Theatre continues to interact with evolutionary ideas, and it remains a valuable site in general for artistically and intellectually wrestling with scientific ideas through its intimacy, immediacy, and communality. It can engage the mind and senses in a way that is unique and that is becoming, if anything, more vital in a fragmented digital culture. In fact, recent plays that engage evolution are pretty bleak about where we have arrived as a species and where we are headed. “Why is it that everything that humans touch turns to shit?” asks a character in Richard Bean’s climate-change play The Heretic.1 Plays are collectively asking not whether evolution is valid but what all these eons of struggle have amounted to, certainly not Bernard Shaw’s vision of metaphysical perfection at the end of Back to Methuselah or the sense of communal uplift and striving that triumphs over war-wrought devastation in Thornton Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth. Playwrights are depicting human evolution in varying degrees of crisis, regression, and stasis, with the added element of threat posed by climate change. It makes the earlier plays looked at in this book seem positively cheerful.
But is this really so new? Theatre has always unflinchingly shown the worst sides of humanity as well as the best: from Oedipus Rex through the medieval morality plays, from Jacobean tragedy through nineteenth-century naturalism, from the baby killing of Saved to the baby eating of Blasted. As Michael Billington notes in State of the Nation, theatre bears witness; it also articulates a consciousness. The consciousness theatre is articulating now about evolutionary ideas seems tacitly to be in agreement with the scientists who are proposing a new epoch: the Anthropocene, dating from the onset of the Industrial Revolution and marking a period when humans are having a direct, and largely adverse, impact on the lithosphere and atmosphere of the earth. This helps to explain that nostalgia for nineteenth-century meanings of evolution that I mentioned at the beginning of this book—and a concomitant retro-Victorianism in theatre’s engagement with evolutionary thought.
Retro-Victorianism
An entire subgenre of plays re-creates the Victorian freak show, much as Arthur Wing Pinero did in The Freaks in 1918 (and e. e. cummings in an obscure play Him, 1946).2 But this is no sudden revival of interest. The nineteenth-century fascination with freakery in relation to human evolution found renewed force in the mid-twentieth century, partly through the phenomenon of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! franchise of cartoons, products, and live shows. Robert Ripley trafficked in “staged eccentricity, freak tourism, and eye-popping spectacle” that reached millions in America from 1930 onward. His Odditorium, on Broadway in New York, boasted “currioddities from 200 countries,” such as a man with no stomach, “a man who drove spikes into his head, and a woman who swallowed a neon tube bolted to a rifle, which she then fired.” A master of ceremonies would announce these incredible displays, and young women dressed as nurses (with “Ripley” embroidered onto their hats and jackets) would circulate, helping audience members who fainted.3 Recent plays show a continued need to revisit this troubled legacy of human display and exploitation and its specific links to the stage; among them are Bernard Pomerance’s Elephant Man, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus, Mary Vingoe’s Living Curiosities; or, What You Will, Shaun Prendergast’s True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World, and Robin French’s Gilbert Is Dead. In these new shows (as in Pinero’s play), the freak is the object of empathy, and Otherness provides the moral center. Tony Kushner notes how daring it was for Parks to make the Hottentot Venus the heroine of a serious tragedy:
Venus expresses both a global empathy, a mourning for all of suffering humanity, and at the same time an anger at oppression and oppressors. . . . The play places human paradoxes of love and loathing, attraction and revulsion, pleasure and denial in a historical context of racism, sexism, exploitation, voyeurism and colonialism. By contextualizing these paradoxes the play places the historical in dialogue with the eternal (if anything is eternal) . . . acknowledging the tragic, the immutable, while not extinguishing the possibility of mutation, of change.4
Similarly, Mary Vingoe makes a heroine out of a “freak” when she re-creates Phineas T. Barnum’s American Museum circus performances of 1863 in her play Living Curiosities (2010). Using the device of metatheatre (the “freaks” rehearse a Shakespeare play), Vingoe shows the redemptive power of theatre to bring dignity and hope to society’s castoffs.
