Page 124 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

Extreme Whether (2014) is largely an agon, or verbal contest, between two

climate scientists and two representatives of the fossil fuel industry. Theirs is a

battle between the accretion of terrifying knowledge, as the scientists measure

the extent of the quickly melting polar ice and try to predict the climate system’s

tipping points, and the extractive representatives’ accretion of ever more money

and power. As is usual in drama, the antagonists are related. Jeanne, a publicist

for the fossil fuel industry, and creator of the now ubiquitous “I’m an energy voter”

advertising campaign, is the twin sister of John, preeminent climate scientist

whose story of struggle is inspired by Dr. James Hansen, who announced to

Congress in 1988 that global warming had begun and was subsequently

censored by the U.S. government for which he worked. Rebecca, an ice scientist,

is John’s lover; Frank, a fossil fuel lobbyist and unscrupulous self-made man, is

married to Jeanne.

Their verbal dueling is periodically interrupted and counterbalanced in ritual

ways—just as the agon sections in a Greek tragedy periodically give way to

contemplative choral odes or charged speeches of the messengers or prophets.

The aged steward of the inherited estate whom everyone calls Uncle and the

young self-defined intersex Annie serve as oracular voices in the drama. Both

give speeches in which they set forward earth-centered ways of being. “We

sensed our place in the grand design, to marvel at the large and small, to tread

lightly not to leave a mark, the grasses would rebound, we would exit as we’d

come, gently, unremarked upon,” Uncle remembers. To which Annie responds:

“Don’t cry Uncle. I am not numb. I can feel the vanishing of things. What else can

we do but work to save what is.” The two are digging a frog pond in which

Sniffley, Annie’s beloved frog deformed by the pesticide atrazine, can find safe

haven.

The forward movement of the play, its bitter conflict of truth versus profit, halts

periodically for collective moments of biophilia, when love of nature asserts itself

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