifts of the Magi, O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi directly utilizes this idea, that the gift symbolizes the person.   It’s Christmas eve, young lovers Della and Jim have barely a dollar to their names, but their desire to honor each other is so strong that they each independently sell what is most valuable to them (hair and watch, respectively) in order to buy the gift (watch chain and hair combs, respectively) that the other would appreciate most.  They unwittingly thwart their lover’s plan, of course.  But in this instance, as in the Biblical Epiphany, it truly is the thought that counts: “As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim’s.  It was like him.  Quietness and value–the description applied to both.”

Holiday gift giving has many origins, including the Roman festival of Saturnalia. Originally including sacrificial killing in honor of the god Saturn, the festival’s sacrifices began to be replaced with symbolic figurines and toys when culture began softening its blood rites; the old Greek tyrant Kronos, who ate his children in order to prevent a prophesized rival heir (Herod, anyone?), was replaced by the Roman Saturn, a more benevolent god of harvest (albeit a mysterious god of time and death as well).  As Saturnalia “modernized”, the Mardi Gras-like festival began to feature the exchange of these figurines and toys as a preferred ritual.  As with any ancient holiday tradition, the meaning of the gifts pervaded: they remained symbols of life and death, recognition of social status and tributes to the year’s accomplishments.

This original view of holiday gift giving, in which gifts were endowed with intense meaning, nags at me as I wade through the hordes on 5^th Avenue and stress about the dollars I feel obliged to spend on presents every year, especially when money, time and creativity are lacking.  I abhor buying gifts out of obligation, simply fulfilling wish lists or falling prey to our culture of rampant consumerism and subsequent mountains of waste.

On the other hand, gifts can come in many forms, and I am not one to dismiss the meaning inherent in a single act of generosity.  For all the stress and consumerist frenzy, meaning so often shines through.

I have received many gifts this year, not least of which is the ability to have a forum in which to write this blog, to ask big questions about art and the environment, and to grapple with those questions through the medium of theater.  By the generosity of my First Mate Maria Portman Kelly, our Special Task Force, SHC members and friends, by collaborative partners like The Bushwick Starr and Positive Feedback, and by the wonderful artists and scientists we’ve had the pleasure of working with this year, I am able to strive forward toward becoming a better leader, a better theater-maker and a better citizen of the Earth.  By the grace, patience and support of my incredible community of superheroes (of which you are included, dear reader), I am blessed, and honored.

Happiest of holidays to you all.  I’ll see you in 2012.

Seeing as how Superhero Clubhouse is about to open SATURN (a play about food), and considering the questions about food that arose from our playmaking research and development, it felt appropriate to set a challenge for ourselves as we prepared the Thanksgiving menu.  So we agreed (girlfriend, grandmother, mother and father all graciously participated) that our dinner would be as locally grown as possible, and we would research each ingredient in order to find out the story behind the food.

My parents’ home lies deep in the agricultural countryside of upstate New York, just west of Syracuse.  Despite all the farms around, most of the grocery stores are stocked with food from distributors, grown with pesticides, chemical fertilizer and/or genetically-altered seeds and shipped from hundreds if not thousands of miles away.  It is a common paradox present in many small farming communities in the US, as of the last few decades.  Only recently, thanks mostly to a few outspoken journalists, particular chefs and stubborn farmers, has anyone, let alone small town locals who live right next door to farms, had much access to fresh, local, sustainably-grown food.

But now that there is more public knowledge (albeit mostly among those who seek it out) about the food in our grocery stores, there is a growing demand for high-quality food grown simply and transparently, and therefore a growing popularity in farmers markets, community supported agriculture (CSA) programs and local options in certain corners of thoughtful grocery stores.  So the conversation is happening, and it allowed my family to meet our challenge with surprisingly little effort.

Here are three dishes (and stories) from our locally-sourced dinner:

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Dish: Turkey

Ingredients: turkey, herbs, olive oil

Story: The antibiotic/hormone-free turkey was raised eating grass in a pasture on Oink & Gobble Farm (61 miles from store).  It was brought by truck to Wegmans Grocery (13 miles from house), where my parents purchased it and drove it home in a sedan.  The herbs (parsley, sage rosemary and thyme) all came from my mother’s garden in the backyard (0 miles).  The olive oil was already stocked in the kitchen before we made our challenge and so was used, but it did come from an unknown olive grove in Italy (approx. 4,000 miles as the crow flies) and was one of our only exceptions.

Dish: Sweet Potato Spoon Bread (from Heidi Swanson)

Ingredients: sweet potatoes, goat cheese, shallots, butter, whole-wheat flour, eggs, simple spices, Parmesan cheese

Story: The sweet potatoes came from DeMarcos’ Farms (3 miles from house).  The shallots were bought at the Syracuse Farmers Market (18 miles), originally from Caltabiaco Farms (21 miles from market), as was the goat cheese, originally from Lively Run Farms (68 miles from market), and the eggs, from Meadow Creek Farm (68 miles from market).  The butter and flour were bought at Wegmans (13 miles from house), and came from a local dairy and mill.  The Parm cheese, typically shipped from Europe (approx. 4,000 miles) came from Wisconsin (approx. 850 miles); in retrospect an ingredient we probably could have substituted with something more local.