The retro-Victorian fascination with the circus and its suggestive stagings of evolutionary themes can also be seen in Cirque du Soleil’s Totem, which toured internationally (2011/2012) and played at huge venues like the Royal Albert Hall. Totem invokes distinctively Victorian associations of the kind I discussed in the first two chapters: a love of spectacle and extravaganza, a seemingly insatiable curiosity about the natural world and displays of animals and nature scenes, an interest in origins and descent, and a preoccupation with the extremes of human capability, especially physical strength, stamina, and precision. Written and directed by Robert Lepage (channeling Barnum), this high-tech modern circus visually celebrates the rich diversity of nature and purports to be about the evolution of human life from the water to the air. Totem boasts a team of distinguished designers and theatre artists—everything except, apparently, a scientific adviser, despite a two-year development period. For a show that stakes so much on a single scientific concept, this is a strange omission, especially at a time when it is standard practice for theatre practitioners to bring scientists into the process not only to ensure accuracy but also to develop ideas.
Given its immense popular success, it is worth analyzing Totem’s use of evolution rather than simply dismissing it as erroneous because of what it reveals about the assumptions that still dominate our understanding of evolution in the modern world—a catastrophic world of global warming, climate change, and accelerated species extinction in which, one might argue, a deep understanding of evolution is essential for Earth’s survival. The program explains that Totem is about “the odyssey of the human species,” tracing “humankind’s incredible journey” from amphibian to bird. It explores “our dreams and infinite potential, and the ties that bind us both to our collective animal origins and to the species that share the planet with us.” But this circus foregrounds exceptional, not “normal,” human beings; the artists we see represent the pinnacle of human achievement in terms of physique, balance, coordination, flexibility, and sheer hard work and endless practice. This is drummed home to the audience with every new feat it witnesses: a team of unicylists juggling golden bowls from their feet to their heads; two sisters whirling pieces of sequined fabric on their feet and hands while balancing precariously on chairs, with heads down and feet up; a roller-skating couple spinning around on an impossibly small, leather-covered, drum-like platform. Most acts revolve around this crucial combination of balance and teamwork. Interdependence, a very Darwinian concept, bumps up against a non-Darwinian reliance on absolute perfection and repetition that does not allow for variation. Each routine must follow the exact choreography laid out for it. The acrobats and other performers start with an already-difficult task and then repeat it with increasingly complicated variations so that by the end of their act the audience is astonished at a display of human ability mastered by only a handful of people on the planet. We see human beings at their most spectacular, performing acts mere mortals can only dream of, and suggesting even greater possibilities for the future (e.g., human flight) if we continue to evolve along these lines. We are right back in Shaw territory, evocative of the final lines of Back to Methuselah. If the performers deviate from the rehearsed choreography, however, with even a slight shift in weight or a missed cue, someone could be killed. If anything, what we take away from this show is humankind at its most robotic; these people resemble machines or cyborgs more than humans.
The show moves quickly and randomly from one act to the next, with no apparent logic regarding their sequence; most of the amazing acts are “complicatedly futile,” and the entire cast is “crazily miscellaneous.”5 But the title of the show points to its hierarchical vision of evolution: life is one long column and we are at the top of it. The production claims to show “scenes from the story of evolution randomly linked together in a chain.” Totem, the program goes on to state, “depicts a world of archetypal characters who, in their own way, witness and act out the perennial, existential questions of life. Alternating between primitive and modern myths, and peppered with aboriginal stories of creation, Totem echoes and explores the evolutionary process of species, our ongoing search for balance, and the curiosity that propels us ever further, faster, and higher.” This implies agency and will in the process of evolution, as if we can direct its course, despite the assertion that the “story” of evolution is shown here “randomly.”
The program notes situate the show “somewhere between science and legend.” Much like its Victorian predecessors, this circus invokes the concept of evolution without showing any awareness of its scientific basis and implications, its historical context, or its complexity; over a century’s worth of further knowledge about evolutionary mechanisms seems erased. The show simply tacks a vague idea of “evolution” onto its series of amazing acrobatic acts to provide a unifying theme and coherence. It purports to show how far we have come since we came out of the primordial slime: we now “break free from gravity.” Intellectually, the entire thing is shaky and confused.
