Ecologies of Theater

"I have always wondered what Gertrude Stein meant when she called a play a landscape. The marvel of her image revealed itself decade by decade as I discovered how essential landscape, field, and geography are in the conceptual vocabulary of American performance, and the extent to which the idea of nature (or the real) was transposed into a description of performance space by avant-garde artists. That this space would also be a spiritual space accounts for the emphasis on mind and perception in American performance whose subject has always been vision, or revelation."--from the IntroductionHow do geography and climate influence a work? How is narrative embedded in landscape? What is the ecology of an image? In Ecologies of Theater, Bonnie Marranca elaborates a new perspective on performance that links ecology and aesthetics. She writes of dramaturgy as an ecology in the work of Robert Wilson, and the mus/ecology of John Cage; the autobiology of Rachel Rosenthal and spiritual style of Maria Irene Fornes and Meredith Monk; and the landscape histories of Heiner Müller and Isak Dinesen. In more than two dozen essays, Marranca considers theater history and the modernist heritage in the context of landscape, culture, and art.