Dish: Cornbread Stuffing

Ingredients: corn flour, parsnips, carrots, onions, leeks, cranberries, eggs, cream, herbs

Story: The produce was purchased from the Syracuse Farmer’s Market (18 miles from house).  The parsnips and herbs came from my mother’s garden (0 miles), the onions from Caltabiano Farms (21 miles from market), the eggs from Meadow Creek Farm (68 miles from market), the cream and flour were bought at Wegmans (13 miles from house), and came from a local dairy and mill.  The cranberries were from Atoka Cranberry Farm (60 miles from store).  We didn’t write down which farm the carrots and leeks came from, but they were purchased from a small stand at the Union Sq. Green Market in NYC before we departed for Syracuse.

Wine/Beer: Gewerstemeiner from Herman J. Weimer on Seneca Lake (70 miles from store), beer selection from Middle Ages Brewery (17 miles from house)

Dessert: Grandma’s apple pie with very local apples (we live in the midst of apple country)

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I challenge you, dear readers and eaters, to answer the following questions for yourself: What exactly did I eat on Thanksgiving?  Where did it come from?  How was it grown?  How did it get to me?

Whether or not you answered with words like “local”, “organic”, “grass-fed” or “I biked to the farmers market” isn’t the point.  I posit that the cause of the current food complexities has less to do with poor choices and more to do with lack of thinking.  Of course, it also has to do with where governments put their money, what regulations allow which harmful practices to exist, and a general lack of public information.  But I’m interested in individuals, and the thought we put into choosing what to feed our families.

So if we’re not thinking about sodium benzoate, the environmental impact of chemical fertilizers running off into our waterways or abused turkeys injected with hormones, what are we thinking about when shopping for our Thanksgiving dinners?

It’s likely we’re thinking about price, quantity and taste.  Not only are these factors valid, they are often deal-breakers for most people (including myself, with a busy schedule and limited funds).  There is no easy solution to this conundrum: fresh food is generally more expensive, harder to get, in need of preparation, only available in season, and rather unpredictable.   Unhealthy food is cheap, addictive, tasty and ready to eat in a microwaveable minute.

The labels on groceries do not tell complete stories.  Simply naming the spectrum of items we are about to put into our bodies gives us neither proof nor peace of mind that what we are eating is good; because we have become so far removed from the source of each ingredient we eat, and because the food industry has done such an excellent job pacifying our anxieties, we spend our meals justifying, defending or simply ignoring, in the name of desire.

I say desire and not hunger because the “we” I am referring to is the small percentage of the world that has access to ample amounts of food.  A stomach gurgle does not signal starvation, and we do not buy a hot dog from a street vendor because we need it.  The Thanksgiving feast is an undeniable luxury, globally speaking.

What we do need is food.  Healthy food.  We need it to live— more precisely, we need it to live without a debilitating assortment of disease and disorder.  And yes, we need food to taste good, otherwise we wouldn’t want to eat it.

The trouble is, we’ve become blinded, unwittingly caught up in a tangled web of industry and media that make it hard to simply eat, or eat simply.  Because so much “food” is manufactured to taste good and be cheap, our inherited bodies tell us: “eat that, its good for you”, and our evolved minds tell us: “buy that, you can afford it”, when really, neither is true.  Poor diets lead to poor bodies, and poor bodies lead to skyrocketing medical bills.

Michael Pollan has written about the stories we are told by industry advertisers, pictures and words evoking quaint, fertile family farms that in reality no longer exist.  Advertisers tickle the old-fashioned farming narrative we hold in our heads, and our trust is sold.

I observe another story being told, in this case by ourselves: infiltrated daily by media, by all the contrasting information we receive from books, news, fashion magazines, Paula Deen, Facebook, and our friends and families, we begin to cast ourselves as victims.  We see the problems, recognize the amount of thinking required to sort through this web, and give up, proclaiming defeat in the name of a short life and a cruel world.

So we either tell ourselves stories of barn raising and horse plowing to convince us that what we are eating is no different from the food of our great-grandparents (in other words, “food is food”), or we tell ourselves stories of exasperation and hopelessness, and rattle around cities like characters out of Beckett, eating whatever is being sold at whichever bodega because we feel there is no other choice available to us.  Or else we tell no story at all.

I am guilty of all three narratives.  I long for the by-gone days of family farms so that I didn’t have to think so much about food; so I could simply trust that the ones who are selling me food are responsible people, damn it.  And I also have a tendency to give up, justifying the purchase of my packaged snacks with unknown origins in the name of helplessness, because I live in a city and I am always on the go and because I’m only human, damn it.  And I also eat without thought, shoving something—anything– into my mouth multiple times a day, and there are evenings when, reflecting on the past twelve hours, I cannot remember what I ate.

