Miranda Rose Hall’s dramatic monologue A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction exemplifies the tragedy of extinction. This emergent theatrical genre responds to the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction in Earth’s geological history, the latest global scale event of biodiversity collapse triggered by human societies’ dependence on fossil fuels. Hall’s play and its staging – directed by Katie Mitchell in 2021 as part of the STAGES experiment on low-impact touring and off-grid performances – think through how to represent mass death and how to stage the tragedy of a climate catastrophe. Harking back to a pre-Aristotelian dramaturgy and a practice of tragedy centered on collective mourning, A Play for the Living addresses the uncontainable reality of global warming. Both the text of the play and its staging navigate the territories between economic austerity and theatrical abundance, individual and collective living and dying, and the horrors and joys of interdependencies. The tragedy of extinction, a genre I argue Hall’s play establishes and represents, acts out a radical politics in which collective acts of mourning conjoin to the cathartic moment of rehearsing shared pleasure.
Ilinca Todorut (Sun,) studied this question.