From the dramaturg, Jaron Vesely

Four hundred million years. That's how long trees have been shaping this planet. Humanity has only graced the stage for the last 160,000 of those years. Trees have nurtured our planet for 2500x longer than humanity has even existed.  If the entire 400 million year history of trees were just one day, we wouldn't show up until 11:59:26 PM - 34 seconds before the present moment. Take a minute and breathe in the breadth of that timescale. 

Given our relative infancy, one might imagine that our species would be more deferential to Mother Nature. And for many thousands of years, we were. We were deeply connected to the land, our lives intertwined with its rhythms. But then something just broke. 

In 1800 in the United States, 90% of the population farmed or worked the land. By 1903 - the year this play is set - that number had plummeted to 40%. The Industrial Revolution arrived with bang and summarily decimated the American agrarian way of life. Railroads and technology favored large farms, pushing smaller farmers off their land and into cities where work was more bountiful. Americans who had spent generations working the land were forced to abandon it if they hoped to provide for their families.

And as Americans flocked to the cities, we began to pillage natural resources to support the demands of exponential urban growth. Forests were logged, mountains were mined, and rivers were dammed all to build the boomtowns that the Industrial Revolution required to feed its growth. Nature was no longer a partner, but rather a resource that could be tapped to facilitate American expansion.

This change was more than a shift in geography; it changed the psyche of our culture. We no longer spent our days connected to the sun, the wind, and the rain, but rather toiled away in (often) windowless factories performing repetitive tasks. As rural farmers, we were reliant on the complex interplay of the forces of nature. As urban factory workers, we learned to be reliant on ourselves alone.

This self-reliance became entwined with a new ideal of American masculinity: the "self-made man." Agrarian life was not a bastion of gender equality per say, but working the land on which they lived required both men and women to partake in tasks that brought value to their families and their communities. The Industrial Revolution created a gendered divide, with men as "breadwinners" and women's unpaid domestic labor devalued. The increasing pressure of Industrial Capitalism molded American masculinity to value toughness, endurance, and the ability to withstand harsh conditions. Success of the individual soon eclipsed the success of the whole. This became the American ideal.

John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt were two men caught in the wave of this cultural shift. They shared a dream that this new American ideal could expand beyond urban centers and return to the “untrammeled” American wilderness from whence it came. Their rugged individualism, their toughness, their masculinity became entangled with a desire to name and claim nature as they envisioned it - self-made men molding the world . This play is not a historical account of their meeting or their actions, but it is inspired by their pursuit to reclaim their connection to nature and reconcile the shifting world view of the early 1900s with the needs of this Earth.

And while “The Trees” does unpack the impact of these two men, it also asks us to look beyond their actions. Modern human culture has turned the natural order of things upside down. Community, intimacy, vulnerability, and interconnectedness - once essential to our species survival - have become markers of weakness. They are not welcome in civilized society. They threaten status. They are “other”. They are queer. 

Though this play takes place more than a hundred years ago, I invite you to consider the following: on the grand timescale of our planet, 1903 is not the distant past - it is very much the beginning of an era we still find ourselves living in. What happens to our humanity when our culture denies connection and intimacy? What becomes of a species when the very behaviors that affirm life on this planet are made queer? How can we find our way back to harmony? These are the questions “The Trees” invite us to explore together.