But I’m ready for a new story.  In my new story, the temporary solution to the food conundrum (at least until government subsidies, regulations and markets meet my demands) is to think.  I am going to think.  A lot.  I am going to think about food.  I want to read about it, think about it, talk about it… and then, I want to eat it.  After all this thinking, I might still need to be frugal in the grocery store.  I might still buy food on the go.  I might still indulge in the occasional fruit from South America or dunk an Oreo.   But secretly, I’ll be thinking about it.  Hard.  I know from history that thinking leads to revolutions, and I know from stories that revolutions lead to changes of mind and heart.  The best stories end with changes of mind and heart.

On Thanksgiving, I’m going to think even harder.  I imagine myself like Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol, throwing open the window of my mind, proclaiming to the throngs of neurons: I will celebrate food!  I will honor farmers, appreciate the people, animals and technology that made this massive meal possible! I will remember the 7 billion people in the world!  I will choose my menu carefully!  I will debate, defend, inspire, and inform!  I will tell stories of food!  I will eat slowly; I will eat with pleasure and appreciation!

I have a lot to think about.

For several years I have been searching for an outlet to address climate change in one of our plays.  It is a phenomenon of immense scale, with well-estimated but ultimately unknown repercussions and variable causality, a topic that remains abstract and overwhelming to many people, literally unbelievable to others.  Especially to those living in more temperate areas of the world, climate change feels very far away.  How does an artist create a human connection to something so vast and seemingly impersonal?

Non-fiction artists are making great strides.  There continues to be a steady flow of documentary films, books, magazine articles, television specials and online publications that can travel the world in a concise time frame and show the startling effects of climate change through a succinct series of images.  These media, at their most effective, get as close as possible to capturing climate change, allowing us to glimpse the forest for the trees.

In theater, the challenge is greater, because plays by nature are intimate, human stories—they work in the micro because the macro becomes too distancing in a theater, and can sever the connection between actor and audience.  In such a human-sized environment, our imaginations just can’t fill in enough gaps to comprehend the scale of the entire ocean, the Milky Way or the radically changing temperature of the Earth and all its massive consequences.

One of my favorite NYC theater companies, The Civilians, is currently working on a piece called The Great Immensity; a fitting title for (you guessed it) a play about climate change.  The Civilians use transcribed interviews and non-fiction text as their script, and they are superb at making their own brand of docu-drama.  I always find their work entertaining and thought-provoking.

But when we’re making plays for Superhero Clubhouse, we tend to filter our scientific research more through the lens of allegory and fairy tale than documentary.  What fairy tale could possibly express climate change?

The answer could simply be hiding in the trees.

In this beautiful season, as deciduous leaves start to change color, it’s hard to forget about trees.  Having grown up in New England, autumn to me is analogous with fall foliage; memories are framed in yellow, red and orange (the new year’s school bus, apple picking, Halloween) and afternoons spent cavorting in the woods behind my house.  In fact, it’s hard for anyone not to have a relationship with trees in every season, in city and country, in every part of the world.  The scale of trees is human-friendly; our brains can take them in.  From very early childhood, humans worship and fear trees as benevolent monsters: silent but imposing, nurturing yet alien, their branches welcoming, their forests foreboding.

Perhaps because trees can simultaneously communicate hope and dread, stories involving trees pervade nearly every culture and community throughout history, providing adventure (Dante, Winnie the Pooh, Robin Hood, Endor), rites of passage (Hatchet, Hansel and Gretel) and ritual (Christmas tree); symbolizing life (Japan’s pine, Africa’s baobab), destruction (The Lorax, Avatar, Fern Gully), friendship (The Giving Tree), wisdom (Tolkien’s Ents, Grandmother Willow, Buddha’s Bodhi) and war (Macbeth’s Birnam Wood, The Wizard of Oz’s fighting trees), not to mention the sacred World Tree depicted in many indigenous mythologies (most notably the Norse’s Yggdrasil), whose trunk, roots and branches connect the heavens, the Earthen realms and the underworld, literally holding the universe together.

Even before discovering the role of trees in science (read on), researching the role of trees in culture yields rich ideas and inspiration for a potential play about a human relationship to climate change.

Consider, ala Joseph Campbell, this time-honored story structure: an adolescent protagonist finds herself lost in the woods.   She is forced to confront obstacles: strange characters and situations as well as her own innocence, fears, and immaturity.  When she emerges from the wood, she has gained confidence and knowledge; in the traditional sense, she has transformed into an adult.

Human civilization is in its adolescence.  Impetuous, shortsighted youth, we make rash decisions, we are prone to fits of rage and intense boredom, we destroy before we create, we act before we think, we don’t yet know how we fit in with the world we were born into.

