End/Ending/Ended: Staging Ecocritical Inversions of Place and Time

This thesis addresses two plays and their entanglement with ecological crises in the United States and abroad, specifically Mexico and Canada: Chantal Bilodeau’s Sila and Victor Cazares’ Ramses Contra Los Monstruos: Salmas para el fin del Mundo (Ramses Against the Monsters: Psalms for the end of the World). Because each play under analysis does not directly deal with environmental degradation and responsibility for a specific ecology, they may not appear to fit the scholarly requirements for “ecology plays.” I argue that each play instead performs an intervention into current, static modes of thinking in terms of space and time that hinder more encompassing ecological thought focused specifically on the human. The age of the Anthropocene, the era in which human influence is seen and felt in every aspect of the Earth, produces a crisis of space, where the human can no longer be thought of as hierarchically separate from its environment, occupying a social geography that is separate from nature in any meaningful way. The dawn of the Anthropocene also produces a crisis of time, in that timescales based in linear human progression and progress writ broad must be placed into context with timescales of forces both under effect of human intervention and out of human control: i.e. climate change. This thesis attempts to place the aforementioned plays in these crises of space and time. By experimenting with and presenting multiple, alternative notions of space and time in performance, this thesis attempts to frame these plays as interventions into the continued propagation of the nature/culture binary, a ubiquitous separation of the human and the nonhuman, which keeps the human separate from considerations of nature and hinders more inclusive ecological thought and considerations of the environment. Specifically, it interrogates how Chantal Bilodeau’s Sila problematizes the separation of nature and culture by remapping the human and the animal onto a shared ontological geography, then moves on to investigate how Cazares’ Ramses Contra Los Monstruos: Salmas Para El Fin del Mundo presents multiple alternate, contrasting, queer temporalities, of which heteronormative time is simply one among many. Grounded in close reading, this thesis will address dramaturgical and aesthetic strategies used in each play, and make the case that these strategies propose new ways of conceptualizing the human as a species among species sharing space and futurity with the planet. These two plays represent limited case studies in an expansive body of work addressing climate change, the human place in the environment, and the foundations of ecology in performance. It is my hope that through this investigation, I can begin to open up new, experimental possibilities in how we as a human species can situate ourselves among the nonhuman in our shared environment.

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