Over this past weekend, I went to a theater production of “Mahinerator” by Jerry Lieblich and performed by Steve Mellor at The Tank. The play being a minimal production was very intimate and used this intemacy to great effect for captivating the attention of its audience. The room for the very intimate production allowed for the lighting to take an even greater hold of the audience as it felt that the people watching the performance didn’t know where their role as the audience began or ended.

We watched Steve Mellor come into the room and sit with a jumpsuit and his water bottle. He begins by setting down his folder of papers, and his script, and adjusting himself in just the right manner. When he begins it catches you by surprise as if we were supposed to stare at each other. The first thing we notice about the production is the unique form of speech in which the author recites his lines. A pseudo dialect that nearly breaks the rules of its speech every other paragraph but gives the story a unique feel. All of the speech from the actor is accompanied by heavy blue and red lights that shine on the actor and drape over the audience. Then nearly always cut by the blinding light of an interrogation room.

While being very hard to discern at times the narrative of the play is of a bureaucrat going over his career in relation to his invention of that of the titular “Mahnierator”. This machine is the only one of its kind to become vitally important to the company that our main character is a part of. The jumpsuit and the fact that our character openly admits at the beginning of the show that he will be recording his form of events in a “time encapsulator”. We can assume that the main character is locked up for what the Mahnierator did or what he did. As the play continues the audience can discern the function of the mahinerator that leads to the ecocide of the world. The audience learns that the main gripe that the main character has is that the people that he didn’t mame or kill won’t support him. With this, the audience becomes very clear that the main character is possibly insane and that he shouldn’t be trusted. The narrative progressively gets more and more lucid as it goes on to the point that it can not be trusted what is being said.

This play takes a unique approach to describing its narrative that will really captivate any person who enjoys understanding and listening to unique dialects. The story is intriguing with a great premise that gives the audience one of the few possibilities for our future. The director Jerry Lieblich gives the audience much to think about in terms of the fascinating and unique language in the play and the narrative that leaves the audience wanting more.

“Cli-Fi” Convergence

Octavia Butler places the reader into a dystopian world that was caused by economic and environmental crises, unlike our world. Butler builds this world around the reader as a hopeless yet strangely possible future using vivid descriptions of the people and the society that the main character Lauren Olamina inhabits. Lauren in this story experiences the worst parts of society to a much greater extent as her condition of hyperempathy causes her to feel the emotional and physical pain of the people around her. Octavia Butler explores themes of religion through the early chapters of the book Lauren someone experiences all the emotions of the people around her to such an extent that she can not go through a ride to church without feeling a great deal of pain and suffering. Lauren fed up with Christianity decides to forsake her old religion of christianity in favor of her belief system “Earthseed”.

To take a step back from the plot of the novel many of the themes experienced by the reader and the main protagonist of Lauren are issues that many people today are dealing with and having to manage. The world of Parable of the Sower is mainly about a world that was created by humans to be on its last legs with the main glimmer of hope being the new religion of “Earthseed”. However, the ideas of slow violence presented by Rob Nixion are finally fully realized in this world. The violence of climate change and the economic problems lead to a world of suffering for all that inhabit it. This can be seen through when our main character Lauren states “A lot of the houses were trashed-burned, vandalized, infested with drunks or druggies or squatted in by homeless families with their filthy, gaunt, half-naked children.” With the world that the people in this world once knew completely devoured by the earth itself, people are left with no other option but to succumb to their circumstances. The inhabitants of this planet no longer have the will or the means to fight for their existence in the world in which they live. Another point that affects readers is the period that the story takes place, between 2024-2025. While this book was written during the 1990s readers today are taken back a little but by the period, the world is slowly looking more and more like the one described in the novel. Personally, one line that sticks out to me is seen on page 62 where Lauren states “ignoring fire in the living room because we’re all in the kitchen, and besides, house fires are too scary to talk about” This line people to the current state that the world is in today. Many of the global leaders for years have avoided talking about the effects of climate change and the possibilities for damage to the planet that humans are having. This is because “House fires are too scary to talk about”

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The effect of literature on Climate change
The most potent weapon humans have at our disposal is storytelling. Literature, specifically novels, has been a significant factor in shaping the world as it is the purest form of recorded expression. Authors like Rob Nixon, and Amitav Ghosh have delved into the issues associated with climate change, accentuating the difficulty of making the threat of climate change tangible. It is not an immediate threat but rather a slow but violent one. With these authors being experts in their given field of literature, their use of storytelling through their novels has allowed them to bridge the cultural gap.

The term “Slow Violence” was first coined by Rob Nixon in his 2011 book, which described the slow but persistent damage caused to the environment by climate change over time. This apt term for climate change brings forth to light the potency but often times hard to visualize the threat that climate change poses. Lemenager and Ghosh also touch on the difficulty of visualizing slow violence as our brains normally only perceive threats that are immediate. Storytelling does not necessarily have to be strictly for entertainment Humans for generations have used stories for millenniums to teach lessons to the newer generations. Novels such as ‘The Great Derangement’ by Amitav Ghosh are filled to the brim with different accounts of how climate change has been affecting the world around us for the longest time. Ghosh recounts a time when in New Dehli a  tornado passed over the capital. This experience opened his eyes to the fact that sooner or later the slow but persistent violence of climate change came out of nowhere but did come. He recounts “Something that was not a property of the thing itself but of the manner in which it had intersected with my life.” (Ghosh, 19). Ghosh emphasizes the fact that the tornado had opened up his eyes to the consequences of what he knows is going on in climate change and that it could affect him in the unlikeliest of times. There is a point to be made that the effects of climate change have already taken effect in the world today. Nixion believes that we are currently at a point in time where we are still not in the post-global warming causes but rather living through it. ” Industrial particulates and effluents live on in the environmental elements we inhabit and in our very bodies, which epidemiologically and eco-logically are never our simple contemporaries” (Nixion, 2361) Nixion uses more logical explanations and anecdotes to explain the effects of climate change while Ghosh uses the storytelling and personal anecdotes to put into perspective the effects of climate change.

Novels and storytelling are powerful tools for humanity to use to their own benefit. Rob Nixion and Amitav Ghosh each masterfully use this medium to push forward their ideologies and their experiences about the ongoing and critical situation of climate change. Climate change is such a difficult issue for many people to get behind greatly benefits from people like these authors and these novels using their experiences and factual evidence to help their readers understand the gravity of the situation we all find ourselves in.