Why should this matter? Why should this show be chastised for its distortion of evolution when so many others in this book have not, even though they likewise confuse issues, are too reductive, or are misleading? The answer is that we have moved on so far, and have so much more understanding of how evolution works, that it is strange to (inadvertently) reflect such dated ideas and package them as new. In addition, given the rise of creationism and intelligent design over the past century, Totem is a missed opportunity to face down some of the ignorance about evolution. As Michael Billington points out in his review, the concept “that we are watching the evolution of species . . . doesn’t make much sense. . . . The evolutionary theme is largely window dressing. . . . It is visually impressive without making logical sense.”6 Lyn Gardner simply dismisses it as a “mind-bogglingly daft show on the theme of evolution.”7
Although Charles Darwin makes an appearance—an amiable white-bearded man shuffling around the stage performing experiments and occasionally walking hand in hand with his chimpanzee assistants—the real, yet unacknowledged, stars of evolution here are Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Ernst Haeckel. The inheritance of acquired characters, the role of the will, progressivism, and recapitulation theory are emphasized not only visually but also in Lepage’s program notes:
The different stages in the development of a human being in many ways encapsulate the evolution of species. As fetuses, we float weightless like fish. As infants, our first attempts at self-propelled motion resemble an amphibian creeping along the ground. As we grow, we crawl like four-legged mammals, then climb like monkeys and finally walk assuredly on two feet in preparation to join the adult world.
Haeckel’s biogenetic law was already questioned in the Victorian period, but it makes a handy visual metaphor for a theatrical entrepreneur needing a shorthand and instantaneous way of signifying the whole of evolution in a single moment or gesture.
The radical changes in the biological sciences wrought by modern genetics and molecular biochemistry and the rapid advances in the technological capabilities of science have, if anything, sharpened the epistemological nostalgia for such nineteenth-century meanings of “evolution.” This is partly shown by the rising interest in the scientists who shaped it, a strong biographical inclination in large part generated by the steadily growing interest in Darwin from the mid-twentieth century onward, culminating in the Darwin celebrations of 2009. A growing number of plays depicting Darwin includes Trumpery (Peter Parnell), Re: Design (Craig Baxter), Darwin in Malibu (Crispin Whittell), Darwin’s Flood (Snoo Wilson), and After Darwin (Timberlake Wertenbaker). But, for all this interest in Darwin, the most compelling contemporary theatrical engagements with evolutionary theory move away from biography and instead probe the tensions inherent in the evolutionary worldview that have never been resolved. Catherine Trieschmann’s How the World Began shows the painful consequences of the ongoing clash between pro- and antievolutionists in America. Caryl Churchill (A Number) and Bryony Lavery (Origin of the Species) continue the exploration of gender questions by challenging the concepts that seemed central to evolution yet at the same time most problematic for women, such as maternal instinct, nurture, and biological determinism.
Genetics and Epigenetics
A key development is the interest in questions raised by genetics. Churchill probes the nature-versus-nurture debate in A Number, coming down firmly in the nurture camp, while An Experiment with an Air-Pump by Shelagh Stephenson dramatizes the ethical problems posed by genetic manipulation. More recently, Ex Vivo/In Vitro by Jean-François Peyret and Alain Prochiantz, the director–scientist team behind many other devised works relating to scientific ideas, shows how increasingly knotty the kinds of reproductive issues discussed previously in this book have become in light of reproductive technology. This piece also brings epigenetics explicitly into the theatre, another link with the Victorian scientific past as it gives renewed interest and credibility to Lamarckism.
August Weismann had rendered the inheritance of acquired characters untenable: as Francis Galton put it,
As a general rule, with scarcely any exception that cannot be ascribed to other influences, such as bad nutrition or transmitted microbes, the injuries or habits of the parents are found to have no effect on the natural form or faculties of the child. Whether very small hereditary influences of the supposed kind, accumulating in the same direction for many generations, may not ultimately affect the qualities of the species, seems to be the only point now seriously in question.8
These words were prescient, as the field of epigenetics is suggesting that this is indeed highly likely to occur. Epigenetics suggests that it is not only through DNA that characteristics are transmitted, but also that genetic makeup can be affected by external factors. A well-known example is the finding about pregnant Dutch women during the famine winter late in World War II, which showed that those who were undernourished only in the first trimester went on to have infants who were normal in weight, whereas those women who were undernourished only in the last trimester had small babies.9 There is ongoing debate about the significance of such findings. “Epigenetically acquired characteristics generally do not get inherited, and therefore do not have much significance for evolution,” writes Jonathan Hodgkin, although there are occasional, striking exceptions. In fact, “much of epigenetics is standard fare in molecular biology, and scarcely revolutionary.”10 What does seem certain is that the inheritance of acquired characters can be seen as complementary to natural selection and it is enjoying renewed interest.11 But why would epigenetics hold particular appeal for theatre makers? One of the vectors in theatre’s engagement with evolution that is explicitly linked to the act of performance is the need to render observable what is either microscopic or too gradual to be seen. Perhaps epigenetics has caught the fancy of dramatists as well as audiences not because we are all closet Lamarckians but because it is so well suited to the power of theatre to render the microscopic and the gradual.
