Notes on “The Trees”
An e-conversation between Michael Walkup and Adam Greenfield
Adam Greenfield, Artistic Director at Playwrights Horizons: Hey MW. Wondering if you have any thoughts on an Artistic Director's note about THE TREES? We can draft something together?, or write two shorter individual notes? Or ....? Maybe we can take a holiday photo wearing matching outfits?
Michael Walkup, Artistic Director at Page 73 Productions: I like the idea of a joint note rather than two separate notes! The story of you commissioning and championing it, me also falling for it and having had supported Agnes before; us successfully partnering on A Strange Loop; realizing a 12-person play would be a great reason to produce together again. Something like that? …That plus the holiday photo shoot.
AG: Agreed, a joint note is way better. Maybe in rhyming couplets?
MW: I wonder if the note can work as dialogue?
AG: Love that. Will put finger to keyboard and see what happens.
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AG: Michael, there's some poetry in the timing of this note, that we're about to start rehearsing our second co-production just as our first is about to end its long journey in New York. I'm feeling deep separation anxiety about A Strange Loop closing; I imagine you are, too?
MW: You and I both saw a workshop of A Strange Loop in November of 2016 that hooked us in, and having that show be a part of our theaters' lives in one way or another for over six years has been an incredible blessing. What a perfect moment to get back in a rehearsal room together!
AG: J’agree. It feels like both the end of an era – one of deep transition, reflection, turbulence and change – and the beginning of a new era of…???? I'm not sure what. But I think that's the question The Trees is here to ask. We’re facing constant unknowns these days. The Trees suggests a new beginning, a new origin story for humanity, with all of the accompanying audacity, speculation, and doubt that goes into creating something new. Which is, I daresay, what our whole world feels like at the moment. But you and I began talking about Agnes’s play so many years ago. Playwrights commissioned the play because I had become a serious Agnes Borinsky fan-girl. I’ll never forget my first encounter with her work, with her play Going Out and Coming Back – an excruciatingly beautiful coming of age story, set at John Philip Sousa-themed summer camp.
MW: Summer camp for female trombonists! You and I have often quoted a monologue from Going Out and Coming Back to each other, that must be the password for entry to the Agnes fan club.
AG: Actually we just re-printed that monologue in our new issue of Almanac, so that more can join our club. Look, here’s the link to the latest issue!
MW: Love it. Years ago I saw a workshop of that play starring none other than Clare Barron. What a remarkable way to be introduced to Agnes’s work. Agnes then joined us for Page 73 writers residencies a few times and I got to know how broad her theatrical interests and ambitions were. When I read The Trees I felt that so many threads that are present in her other work were coming together in one beautiful, large-scale play: the meaning of home, the fellowship of chosen families, the religious and secular rituals we engage in to mark the passage of our lives.
AG: I recall we both read her first draft of this play around the same time, and I remember running into you on Spring Street some morning, where we had a quick, frantic dialogue that went something like, “Have you read it?? Yes. Insane. Right? We HAVE to talk.” And then something came up that got in the way… Oh, right, of course: there was a pandemic. Stupid pandemic. And I was so worried the play would lose its urgency. But now, three years later, after the world ended and then kept ending and now is starting to come back, this feels like precisely the right moment for it.
MW: It so is! When we workshopped The Trees this past fall together it was immediately clear how it resonates in a world changed by COVID, even though nothing significantly shifted in the text. The new beginning her characters strive for to me feels tied to the requirement of staying put – something we all have experienced quite radically now – and tied to developing a hyper-local focus, to enriching your own immediate community. And that comes at the expense of other things – flying to new cities, chasing a wild hair, getting away from someone you’d rather have some distance from. In some ways is the play a counter to globalism, which has been a disaster ecologically for the planet, whatever else it may offer?
AG: That’s definitely offered up in the play, the idea that if we can learn how to stay put, to find stillness in our lives – a distinct commodity in our hyper-connected world – we may find the restart we’re craving. When our protagonists David and Sheila become rooted to the ground, it’s like some force majeure has compelled them to stop and slow down. Like if we pay attention to the land we’re on, live with the earth rather than on the earth, a balance will be restored. It’s hard to feel balanced when the planet’s hissing at us. …But the play’s a parable, and like any great parable, I think, it’s able to hold different readings. Because I also think it’s a play about family, and the birth of a new kind of family.
