They Paved Paradise

In 1975, I was working at Circle Repertory Company on Sheridan Square running the pre-computerization light board: a huge metal contraption of levers requiring all four limbs and a broomstick to crossfade and then dim to black. The first play of the season was Harry Outside by Corrinne Jacker, directed by Marshall Mason with Keven McCarthy, Lois Smith, and Jonathan Hadary. It was the story of a wealthy architect who could no longer tolerate the confines of a house, and in his search for personal freedom, started living in his garden. Soon, everyone who hated him and loved him had to come Outside, where their conflicts and passions intensified around vodka lemonades.

From Thoreau and Emerson onward, Americans have grappled with the lure of “Outside” as a place of purity, escape and rejuvenation. These were American expansionist ideas about primitivity and innocence as simultaneous justifications for leisure and land seizure. Here in New York City we have long histories of battles over the meaning and ownership of Outside. Adam Purple, an urban rebel, collected dung from carriage horses to cultivate a complex, gorgeous, free and public circular Garden of Eden on Forsythe Street that served the people of the city from 1975-1986. It was 15,000 square feet and produced corn, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, asparagus, black raspberries, strawberries, and 45 trees including eight black walnuts. When the city announced plans to build low-income housing on that site, The Storefront for Art and Architecture devised an alternative by which the housing could be situated within and around the garden, preserving its treasures for the new residents. Instead the city demolished the garden in 75 minutes. 

In Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees, the return to the source is not voluntary. Siblings David and Sheila come home drunk one night and discover that rather than make an enlightened decision to leave man-made structures for nature, the earth itself has reached out to secure their toes and entice these two humans to literally grow roots. David’s ex-lover Jared departs their relationship to work for the Parks Department, and comes up with the idea that these two should be declared to be actual trees to avoid being fined day and night for overstaying in public space. But they soon discover that being Trees doesn’t protect anyone. Just recently the poet Eileen Myles cohered a movement of Lower Eastside and East Village residents to oppose the New York Department of Design Construction’s post-Hurricane Sandy plan to create new flood controls at the edge of East River Park by demolishing 991 trees, some 80 years old. Only one lone state assembly member, Yuh-line Niou, stood in objection to the mowing down of a free neighborhood park. Residents fought in the press and on the land, but without any real support from the people who run things around here, the City triumphed and the trees have been destroyed. 

In her 1970 song “Big Yellow Taxi,” Joni Mitchell lamented, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” but “paradise” has changed quite a bit since then. David and Sheila find their new external imprisonment to be... well, pastoral. What saves our heroes from the fate faced by so many people and trees is that their story takes place in a park in a mythical land called Connecticut. This is a territory that is unknown to most of the world, but New Yorkers think of as wealthy. David and Sheila grow their branches somewhere near Milford, and go through lonely periods, but their condition brings friends, lovers, even childbirth. With money they inherit from Dad, they can have food, cool clothes and even a film projector to fill their evenings. Today, in 2023, we live in a time when there are more refugees in the world than there have ever been. The official count is that 47,000 asylum seekers came to our city last year. Here in New York, we have unprecedented amounts of empty apartments, hotel rooms and office space, but in 2022 officials counted 68,884 homeless New Yorkers, including 21,805 homeless children, sleeping each night in New York City's main municipal shelter system. A near-record 22,720 single adults slept in shelters each night in December 2022. So “Outside” is not only a personal transformation destination for people who have an inside option, nor a metaphoric entrapment like Dorothy and the grasping branches of monster trees with faces on the path to Oz. In the brutal period in which we live, more people than ever are denied access to any private space, and so are forced to live in public space. Our mayor, Eric Adams, has made it a priority and obsession to ensure that homeless people do not sleep on subways or in parks. “Outside” is a battleground for survival between devastated abandoned humans, the endless rats, the brutal and clueless police, and the housed-employed going to work, restaurants, events, for exercise, and even – on occasion – to the theater. At the same time, Covid’s medical and social catastrophes revealed how many influential New Yorkers have second homes to retreat to.