Relating modern advances in treatment by in vitro fertilization (IVF) to fundamental questions about identity, Ex Vivo/In Vitro updates the nature-versus-nurture debate (as we have seen, a theatrical mainstay ever since naturalism) and, without lecturing the audience, discusses pluripotent and totipotent stem cells and powerfully evokes Conrad H. Waddington’s epigenetic landscape in references to “redescending new valleys” and “epigenetic reprogramming” (figure 6).12 It also puts a modern twist on the theme of maternal instinct by musing on the relationship between carrier mother and the baby she is carrying that is not her own but that she is still biologically tied to in subtle ways.
The piece muses on what a person really is if he or she is conceived artificially; indeed, it goes to the crux of what conception really is if not done naturally. Ex Vivo/In Vitro explores the paradox that the most personal of all experiences, conceiving a child, can be so public. The opening line of the play asks: Is in vitro fertilization the triumph of biology over love as well as dissociating sex from procreation? This was, as we have seen, positively portrayed in Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (women no longer have babies; instead, children hatch full grown from giant eggs), negatively in Neave’s dystopian Woman and Superwoman. Maybe Shaw was not so far-fetched after all. Nor was Apollinaire: cloning is very much present in the intellectual terrain of Ex Vivo/In Vitro, and there are moments that strongly recall Les Mamelles de Tireseas, a male character, for example, talking about having dozens, indeed millions and millions, of babies. This is not just textual but visual. Ex Vivo/In Vitro uses over a thousand “cordes de chanvre” (thick hemp ropes) hanging from the ceiling like a forest of umbilical cords through which the actors walk and intertwine themselves. These ropes also signify the increasingly complex “filiations” among us, our tangled bank of relationships never imagined possible before intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) and not yet fully understood.
Figure 6 Conrad H. Waddington’s epigenetic landscape, visualizing the totipotent stem cell’s journey toward specialization and differentiation as it matures. (From Conrad H. Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes: A Discussion of Some Aspects of Theoretical Biology [London: Allen & Unwin, 1957])
Ex Vivo/In Vitro is only the latest of several theatrical engagements with artificial fertilization, following on from Carl Djerassi’s Immaculate Misconception and Anna Furse’s Yerma’s Eggs (2001–2003), works representing vastly divergent approaches and conclusions. One of Ex Vivo/In Vitro’s questions is whether reproductive technology affects the human species collectively. ICSI is held up as a triumph over natural selection because it involves “a SINGLE spermatozoa instead of the usual 150 million! Technology takes the place of nature, of natural selection. Can you hear me Darwin? We did it!”13 Eugenics, though not named as such, has renewed relevance now in terms of genetic counseling and medical genetics. It is not so much a question of individual identity (who are you?) as of the group (what are you?). Alarmist concerns over the results of artificial reproduction are bringing us full circle back to the days of the freak show and the “missing link.” Philip Ball, in his book Unnatural, explores this subject and exposes the damage done by the tabloid media in misrepresenting scientific advances in reproductive technology as leading to horrific human anomalies, or “Frankensteins.”14 This is still an endlessly riveting subject for theatre, and it also relates to a concomitant fascination with uselessness. In Origin, Darwin defines a monstrosity as “some considerable deviation in structure, generally injurious, or not useful to the species.” Many recent theatrical encounters with evolution seem to reject the valorization of or bias toward all things “useful to the species”—the implicit, unspoken pressure put on all of us to live well, multiply, prosper, and be useful not only to society but also to our species. They seem to sense the irony that, far from sweeping away religion with its moral teachings, the biological sciences through the rise of evolution were simply replacing them with equally stern commandments about how to live.
