About the Book
This book is a brief history of the end of the world as seen through the eyes of theatre. Since its inception, theatre has staged the fall of empires, floods, doomsdays, shipwrecks, earthquakes, plagues, environmental degradations, warfare, nuclear annihilation, and the catastrophic effects of climate change. Using a wide range of plays alongside contemporary thinkers, this study helps guide and galvanize the reader in grappling with the climate crisis.
Kulick divides this litany of theatrical cataclysms into four distinct historical phases: the Ancients, including Euripides and Bhasa, the legendary Sanskrit dramatist; the Age of Belief, with the anonymous authors of the medieval mystery cycles, Shakespeare, and Pushkin; the Moderns, with Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, and Bond; and, finally, the way the world might end now, encompassing Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, and Anne Washburn. In tandem with the insights gleaned from these playwrights, the book draws upon the work of contemporary scientists, ecologists, and ethicists to further tease out the philosophical implications of such plays and their relevance to our own troubled times. In the end, Kulick shows how each of these ages and their respective authors have something essential to say, not only about humanity's potential end, but, more importantly, about the possibility for our collective continuance.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction: On Transforming Our Social Imaginary
PART ONE: THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS IN ANCIENT TIMES
1. Lessons Amongst the Ruins; Or, What Survives and Why: How the Cultural Detritus of the Ancients Can Become a Kind of First Philosophy
2. Slouching Toward Kurukshetra: A Brief Look at the Mahabharatas of Bhasa, Bharati, and Brook
3. Diasporas Old and New: What Euripides' Children of Herakles Can Tell Us About the Coming Climate Wars and Resulting Refugee Crisis
PART TWO: THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS IN THE AGE OF FAITH
4. Noahs, Arks, and Floods: Why Medieval Mystery Plays Still Have Something to Say About Our Modern Day “End of Days”
5. Shipwrecks, Recursion, and the Necessity of Deep Ecology: Surviving Shakespeare's The Tempest and the Breaking of Our Anthropocene Ways
6. On Earthquakes and Metaphors: Bouilly's Disaster of Lisbon and the Fukushima Variation
PART THREE: THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS IN MODERN TIMES
7. Plague's Threat to Our Immune and Belief Systems: A Look at Pushkin's A Feast in the Time of Plague
8. A Canary in the Bourgeois Coal Mine, Part One: Pollution and Direct Critique in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People
9. A Canary in the Bourgeois Coal Mine, Part Two: Denial and Indirect Critique in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard
PART FOUR: THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS NOW
10. Ethics During Dark Times: Brecht's He Who Says Yes and He Who Says No
11. On the Other Side of the Apocalypse: The Broken Worlds of Beckett and Bond
12. Nostalgia for the Future: The Fraught Tomorrows of Rivera, Churchill, Washburn, and Kushner
Coda: And in the End
Notes
Index
About the Author :
Brian Kulick is the Chair of Columbia University's School of the Arts Theatre Program, USA, where he also teaches directing with Anne Bogart. In addition to staging the works of Shakespeare, Brecht, and Tony Kushner, he has been the Artistic Director of Classic Stage Company and an Artistic Associate for The Public Theatre. He is the author of Staging Shakespeare (Methuen Drama, 2021), How Greek Tragedy Works (2020), The Elements of Theatrical Expression (2019) and The Secret Life of Theatre (2019).
Review :
It's odd to call a book about the apocalypse delightful. It's odd to encounter a book about plays, a work of literary and philosophical inquiry, that has the urgency and force of a political tract, that's unashamedly, and persuasively, a call to action. It's almost as odd to encounter a rigorous scholarly work of extraordinary erudition that's also grippingly, compellingly readable. Staging The End Of The World is all these things; I've never read anything like it. Jonathan Schell, Amitav Ghosh, Hannah Arendt, Asja Lacis, Arne Naess, Thich Nhat Hanh, Davids Benatar and Graeber, Kant and Levinas are just a few among the legions assembled by the author to engage with, expand upon and illuminate the works of a host of playwrights, from Aeschylus to Anne Washburn, for a deeply serious exploration of the most serious subject imaginable. These pages are often heartbreaking, frightening, disturbing, and they contain passages of dark despair, but they're suffused with generosity, clarity and a strange, original spirit of grief-stricken determination and joy. Brian Kulick, a great theater artist who's also a glorious thinker and writer, has written a book that's an important contribution to our understanding of how plays work on us and what they can tell us about ourselves and our overwhelming, imperiled world; and more than that, he's offered magnificent proof of the necessity of playfulness, even in the face of the direst circumstances, if we hope to discover paths forward and to create change.
Brian Kulick's latest book is a marvel and a delight. Staging the End of the World uses theatre to examine humanity's most chilling fears and deepest hopes. Kulick's brilliant mind refuses to accept traditional intellectual boundaries. This is a wonderful book about the theatre which is also a mesmerizing philosophical study and an urgent response to climate change. Kulick is the most incisive and widely learned mind in the American theatre, and he has written an indispensable book.
A thought-provoking and timely analysis of theatre's preoccupation with the end of the world and eco-catastrophe from antiquity to the present.
