Hope at the edge of the world

By LIAM MAYO
Posted 8/15/22

The year? 2062. The place? A tavern in Northeastern Pennsylvania, on a farm struggling to survive in a grim post-apocalypse.

That was the setting of “Tavern at the Edge of the World,” …

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Hope at the edge of the world

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The year? 2062. The place? A tavern in Northeastern Pennsylvania, on a farm struggling to survive in a grim post-apocalypse.

That was the setting of “Tavern at the Edge of the World,” the latest in a ten-play series of climate change plays to be produced between 2020 and 2030 by the Farm Arts Collective.

“Tavern” found resounding success (in this reporter’s opinion) navigating the past, present and future of a civilization at the edge of collapse.

The play portrayed its post-apocalyptic future well, introducing a rich world filled with descriptive detail and brought to life by a cast of compelling characters. Of particular note: the conflict between ‘Jo’, played by Jess Beveridge, and ‘Mac,’ played by Eric Wunsch, over who would control the tavern. Beveridge brought an intense gravity to Jo’s position as the tavern’s leader, while Wunsch’s energy and whole-hearted physicality brought momentum to every scene he was in.

The staging of the play brought its audience forward in time into the tavern of 2062. The audience entered through the tavern’s ‘security system’ (a network of lights and cameras that added tension to the play’s climax); actors served beer and cabbage salad to the characters and the audience alike. The setting, a greenhouse in the middle of Farm Arts Collective’s working far, placed the audience right where the tavern would be in 2062. The effect made it easy to forget the present in favor of the apocalypse.

References in the play to present and near-future events—the climate crisis of the 2020s, armed militia groups, Elon Musk as America’s first cyborg president—felt uncomfortably real. At times, the play’s presentation of apocalypse felt less like a hypothetical situation and more like a prophecy.

“Tavern” reached back into the past, too, locating the origins of the climate crisis in the genocide of the Native American people and the conquest of the Wild West. Bobby Skotch as “Gif” carried the past and the future both, portraying a soldier in the old West and a militia-man in the post-apocalypse with nuanced horror and humanity. So too did an excellent—and trippy—sequence of visuals that saw cowboys beset by pterodactyls around a time vortex, and gave the conquerers of the West the power to see what their work had wrought.

The play had a message of hope to accompany the grimness of a world in collapse, hope invested in “the spider sisters of Arachne,” a web of women keeping the tools and the practices of civilization alive. It’s a hope that gets threatened by aggression, most of it male, from the militia, from within the tavern and from the past, but it’s a hope that ultimately prevails, with the planting of new seeds and the survival of civilization amidst apocalypse.

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