Zooësis, Mimicry, and Interspecies Performance
It is therefore no surprise to see an avid theatrical interest in animality, the nonhuman, and interspecies performance.15 The frontier between human and nonhuman has always held a deep appeal to playwrights, and this is only increasing, even as ethology and sociobiology, among many other fields, are constantly enhancing our knowledge of animal life. What is new is the seeming desire to stage the becoming of the animal Other, giving renewed meaning to the concept of mimicry in nature. In Totem, several acts simulate animal behavior while maintaining a human guise, invoking courtship rituals in birds and primates through astonishing acrobatic feats. A male–female trapeze duo rehearses a mating ritual that strongly evokes bird behavior and departs from the stereotypical coy female/aggressive male dichotomy that often prevails in representations of animal courtship. As the couple hangs in midair, they use the only props they have at their disposal—the trapeze bar and the ropes that hold it—as well as their own bodies in extraordinarily complex and inventive ways. The key thing about the scene is that it is not clear who is leading and who is following; gender roles are challenged, and the markers of gender are physical, not behavioral. There are some really surprising, almost disturbing gestures, as the male and female shift seamlessly from tenderness to violence, from gentle caresses to fierce pecking, gripping, throwing, and clamping onto each other, echoing the many instances of similar behavior in animals engaged in mating rituals as the males try to win the females to select them (as Darwin documents in The Descent of Man in examples referred to throughout this book). This happens as well in Terry Johnson’s Cries from the Mammal House, David Greig’s Outlying Islands, and Peyret and Prochiantz’s Les Variations Darwin. Outlying Islands (2002), for instance, features humans enacting bird behavior, blurring the human/nonhuman boundary, and weaving many other evolutionary motifs into the drama, such as adaptation, survival in hostile habitats, Malthusian culling (natural death making way for the fitter specimens to survive), mimicry, sexual selection, and maternal instinct. The overriding question guiding the play is what is “natural” in the Anthropocene age. This and many other plays adopt what Cary Wolfe has described as “zoontologies,” recognizing the important role played by the animal in decentering the figure of the human, and Una Chaudhuri’s “zooësis,” the discourse of animality in human life.16
An important forerunner in theatricalizing zooësis is Edward Albee, who was once called a “playwright of evolution” because of the overt concern with evolutionary ideas in his play Seascape.17 Albee’s zooëtic concerns begin with his early play Zoo Story in Jerry’s histrionically narrated encounter with the dog, and quickly broaden to embrace other evolution-related issues raised by Jerry’s suicide (altruistic; yet where does altruism fit within the natural world?) and the genetic dead-endedness of all the characters, both those on stage and those Jerry recollects in the tenement house as isolated and miserable. Albee continues probing evolutionary ideas in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the focus on reproductive issues: the obsession with procreation, especially stillborn procreation; the hysterical false pregnancy of the younger woman coupled with the illusory child who then has to be “exorcised” (so twice dead). But, with The Goat; or, Who Is Sylvia, his evolutionary vision crystallizes in his treatment of the taboo topic of interspecies sex. One of the key things about this play is that, much like the elusive dodo in Cries from the Mammal House, we do not see the animal that is central to the play until the final moments. We are entirely reliant on Martin’s description of the goat Sylvia and must imagine her. This makes it all the more shocking when his wife Stevie carries the bloody carcass of the goat on stage at the end, dumps it there in full view of the audience, and exits.
Another interspecies performance mode that deserves mention in this context is a modern version of the device of the “man in the monkey suit” that has been a favorite from the Victorians through Eugene O’Neill and beyond, given a new twist in Kathryn Hunter’s haunting portrayal of Red Peter, the chimp addressing the academicians in a stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” as I discussed in the previous chapter. (This story also provided source material for Des Chimères en automne, by Peyret and Prochiantz, performed in 2003.) Colin Teevan’s adaptation garnered wide acclaim, largely due to the feat of Hunter’s performance, “perhaps the most physically remarkable I’ve ever seen on a stage,” writes Charles Isherwood in the New York Times. There is no monkey suit, and it is a woman enacting chimphood, not a man, “scampering up to a woman in the front row and picking through her hair for tasty morsels of lice, which he then offers to share with others, as a delicacy,” or clambering up a ladder to hang by one leg “as he casually continues his narration. But this is much more than a feat of actorly athleticism. Ms. Hunter imbues Red Peter with a wry wisdom, a touch of cheeky humor and, above all, a sense of dignity just slightly tinted with melancholy.”18 The performance indicts the audience: “all humanity” has done this to the chimp. Productions like this increasingly point the finger at the audience, increasingly imply, either directly or indirectly, some shared blame for things as they are in our current state of evolution, which some are calling “posthuman.”
