Arts Exploring Eco-Grief – Commissioning Playwrights
This semester’s faculty and staff spotlight recognizes Leah Lowe, Professor of Theatre and Director for the Curb Center for Art, Entrepreneurship, and Public Policy. She met with us to discuss her role in commissioning a series of one-act plays exploring emotional responses to climate change as part of the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative. In collaboration with professors David Wright and Theresa Goddu, Lowe has overseen the selection process of the four playwrights and connected them to the Vanderbilt community throughout their writing process last year. The plays will be performed in September and October 2024, and Dr. Lowe will direct three of them. A complimentary exhibition, Extraction/Interaction, exploring climate change through visual art will be on view this semester at the Curb Center.
Please note that this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Claire Campbell (Office for Arts, Libraries & Global Engagement): To begin, please describe the project in your own words. What led you to work on this project? Whose collaborations made it possible?
Leah Lowe: The eco-grief initiative has been a year-long exploration of the human emotions surrounding climate change, which for me, is very present every summer here in Tennessee. It is getting hotter sooner, and by the end of the summer, vegetation is dried out and crispy, which is not what I remember about the Tennessee of my youth. My father was a scientist, and I remember him being concerned about greenhouse gases when no one else I knew had been. I grew up with the idea that climate change was inevitable. It was a certainty, not just a hypothetical. The fact that climate change is with us now is harder and harder to ignore.
The idea for a project focused on eco-grief came to me years ago when I was teaching a class for the American Studies program called the Art of Social Justice. In this course, we examined artists’ responses to various social justice crises throughout American history. When we reached the unit on climate change, my normally very chatty class went silent. When I asked what was going on and why they were silent for this unit specifically, one of the students replied, “I'm so tense about thinking about climate change that I can't even talk about it.” That was about five years ago. Since then, I've noticed increasing student interest in thinking about climate change and anxiety on the matter.
David Wright, the Director of the Program in Communication of Science and Technology, approached me about doing an artistic project around eco-grief. Collaboration with Professor Wright and the Science Communication and Media Grand Challenge have been instrumental in helping us with funding and support. Then, Theresa Goddu—Professor of English and American Studies, who works cross-departmentally with climate studies and environmental humanities—expressed interest in the project. Through our discussions, we came up with the idea of commissioning plays dealing with eco-grief. I always turn to theater first, since it is my home.
CC: How would you define eco-grief?
LL: Truthfully, eco-grief is a newer term for me. It is a term that some environmental humanists have been using to describe the sense of loss around climate change. My expertise, as a theater artist, allows me to talk about the lived impact of climate change through performance.
CC: What media and art capture eco-grief well? And what do you see as the intersections of art and science?
LL: There are a lot of folks—many on our campus—who are dealing with climate in the visual arts, theater, and film. I think about Jennifer Fay, the chair of the English department, who wrote a book Inhospitable Worlds that looks at the environment through film. There are a lot of artists who are experimenting with photography of vanishing places, documenting what's being eaten up by building development. Both are legitimate ways of engaging with climate change from artistic and scholarly points of view.
Art and science have a lot more in common than we traditionally acknowledge. Art is about experimentation in a lot of ways. People I know in science have also been very receptive to artists in general. There is something about the way that art speaks to the whole person. We are focusing on eco-grief in this project, but it's not just grief and concern that these plays appeal to. They also appeal to one’s sense of humor and sense of awe at the natural world. I think that many people in the sciences understand that art is a communicative tool. It speaks to the whole person and allows for deep communication and thought.
CC: Please speak on your experience commissioning the plays. What was the project's general timeline and the steps involved?
LL: We put out a call for playwrights for the commission in the summer of 2023. I was expecting 70 or 80 applications, but we got 276. The way it works was the playwright responded to the call by submitting a full-length play that they had already written that may or may not have anything to do with climate change. By reading their submissions we were just getting a sense of the quality of their writing. Then, we decided which four playwrights would be commissioned for the project. The reviewing committee consisted of me, Liz Haynes from the theater department, Elizabeth Meadows with the English Department and Robert Penn Warren Center, and a theatre student, Natalie Wright. Once we selected the four playwrights, we connected them with students through Zoom meetings and later class visits. We kicked off these discussions in February when we had Mary Annias Heckler visit. She is a writer who deals with the emotions surrounding climate change, so she was able to do some interesting workshops with students and speak to the larger Vanderbilt community. In late April and May, we also were able to have some students involved in the developmental readings of the plays.
CC: Expand on the student involvement. How did their conversations influence the commissioned plays?
LL: For me, it was vital that the playwrights be in touch with the Vanderbilt community throughout their writing processes. Despite not being local, with three playwrights being from New York and one from Chicago, we ensured that they would have opportunities to talk with Vanderbilt students one way or another. They talked with students across a variety of disciples through class visits, including Professors Liz Haynes’s Sustainability in the Arts (THTR 2711), Matt Pliskha’s Environmental Justice (LAS 1111), Stephen Ornes’s Crafting the Science Podcast (CSET 2200), and Anna Hill’s Imagining the Climate Crisis (ENGL 1111) courses. They also met with environmental humanities postdocs and even had some one-on-one discussions. Therefore, while the playwrights were developing these plays, they were learning something about the Vanderbilt community and the things that were on the minds of our students, which is so important.
Student involvement was important to all of us involved in the project. Climate change is going to be something that the folks who are undergraduates now are going to be dealing with into their adult lives. There is a lot of interest and thoughtfulness around climate change and the environment among our undergraduate student body. The Environmental Humanities postdocs have also been invaluable in terms of sharing their amazing ideas and talking about climate change issues.