In that case, perhaps we humans have only just entered our own proverbial woods, and the disorientation and disbelief we feel in regards to climate change—the sensation that we are alone, that the forest in front of us is disturbingly cloaked and the world we’ve come from has disappeared behind us—perhaps that’s just the necessary first step toward our species’ adulthood.  There’s no turning back, no comforts, no magic to make it all go away; the path is no longer familiar.  Accepting the truth of our situation is scary, but also galvanizing, because the forest surrounding us conceals dangers as well as solutions.

We are not alone, you see: the trees can speak, and they are filled with stories.

On October 1, Superhero Clubhouse presented a family-friendly, site-specific piece at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s annual Open House.   We collaborated with scientists from the LDEO’s Tree Ring Lab, one of the country’s foremost places for tree-centered climate research, to create a short play inspired by their work: the science (and art) of dendrochronology, a.k.a. tree ring dating.

Studying the rings of ancient trees can yield a panoply of information in regards to the history and people of the earth.  By extracting cores from trees of particular age in particular geographic areas, scientists can locate specific geologic events in time, observe historic natural disasters and—most significantly to our present/future climate matters—measure trends of heating and cooling, which in turn reveal patterns of flooding and drought, and consequently tales of cultural collapse.

800-year-old bald cypresses of North Carolina tell the ghost story of Roanoke, tracing the mysterious disappearance of an early settlement to severe drought.  Although for a long time we attributed the disappearance to skirmishes with indigenous people, it was most likely the drought of 1587 that did them in: drought has a tendency to destroy crops, making people hungry, desperate and violent.

The trees of South America tell a morality tale of industrialization that makes an eerie parallel to our contemporary world:  between 810-910, the overpopulated Mayans, living way past their means, slashed and burned the Guatamalan forests so much that they increased the climactic temperature, intensifying an already major drought period which in turn caused mass migration and death.

The trees of eastern China present an epic: between 1638-1878, four entire Chinese dynasties fell as a result of a diminished monsoon season.  Rice patties dried up causing peasant rebellions, societal upheaval, political reorganization, socio-economic turmoil and widespread famine.

Our LDEO collaborator Nicole Davi and her fellow dendrochronologists are currently studying the recent dzuds (severe summer drought followed by harsh winters) that have devastated the animal herds of Mongolia.  By sampling and “reconstructing” trees from all over Mongolia, they are slowly creating a historical map, tracing water flow and developing an understanding of the country’s fertility.  The short piece we made together at the Open House was the beginnings of a similar map, one of culture and expression as well as science.

Trees horde stories of climate change, they hold them between their rings just as they capture CO2 with their branches and stabilize ground water with their roots.  We have only begun to consider the theater that might sprout from such stories, but it leaves me giddy with possibility.  The human-sized fairy tales of trees might allow us to better understand ourselves, and better see the forest.

“If I cherish trees beyond all personal (and perhaps rather peculiar) need and liking of them, it is because of this, their natural correspondence with the greener, more mysterious processes of the mind—and because they also seem to me the best, most revealing messengers to us from all nature, the nearest its heart.”  -John Fowles, “The Tree”

Full and By Farm, Essex, NY

Three of my fellow SHC members are turning a large heap of compost. It’s their first day here on this simple, 100-acre sustainable farm run by James Graves and Sara Kurak, a radiant couple in their mid-thirties. A few of us have been at it for a several days already (we’re here on a work retreat as we develop SATURN a play about food), and we sport our budding farmer tans and novel pride to prove it. But our new recruits have barely brushed the sleep from their eyes, and now they are coming face to face with decomposing horse parts.

Several months ago, a horse named Thunder died of a stomach infection. Full & By is not stamped with labels and certifications, nor does it need to be; all of their business is done through CSA (community supported agriculture): they deal solely and directly with 50 shareholders from the small community surrounding them.  And because James and Sara have no interest in growing bigger, they are able to farm the way they think most “natural”: rotational grazing, organic fertilization, and with two horses doing most of the fieldwork. So it is not an exaggeration to say that the passing of Thunder saw the death of one of the hardest-working and most beloved farm hands.

What do you do with a dead horse? Traditional farming (that is, pre-industrial) produces virtually zero waste; any scrap is either burned for heat, salvaged for the future, fed to the animals or spread on the garden as fertilizer. On a farm like Full & By where both the environment and the harvest are constantly considered, allowing Thunder to become fertilizer seems the most natural thing to do.

But the very act of farming is not natural. The invention of agriculture (around 7000 BC) was the first time the fabric and patterns of the natural world were forcibly and consciously altered to any great extent by a living thing. Since then, what agriculture has evolved into has arguably had more negative impact on the environment than any other human action in history (it is certainly one of the major causes of global warming). Small farms like James and Sara’s aren’t in league with heavily-footprinted factory farms, of course, but the question still arises: Amidst an operation intended to systematize the wilderness, how do you determine what is natural? Where do you draw the line?