Climate Change Drama
The most obvious way in which theatre represents the Anthropocene epoch is through its increasing engagement with climate change, giving new meaning to the vexed issue of how individuals relate to their environments. Some see theatre as playing an almost-salvationist role, getting us “back to nature in an authentic way,” because as a live experience,
theatre of any kind in any space is ecological in a social way, even if removed from nature. It is always a niche in an ecological sense, what [Baz] Kershaw calls an ecotone. In addition to that, plays can tell powerful tales of human relationship with the earth, its creatures, and its endangerment. More than literature or art, theatre deeply connects nature back to humanity, because it can combine all of Felix Guattari’s “three ecologies”—mental, social, and natural.19
Climate change dramas like Richard Bean’s Heretic and Steve Waters’s Contingency Plan are part of what Julie Hudson calls “a rapid escalation of interest in climate change on the stage” since 2008.20 Such plays echo themes dealt with in earlier drama that I have discussed, such as extinction and catastrophism, giving them a sharper urgency in light of current concerns about global warming. They recall Victorian stage spectacles of nature and geology, but cast in a different light, as global, man-made disasters.
Extinction also features in plays less interested in climate change than in how species simply die out and in fantasizing about what might happen if they could be recovered. Cries from the Mammal House imagines a scientist finding examples of living dodos sustained and protected by enlightened “third world” humans. Robin French’s Gilbert Is Dead (another retro-Victorian play) explores the connection between the rise of the zoo and the nineteenth-century craze for taxidermy. The main theme of Gilbert Is Dead is the idea that evolution by natural selection can be entirely discredited by locating a single organism, a rare loris that survives despite having all kinds of physical, nonadaptive disadvantages. A common thread in these plays is the fantasy of undoing or reversing evolutionary processes such as natural selection and extinction. The very presentation of such ideas as dramatic subject matter indicates their thorough absorption into the public consciousness.
Supercooperation
If this truly is the Anthropocene age, what will the next geological epoch be called? Will there even be a next epoch? Perhaps the answer is affirmative only if we cease to think that competition is at the heart of survival and instead embrace our cooperative side. Some scientists are skeptical of the selfish gene theory, of scientists who see all human behavior in terms of “reproductive ambition and the aggression this instils,” and culture as just “a set of strategies to promote reproductive viability.” Instead of Spencer’s “dog-eat-dog survivalism,” there is now a greater belief that “reproductive viability requires teamwork and cooperation.”21 This emphasis on cooperation puts Darwinism in a far more positive light: evolution as a collaborative effort rather than a competition, with humans working together rather than against one another, something for which theatre has renewed relevance through its central quality of empathy. Just as humans living in small groups depended for survival on cooperation and this strategy along with the quality of empathy gave an evolutionary advantage, theatre, argues Bruce McConachie, “trades on these proclivities [for cooperation and empathy], through the co-operation of actors, and of the audience, in the production of the theatrical event, and we spectators take pleasure in this experience of co-operative flow” as well as in empathizing with the characters we see on stage.22 Critics may object that the idealization of “theatre as a badge of the human achievement of co-operative culture” ignores the even more important aspect, which is that theatre not only depicts but also enacts conflict.23 We are back to the basics of theatre as bearing witness and articulating a consciousness. The discovery of mirror neurons suggests a way of probing the exact nature of the empathy that is so crucial to encounters between performers and audiences. Just as it did 150 years ago, theatre is responding to these new ideas in innovative and provocative ways, but it is also continuing to play a constitutive role in our ongoing search for answers to the fundamental questions posed by evolution about our origins, our development as a species, and ultimately, our place in the universe.
While this epilogue has explored some recent developments and new directions in theatre’s engagement with evolution, the book as a whole suggests one abiding, eternal theme: the family. From mate selection and the relation between the sexes, to breeding and reproduction, to the raising of young, theatre has always foregrounded the family constellation, right from its origins to the present. Evolutionary ideas collectively proffered powerful new theory that changed the way we think about that core unit, and theatre is still probing the aftermath and repercussions as they continue to play out.
This book has explored the two-way conversation between evolution and theatre, and the story that has emerged points to nothing less than the birth of modern drama from the spirit of evolution. All along, the underlying mandate has been the question of what theatre takes from evolution, which aspects of this vast and complex set of scientific ideas the theatre—as opposed to other art forms or modes of public discourse or expression—seizes on. I hope the book has gone some way toward answering this and opening up new areas of investigation as we continue to try to address it fully.