THE EDGE OF NATURE
“I guess you could call that instinct – or insanity,” states the director-writer-environmental activist Josh Fox about his compulsion to build a high platform in the middle of the Pennsylvania forest where he’d gone to convalesce from long Covid. Later, after a monologue about deer trails being the precursor to roads, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker (for 2010’s Gasland) likewise notes that “Nature is an X-ray – upon which our entire system is a hologram.” Equal parts self-deprecating and painfully earnest, Fox serves as our passionate guide in The Edge of Nature, a documentary theater piece that recently premiered at NYC’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club to rave reviews (including from none other than Bernie Sanders, who’s long supported Fox through The Sanders Institute. Fox also wrote parts of the Democratic platform on energy and environment in 2016).
In a nearly description-defying work that unspools with knowledge seemingly gained from a fever dream, Fox and the members of his International WOW Company, which he founded three decades ago, sing and perform along to the film version of The Edge of Nature, which plays on a giant screen onstage behind the ensemble; while the project itself is the banjo-strumming, multimedia artist’s attempt to weave together a wide range of existential subjects: illness, genocide (both Native American and the Holocaust) and environmental destruction. All set to a rousing Pete Seeger (and Seeger-influenced) score.
With some topical flourishes. “Now my curiosity was piqued. I did wonder why these people were living in the woods if they were afraid of everything,” Fox wonders aloud after some Trump-supporting neighbors offer to “take care of” any wildlife that might menace him during his outdoor retreat on his family’s property. Looking up the definition of nature he has a eureka moment. According to English-language dictionaries it is “opposed to humans.” Indeed, the colonizers considered Native Americans animals – part of nature – and thus separate. Which means that “Genocide, racism and the destruction of nature are connected…Climate change could be the greatest genocide yet to come.”
And while revelations of this magnitude might lead some to despair, Fox, like his guiding light Seeger (who once said, “Participation – that’s what’s gonna save the human race”) is ultimately an uplifter not a divider. “We cannot heal ourselves without healing the planet. We cannot heal the planet without healing ourselves,” he realizes. “I will be earth for a lot longer than I will be human.” Back to nature in the most profound sense.
– Lauren Wissot
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