Mucking a coop

To many, Full & By is a paragon of “natural” farming, in that it is a stellar example of minimal-impact, high-quality agriculture (even their water is sustainable: the farm is positioned conveniently between river and mountains, and an abundant natural spring runs directly under the property). Still, James & Sara dominate the land, they raise animals to be eaten, they decide which plants are desirable and which are weeds—processes that could easily be deemed “unnatural”. It could be said that Thunder himself was unnatural: horses were domesticated to work for us, and certainly spreading his remains on a garden for the direct purpose of feeding humans is far from what happens when wild horses die.

Thunder the horse was as close as kin, and we non-farmers relate to this sentiment such that all of the people I shared this story with when I returned from Full & By were mortified—not just that my collaborators were made to spend a morning uncovering rotten horse guts, but that the horse was butchered and composted in the first place.

Is it unnatural to chop up your dead son and put him in the compost? Is it more natural to lock our fertile bodies in giant lacquered caskets six feet beneath the earth where they have little chance of participating in the circle of life? Have we strayed entirely from the natural order of things? Or have our adopted rituals become what is natural?

A similar “natural/unnatural” conundrum arose during our afternoon rehearsal sessions, in which, after long mornings working on a farm, we proceeded to pretend we were working on a farm. Being in the early stages of SATURN’s development, we wanted to immediately capture the essence of our real farm experiences and translate them to the stage, for the ultimate purpose of igniting a larger conversation about food with our future audiences. But while rehearsing, the dichotomy was palpable: just down the road our real farmer friends were returning to their real farm work just as they did every day of the year, and here we were making a dance about it.  Our heads spun a little.

But isn’t this the very nature of art, forging the narrow chasm between fabrication and reality knowing truth lies somewhere in between?  Aren’t we artists constantly chopping up, burying and sowing the remains of our ancestors in order for our culture to grow?

Then maybe farmers like James and Sara are modern artists; aware of their ineluctable 21st-century relationship with the natural world, they simultaneously command and cultivate nature because it is the closest they can come to the truth.

Perhaps we need a new definition of “natural”– a super-natural (!), a route in between the pre-agricultural wild and our ultra-industrial society, a hybrid of contemporary considerations (evolution, the needs of our bursting population, the threat our actions pose to the environment, etc.), something that provides solutions and coexistence.  Whether this new super-natural will be defined by scientists creating meat in petri-dishes, companies perfecting GMOs and governments subsidizing mass-produced crops, or by small communities and dead horses in compost heaps, is unclear. But whatever the new natural, it will likely be groundbreaking, and possibly backbreaking, for farming is just that.

On a side note, we had an extraordinary experience at Full & By Farm, a ripe week full of work, research, rehearsal and the best meals this side of Kentucky. Immense thanks are owed to James Graves and Sara Kurak, their apprentice farmers Tyler Sildve and Emily Jaquish, Tom, Margaret and David Graves and Hannah Kenah.

Sarah Hughes will direct SATURN this fall in NYC

What is most extraordinary about this rigorous summer workshop that takes place annually on the beautiful campus of Skidmore College is the amount of diverse international artists that gather here, and by default the incredible exchange of ideas that occurs and standards that are set.  More than half of our participants were from foreign lands, and the other thirty USians were themselves rich with varied culture and experience.  We ate, slept, partied and made art together.

Anne Bogart, SITI’s artistic director, speaks often about how theater creates microcosmic societies, proposing ways we might live in the world.  The Viewpoints training method itself is essentially a practice of mini global coexistence:  there are people in a room, these people are individuals with individual bodies, languages, and desires, yet these people must find a way to come together as a group and make something, so that the rest of the world can watch and say “hey, what a great way to live, I think I’ll try that.”

Not coincidentally, the text we used throughout the month both in Viewpoints class and in making short plays called Compositions focused on the conversations and events experienced in cafés (specifically, excerpts from café-centered plays by Chuck Mee).   It quickly became clear that a café is more than merely a place for coffee and cigarettes; it is a gathering place, a place of focus, inspiration and coexistence, a place where big ideas are born and our complex lives are grappled with safely and publicly—just like a rehearsal process, a Viewpoints improvisation and our four weeks at Skidmore.

As I write this, I am sitting in a café.  Thankfully sipping iced tea on this typical oven-like July day in NYC, I feel myself confronted yet again with a Big Conundrum: how do you take a microcosm and make it macro?  That is: how do you take the lessons learned from a functioning mini-community and apply it to the much more complex global community?  If all the world were a café it would be easy to negotiate questions of self vs. society, for instance, because the society I am a part of would be small and visible enough to understand, to know my place, to find love, to examine evolution, to harvest the knowledge of others, to start revolutions, to improve…

If the world was a café, there would be a farm in the back that was our sole provider of food, and we would eat what was in season, and it would taste good and be healthy and we would have a more direct relationship with agriculture.  The coffee would come from a greenhouse tree, the tea plucked from our herb garden and the wine and whiskey would grow old with us.

If the world was a café, there would always be music playing.