I did not participate in the student conversations at all because I didn't want my presence to hinder the student’s ability to speak freely about things that were on their minds. My being there would have changed the dynamic, and I thought it was more important for the playwrights to be in touch with the students than it was for me to hear the resulting discussion. I cannot say what went on in those conversations, but I heard from both playwrights and students that the conversations were rich and productive.
CC: What surprised you most about working with the playwrights? How would you compare their engagement with the theme of eco-grief?
LL: All four playwrights have gone in wildly different directions in considering eco-grief. Some are interested in the more personal moments that different individuals experience when thinking about the loss of our planet as we know it, while some take the theme in a more political direction. One of the plays involves horseshoe crabs. Their blood is used in testing certain drugs and medical devices that are implanted in humans. This play considers supply chain issues, asking how we test those devices if we no longer have horseshoe crabs. Using the word grief makes the plays sound like they are going to be total downers, but these works are filled with humor and hope. There is a lot of variety in the collection.
All plays have conflict moving the plot forward. One of our playwrights, Jaymes Sanchez, chose to look at the conflicts that can develop between people, who both acknowledge that climate change is real but have different opinions on how to handle it. You would imagine that would be a unified group, all wanting to fight climate change, but Sanchez was interested in how conflicts still exist in human response to the issue. I found that interesting because when we think about the conflict surrounding climate change, we often think of the deniers versus the rest of the world. However, even with people who agree on the problem, deep conflict can emerge philosophically and practically as they think about how to get their message out. Some will want a totally revolutionized approach, while others take a more incremental and gradual approach, slowly extending their comfort zone in terms of dealing with and talking about climate change. His play is rich, and it surprised me because it never occurred to me to take this direction as the source of conflict for a play.
Another one of our playwrights, Gina Femia, has written a personal story about two 18-year-old best friends who have lost a tree that was their special place. It was their childhood spot, where they would go to read library books and hang out. Their loss is also compounded by the fact that they are going to college and moving far apart. This play shows how the loss of the environment that they knew as children is one among several different but important losses.
CC: When will the plays be performed? And how will students be involved in the performances?
LL: Two plays will be performed September 26-29 and the other two October 15-17. Each will have a student cast and crew. We will be producing the plays using sustainable materials and methods in the theater department. Sustainability in theatre production is an interest of Professor Liz Haynes, our technical director. Professor Millán in the theater department will direct one of the plays, and I will direct the other three.
All four of the plays are one-acts. We wanted shorter plays for multiple reasons. Doing a play is a large time commitment for busy students, so we wanted to create an opportunity for folks who were moved by the project to be able to participate, which is more feasible with the easier time commitment of a shorter play. We felt that multiple one-acts could also showcase a variety of approaches in thinking about eco-grief.
CC: What do you hope people take away from this project?
LL: I hope that these plays generate conversation. I want people to recognize different attitudes and emotions they might feel regarding climate change when they see these plays and then want to talk about those aspects. I saw an article in the New York Times, recently, about how climate change is coming up more and more in therapy sessions. Often people have important emotional and interior responses to living through this moment of environmental change. Art permits people to have feelings about these changes, and I think acknowledging the emotional dimensions of climate change and recognizing the real fears it brings will allow us to have more productive conversations on the matter.
CC: What will happen to the project once the performances conclude?
LL: We are beginning to explore the possibility of publication for the four plays. There is interest in using art, in teaching about climate change, and it would be interesting to see this project be a resource for that. One of the playwrights, Kristen Idaszak, who teaches at DePaul University, has expressed an interest in using the plays to teach about climate change and playwriting.
CC: This project has engaged your roles as a theater professor and director of the Curb Center for Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Public Policy. How has the Curb Center been involved in the process?
LL: While the playwrights have been working on their pieces, we, here at the Curb Center, started thinking about possible exhibits that would support the plays. Why stop with just theater in our consideration of art exploring eco-grief? We will be hosting the exhibition tentatively titled Extraction/Interaction, in which three visual artists explore the extraction of materials in some way. Will Wilson is a member of the Navajo Nation, who uses drone photography to look at abandoned uranium mines throughout the Navajo Nation. His resulting images become like otherworldly landscapes. John Sabraw extracts pollutants and oxides from polluted rivers and streams to create pigments for painting. And then we have Eliza Evans, who is a conceptual artist who has been working on clever and interesting ways to thwart the fracking industry. This exhibition is another part of the eco-grief initiative. It will be open through the entirety of the fall semester. We will be working to schedule the artists for class visits. If any faculty members are interested in incorporating any of this project into their classes, we would love to hear from them and would try to accommodate their schedules. Contact Rachel Thompson (rachel.h.thompson@vanderbilt.edu) if interested.
Leah Lowe (Oberlin College, A.B.; University of Minnesota, M.F.A.; and Florida State University, Ph.D.) is the Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise & Public Policy and a Professor of Theatre Directing & Dramaturgy in the College of Arts & Science. Her artistic interests include acting, directing, and devised performance. Her scholarly interests include popular American theatre of the nineteenth century, theories of comedy, and gender performance in theatre and drama.
Be sure to attend the Eco-Grief Plays when they are performed September 26-29 and October 15-17. You can also engage with the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative by visiting the exhibition Extraction/Interaction at the Curb Center and attending Q&A sessions with the visiting playwrights on September 26 and October 17. For more information on the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative and its fall programming check out the Curb Center's Website.