This profound material and perceptual inequality and its meaning for organized society loom in the subtext of Agnes Borinsky’s play, addressing head-on the aimless leisure class’s continued preoccupation with its own access and myopia. And many other questions of our time are approached in The Trees almost casually with an engaging charm and a lack of subjectivity, as if the characters don’t know that they are in the world. There is no world. There is only them. They don’t know that they are rich, they don’t know that they are not resisting their entrapment by the earth, nor that they have never considered trying to escape, and none of their friends do either. In a way, these are the new Chekovian bourgeoisie pushed to our most brutal and accurate contemporary representation. They are the end of the empire. Borinsky has given us Adam Purple’s Garden of Eden as the last beautiful and charming circle of hell.

One of the problems with theater criticism is that it rarely addresses the meaning of the work. What a play is saying, what values it upholds or reveals are rarely included in its evaluation. The content of what the playwright is actually claiming is often not engaged. There is a fashion in terrible times for being elusive, and that can be exciting and revelatory and also engagingly deceptive. Plays may not clarify meaning, but they can make us grapple with their lack of it, and thereby produce our own new knowledge, which we can discuss in our private spaces, since most theater-goers have them. And The Trees addresses the relational as well as the social. Seven years pass in The Trees and people’s circumstances change. Sheila finds love and David understands that he won’t. But that is not a lot of change for people forced to stand erect outside with their feet in the ground for the rest of their lives. It is this normal unexceptional subject in extraordinary circumstances that helps us identify with these helpless sprouting trunks.

One more of the many themes and tropes in The Trees worthy of engagement is the question of the Jews, which is always somehow hovering even when it’s not there, but here it is. What I LOVE about Borinsky’s character of the Jewish grandmother here is that she goes against everything that we are seeing in contemporary Jewish representation. She is not a Fabelman or a Fleishman, she is not a character at the service of nostalgia for Jewish innocence, nor a Woody Allen derivative. “Baba”, the Polish, yet Yiddish speaking Jewish grandmother of The Trees is wonderfully too old for her story to actually exist. She is a fabricated fantasy of the past! I am old enough to be Agnes Borinsky’s grandmother, and it was my grandmother who lived through pogroms. These characters are too young to have a grandmother who lived through pogroms, their grandmother probably lived through the suburbs, Hebrew school and upward mobility, or urban atheism and radical disappointment. Agnes has created a Jewish grandmother who has died sixteen times and was once a bird, and in that way, Jewish innocence is also a fabrication in a play that exposes false innocence over and over again while defying realism until it unveils it.

The Trees takes all the tropes of our utopian legacies and pulls out the mythologies to reveal the predatory nature of the capitulation, the retention of bourgeois wishes and passivity despite the actual state of life and the world. While we are going to The Hudson Valley, or Equinox, or the park in Connecticut, we are stepping over the living and dying corpses of our collapsing society, and while we traffic in mythologies of innocent pasts, we abdicate responsibility to the shrinking future. The real park is filled with homeless people and rats, so maybe better to invite them inside the next time we get trapped by the earth rather than try to pitch a tent and fear spiders, as everything becomes a shopping mall, but as David assures us, a nice one, with a Nordstrom.

Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright and AIDS historian and is the author of the plays Carson McCullers (dir Marion McClinton, Playwrights Horizons/The Women’s Project), Manic Flight Reaction (w/ Deirdre O’Connell, dir Trip Cullman, Playwrights Horizons), Enemies, A Love Story (adapted from IB Singer, w/ Morgan Spector, The Wilma Theater), The Burning Deck (w/ Diane Venora, La Jolla Playhouse) and The Lady Hamlet (w/ Jennifer Van Dyck, dir David Drake, Provincetown Theater- winner Broadway World, Boston Best New Play.) She is a Guggenheim fellow in Playwrighting. Her musical SHIMMER, with composer Anthony Davis and lyricist Michael Korie, will be presented at Yale University’s Innovation Summit on June 1.