If the world was a café, we would learn each others languages and marvel at the power of words. We would debate until dawn, until our disagreements were absorbed and respected.  If we fought, it would be without weapons, with our friends surrounding us, to protect the walls and our brains from breaking.  We would break bread.

If the world was a café, we would rearrange the chairs every night and enact stories and play instruments and dance.  There would be celebrations for each new friend that entered, and for each old friend that left.  We would notice the subtle changes of people and time like seasons, and react accordingly.  We would take care of one another.  And when others were taking care of us, we would take care of ourselves (less caffeine, more dancing).

The head chef would change every year.  We’d all get a turn to choose the menu.

It would be simple to power our café from the sun, from water wheels, windmills or geothermal—it’s only one café, after all.  Most of the time we wouldn’t even use electricity, because our windows would be big and our café built to harness passive solar.  Our water and waste would be recycled on a self-contained system.  Computers would only be used for reference and research; most of the news and knowledge we’d need would come from each other, from word of mouth.  The walls would be lined with used books—every book ever written, in fact—and we would read to each other and to ourselves, and make decisions based on the lessons of the past.  All of this would have been decided and financed together, as a group, with the oldest woman and the youngest boy making final decisions and the barista taking minutes.

But the world is much bigger than a café, the problems more complex, the demands more demanding.  How do we take the possibilities of coexistence discovered in a microcosm and apply them to the challenges of the macro?

Perhaps the answer lies in the process of trying to make the micro-community function.  After all, there are very few cafés with such diplomacy and sustainability, much less theater companies.  Individuals want different things, and their needs evolve as they age; audiences want different things, and their needs evolve as the world ages; funding appears and disappears; competition appears and disappears; inspiration is fickle; coffee just doesn’t taste as good when it comes from a greenhouse.  There are immense challenges in forming and maintaining a functioning society on any level.

But if we can’t make a theater company function, how can we ever expect the world to do the same?  When looking at the mammoth problems we face as a global community, it seems essential we figure out how to better coexist in our microcosms and hope that, leading by example, the ratio between micro and macro will gradually become more perfect.  If Superhero Clubhouse can truly become sustainable, can take care of its members, nurturing individual interests while simultaneously forging ahead with the goals of the group, if we can consistently create vital art and bring it to people who need it, if we can become community servants, if I can become a better Captain – only then we can demand such change from the leaders of the world, and offer a living model to our fellow citizens.

It is too typical to feel overwhelmed, too easy to become sunk by the weight of the world on our shoulders, too natural to take care of ourselves first, and too human to give up.  Fear and resignation is what is expected.  But art offers an opposing approach —art defies death and diversity, it strengthens by difficulty and accelerates through endings.  Art is the only place where utopia can truly be realized, because it does not legislate with answers, but rather guides with questions; it is merely a model–a microcosm–of reality.  So then, it is imperative that we figure out to make art together, if we are ever to make a livable world again.

Art is a café.  It stays up late, spooning the dregs from the bottom of the cup, drunk on ideas and flush with discovery.  It declares love and initiates heartbreak, unites friends and confronts enemies, philosophizes and remembers and forgets and rebirths.  It is a place of pleasure and pain, a place where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  And we are all in it together.

Cafe Voltaire

We’re about to present URANUS (a play about waste) to the public June 7-11.  The story, staging and design of URANUS are inspired by the greater theme of waste: waste of the human experience, such as deferred dreams, expatriation, abandonment, progress; but also, of course, waste that affects the environment: garbage, landfills, and human excrement.

To better examine why this theme is important, I participated in an experiment—a pledge I made for Earth Month—to produce no inorganic waste for 30 days*.  That means I wasn’t allowed to consume anything that was intentionally produced to be disposable, and then see how it effected my days and my mind.  I’d like to give you a taste of what this experience was like.

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Pretend I don’t have to work today.  I’m in Manhattan, taking a walk.  In a few hours I’ll be at the theater, to see a play by one of my favorite off-Broadway companies.  But right now I’m just walking down the street.

It’s turned into a lovely day, weather-wise.  The sky has cleared, the air smells fresh, and I feel lighter, even though my backpack is more full, with the addition of my reusable containers, bags, utensils and unpackaged snacks.  Somehow, knowing that I have temporarily disconnected myself from a system that often feels unavoidable, I feel empowered.

Removing something as ubiquitous as garbage from one’s life makes one incredibly conscious of the garbage that other people are producing.  It’s the experience of seeing the world for the first time, with new super laser eyes.  So as I walk down the street, my new super laser eyes involuntarily zoom in on the black plastic heaps on curbsides, the overflowing trashcans on corners, the bits of litter strewn about by wind or the careless.  The two things I observe most profoundly: how much literal space all this garbage takes up just on one block, and how many passersby seem totally oblivious to it’s presence.  Would we perhaps pay more attention if we were made to put garbage in clear bags, our rotting detritus naked and incredibly visible?