MW: I love that idea, that many possible readings emerge from such a bold beginning (to quote Agnes’s stage direction: “Their toes root into the ground – break through their shoes and rapidly spread through soil” – and this is not a spoiler, this happens within the first minutes!). Because while it might be odd to suggest that a play with that stage direction is deploying naturalism, as the play unfolds we notice the impact that all these invisible forces have on the trees. Seasons and years pass and we sense the trees shape and get shaped by family ties (biological and chosen), the climate, sex, capitalism, perhaps even the hand of God? This is making me think about Chekhov, who clearly must have been on Agnes’s mind, too, don’t you think?
AG: (It’s, like, literal naturalism!) It is a little hard to avoid thinking about Chekhov when you’re thinking about The Trees. Not just in that Agnes uses a four-act structure, each act denoting a passage of time, and a new season; but in the way characters move through the story, and drift through the physical space, in equal parts love and despair. In the way that both nothing and everything seems to be happening at the same time. And, I think, to my point about family, in the way that the ensembles in these plays make up a family that’s defined not only by DNA but by location. In the modern era, we scatter and roam, and we leave home. A sense of family is elusive. The Trees, in its appeal to find yourself where you are, is a kind of antidote. …The thing I find hardest to articulate is that, for all of the utopic harmony we’re describing, there’s always a wolf at the door.
MW: Right, an interesting metaphor because it supposes we’re safe inside and the wolf is waiting outside the door, but Agnes goes and sets her play outdoors in a park — so there’s not even a door, just the fear of the wolf! They attempt to find a sustainable solution to that insecurity and it drives so much of the play’s action. They need extension cords and hoses, they need chairs for their friends and entertainment to pass the time, but they also need to keep the wolves at bay and find a lasting solution to their care. A complicated relationship develops with a local entrepreneur who sees the opportunity to offer stability by capitalizing on the draw of the trees’ peculiarity. That ultimately sets up conflict amongst the community about what’s the best way to sustain themselves.
AG: Which, yes!, circles back to Chekhov, and specifically The Cherry Orchard. I mean, both stories center on the possible sale of a piece of land, a sale which could protect the family financially but which also threatens an entire way of life. In Cherry Orchard, Lopakhin (a former peasant, now a budding capitalist) pitches a real estate venture that would cut down the cherry trees to develop that land for commerce. The same dynamic looms over Agnes’s play. In both cases, it’s a clash between two opposed economic value systems. The cherry orchard (while far from a utopia) symbolizes a value system not based on profit-seeking, bottom-line economies. So does this municipal park in The Trees, as Agnes has imagined it. Both exist only with great fragility. …And I daresay, fragility is the law of the land right now.
MW: I’m taking fragility two ways when you say that: we are holding together our homes, our communities, our entire democracy, by the skin of our teeth; but also, we’ve all taken a hit during these unprecedented times (to use the overused phrase) and are feeling pretty sensitive.
AG: How often, in these last few years, have we heard another phrase, “this cultural moment?” “In this cultural moment…” “Responding to the cultural moment.” What do we even mean by that? What is the moment? I don’t think anyone knows. It’s an enormous question, and that’s a vulnerable place to be. …
MW: One way I interpret that within our field is that there’s a carefulness that’s being asked for as we go about making our art, and hopefully we all are offering that more now than in the past. Agnes definitely gets my vote for playwright who will both rivet you with story and spectacle and emotion while being careful, too. I mean that in the sense that her plays are filled with care, not that they’re delicate.
AG: And/But also, there’s so much strength and hope in fragility. Or at least, that’s what the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb argued in his book Antifragile (which, personally, helped me a lot in the darkness of the pandemic). He writes that systems thrive when uncertainty and vulnerability are embraced, rather than feared and avoided; that the struggle to build resilience against shock and disorder is to go against our world’s natural patterns; that to thrive means to adapt. I think, going back to where we started, that’s what the parable of The Trees is ultimately offering: a readiness to face the future, whatever that might mean.
MW: Adaptation is strength – that’s bringing to mind Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction and adrienne maree brown’s reading of it in Emergent Strategy, which was a similarly important pandemic read for me. Our institutions have certainly had to adapt over the past few years, our artists and our audiences have as well. A parable about building community and seeking sustainability through adaptation? “In this cultural moment,” that’s a play I’m ready to share with our audiences.
AG: It’s a play unlike any other I know. And Agnes pulls it off with characteristic grace and charm – and humor! She manages, as usual, to pierce the soul so sweetly, and with hard-earned joy. The Trees is a salve for our weary souls, I think. I feel lucky to (at long last) bring it to the stage, “in these unprecedented times,” and in such great company.
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AG: I think that works, yeah? And we got everything in – except for the rhyming couplets. Shall we close out with one now, just to know we can? I’ll go classic iambic pentameter…
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