I enter the Union Square Green Market.  It’s spring, so there are lots of leafy greens, members of the onion family, root vegetables and apples from the fall harvest, milk in returnable glass bottles, naked bread, etc.  There are bags and cartons being doled out en masse, but luckily I brought my own (small canvas totes, Tupperware for eggs and cheese, plastic produce bags from housemates’ grocery trips), and my methods are very welcome here because it saves the farmers money.

A trip to the Farmers Market isn’t a breeze; it requires planning, you’re limited to whatever’s in season, and it’s more expensive.  But it’s the healthiest, freshest, most local (therefore low-impact) way to eat, and—most pertinent to my experiment—the only source of groceries in which almost nothing is besieged by packaging, so I adjust my diet and budget to make it work.

The food I buy at the market will be my breakfast and dinner for the next few days, but it needs to be prepared, so I’m eating a late lunch out.

On the sidewalk, I wade through hundreds of cigarette butts (when did it become so acceptable and commonplace to throw these little devils on the ground?!), hundreds of free daily newspapers, and several people trying to force fliers upon me: discounts on shoes, Japanese lunch specials, comedy clubs… most of the fliers, I notice, end up on the ground a few blocks down or in the trashcan on the corner.  My super laser eyes next zoom in on the hordes of broken umbrellas strewn about.  We had a burst of heavy rain earlier today, and I’ll bet plenty of the parasols I see were purchased from a street seller only minutes before being turned inside out, snapping a limb, or being forgotten outside a doorway.  I wear a raincoat with a hood, to prevent potential umbrella death.

Scouting an eatery that will forgo their usual procedures and let me use my Tupperware and fork (in the case of messy food) or bare hand (in the case of a pizza slice) is tricky, but not impossible.  No napkin is easy; I merely decline and use the towel I brought from home.  As I eat, I watch the other customers, most of them surrounded by paper napkins, disposable cups, Styrofoam take-out boxes, plastic bags, plastic forks, plastic straws, leftover food—all of which I cannot use, all of which gets tossed in the trash and carted around the city in a giant truck before it is transported to a Pennsylvania landfill and entombed for hundreds of years.  The event of eating lasted ten minutes.

I wonder how many New Yorkers consider life in a garbage bag.  Anything that decomposes still needs oxygen to decompose, and without it—say, if it’s tucked inside a thick black plastic bag and compressed into the depths of a landfill—even the most perishable items can sit for hundreds of years.

Back on the street.  A garbage truck passes me, one of hundreds that drive through the five boroughs of NYC 24 hours a day.  It runs 3 miles to the gallon, produces the most greenhouse gas emissions of any vehicle save tractor-trailers, and headquarters in poor Bronx & Brooklyn areas, bestowing kids in those neighborhoods with the highest asthma rates in the city.  But without the trucks, those black plastic heaps would just keep heaping.

I’m meeting a friend for tea before the show.  I use my reusable hot/cold bottle, which thankfully is accepted without question at most cafés, and shake it to stir in honey and milk.  The tea bag I can compost (the Lower East Ecology Center has a stand at the Green Market where you can drop off food scraps), and if there are no communal bottles of honey and milk, I drink it bitter.  I want a cookie, but that typically means a square of wax paper (used in handling), a napkin to go under the cookie, sometimes a paper plate under the napkin, or a paper bag if it’s To Go.  So I explain my experiment to the barista, who may or may not comply with my request for a bare-hand exchange, which means I may or may not eat a cookie.  My friend has no such rules; she consumes the coffee and the cookie and all the disposables that come with them.  As we sip our beverages, I am nagged with feelings of guilt and self-righteousness, internally tainting my pleasant visit.  After the play, we might have a beer, which may or may not come in a bottle or plastic cup, and include a cocktail napkin, and these feelings might return.  But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to.

My friend and I arrive at the theater, we pick up our paper tickets (unavoidable) and are handed thick glossy paper programs with paper insets (not unavoidable, but I collect programs, and have no intention of throwing it away).  The play is magnificent, but my super laser eyes can’t help zooming in on all things disposable: the scripts printed, script revisions printed (it’s a new show with a big cast) and wooden design materials (no doubt all coming from virgin arboreal forests), the bottled waters and wrapped candy bars in the green room, the packaged snacks and plastic wine glasses at the intermission bar, the paper towels in the bathroom, the throw-away pens, the foam and plastic and cloth and plexiglass used in the set, the spike tape…  When I consider the Broadway equivalent of this modest Off-Broadway production, I get a bit dizzy.

On my way home, I need to renew my 30-day Metrocard.  The machine dispenses a new card; it won’t let me refill my old one.  Machines do not negotiate with social experiments.  I have no other choice but to throw it away.

It’s been a good day, but the empowerment I felt earlier has faded a bit.  I feel small, and I wonder truly what will become of our livable land (when landfills overcrowd), our water (when toxic chemicals in landfills continue leaching into the ground) and air (when unwanted gases continue to be released via the decomposing process) if we continue recklessly consuming and discarding at such a magnitude.

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Now that my experiment has ended, I am left with a few resolutions (certain practices I want to continue, lessons I’d like to spread), but mostly questions: As Superhero Clubhouse moves forward toward what we hope will be a promising future, how will we retain our past policies? Can ideals be reduced, reused and recycled? Can words and movement?  Can theater lead the way in a crusade to make the arts less wasteful, when by nature a theatrical event is fleeting and inefficient?  Can theater makers from the get-go (starting with playwrights and ending with audience) more profoundly consider all the stuff they plan to use?

And, quite simply: what are we, the people of Earth, going to do about all this waste?

*Exceptions to my “no waste” rule: tea bags (which I composted), toilet paper (which I reduced), items bought by friends and shared with me and the groceries that were already in my apartment before I made my pledge (all of which I declared more wasteful not to use), and what I considered the “nearly-unavoidables”: receipts, stickers on fruits/veggies, gifts and cards sent by relatives, bills, deposit slips, checks, toiletries and tickets.  All exceptions (and any mishaps) I collected, in order to display as a collage at our performances. 

PS- The other members of our Special Task Force (SHC’s core company) also made 30-day waste-related pledges, each unique and inspiring.  You can read about their adventures on our Facebook page (and Like us, while you’re at it!).

According to this acquaintance—and many others who have expressed similar feelings, including politicians, CEOs, some of my closest friends/family, and me, sometimes—the global environmental crisis can only truly be solved from the top down, from the legislation of government, the regulation of corporations and industry.  Questions arise as soon as you start comparing the small actions of individuals to the immensity of environmental challenges: How can the tiny, mostly imperceptible changes I make in my life curb something as massive as global warming?  What difference does it make in the grand scheme of things if I throw this plastic bottle in the trash?  The meat is in the grocery store whether I buy it or not.  The plane is flying whether I’m on it or not.  And also: why should I have to sacrifice convenience and comfort when I’m not the one cutting down all those trees or poisoning the water?

One might ask similar questions about green theater: How can theater, a medium that reaches relatively few (compared to television, for example) and wastes relatively little (compared to film, for example) be an effective conduit for environmental change?  What difference does it make if we don’t print programs or use high-wattage lights?  The materials are being thrown away whether we use them in our set first or not.  Mercury will still be in the water whether we talk about it in our play or not.  Why spend so much energy and time on something that might be seen only by a few hundred people (if we’re lucky), doesn’t have the power to change a law, and by nature will almost completely disappear after closing night?

These days, this is how I’m answering some of those questions:

Change begins small.  It begins with stories and conversations.  Theater is merely a gesture in the frenzied dance of the millions vying for an individual’s attention, but because it is a carefully constructed, highly conscious gesture, affective on both a personal and communal level, theater has the ability to change minds—in this way, theater is like a reusable cup, the purchase of a local organic tomato, the switch to CFLs, or composting.  To paraphrase what I have heard Anne Bogart articulate on several occasions, the event of theater is a tiny model for a larger functional community, a microcosm of society, an arena in which we might practice—artists and audiences together—how we might live in the world.  It has the power to allow a group of people to consider that which is larger than themselves, even just for one evening.

Therefore, to me, the process of making theater and the content shared with an audience are vital to consider, because they mirror (and sometimes create) the content of our real-world conversations and the way we live in the world.   The same can be said for the content of our little daily decisions—riding public transit or a bike instead of driving a car, declining a plastic bag at the checkout—they reflect our priorities, which in turn create our quality of life.

Art begets discourse.  Discourse creates paradigm shifts.  New paradigms create new memes.  Memes are shared and passed from individual to individual, shaping our culture.  Culture makes demands.  Demands make a system.  A system becomes an eco-system (and by “eco” I mean both economy and ecology, together as siblings). This eco-system, devised by our collective consciousness, is what our governments are hired (by us) to govern.  In other words, as Colin Beaven (aka No Impact Man) would say, we are the system.

Yes, it is essential for our administrations and industries to adopt new policies and drastically change their business-as-usuals; the results of their procrastination or failure to do so are terribly frightening, and there’s not much we as individuals can do about how those with money and power govern the system we live in.  But without the bottom up, without our individual demands, our boycotts, our conscientious purchases, our informed perspectives, our self-empowerment, our mini revolutions, without a new culture of eco-consciousness, we are doubly doomed.

No, the environmental movement is no more about organic biodegradable hand soap saving polar bears than our plays are about telescopes and mad hatters.  The true event (of the play, or the reusable cup) is a symbol of cultural movement, of a new social story being written.  “Going green” in its truest form is about events both large and small igniting a change of thinking.  Through art and discourse, we determine our future.  What will we make?  What will we talk about?  How will we live?

Side note: this is the first of a monthly Captain’s Blog I’ll be writing.  This one’s for Earth Day.  Next month I’ll be chatting about waste, in preparation for our upcoming production of URANUS.  Thanks for reading!