Thursday, April 27, 2023

Flashback 2010: New green looks pretty old-school


  
       With "The Cherry Orchard" marking the end of Bob Falls reign as artistic director at the Goodman Theatre, I've been in a Chekhovian frame of mind. I wrote this recent column on the play, and was looking back at my takes on previous productions, I couldn't help but share this. Though not directed by Falls, how can I not be proud of managing to combine "Uncle Vanya" and the Home and Housewares Show?  

     'There's no such thing as a simple, honest love of nature," Dr. Astrov complains, in the excellent, Russian-language production of Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" on stage this weekend only at Navy Pier's Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
     Among the modern surprises in the 1899 masterpiece is a dose of environmentalism — no, our era didn't invent it — in the form of Astrov, who plants trees and studies animal population trends, boring the heck out of his companions.
     "The goats are gone?" exclaims Elena, arranging her features into a parody of pained alarm.
     Astrov is right. We've got recycling down pat, but it often seems oddly uncoupled from actual love of the outdoors — of hiking, birding, gardening. It's become a nonsecular ritual, a kind of ecological kosher.
     Not to suggest that "Uncle Vanya" is an ecology pageant — I might just be green-minded, having earlier this week spent hours at the enormous 2010 International Home and Housewares Show at McCormick Place, tagging alongside my pal, Lise Schleicher of BasketWorks.
     Commerce, like life, pulls us in opposite directions, as illustrated by two objects tucked into the big bag of swag I gathered at the show.
     One is a piece of "Comboware," a cornflower blue plastic plate with a knife and fork molded out of the same blue plastic, attached to either side. Thus, standing at a buffet, you need not dedicate a hand to holding plastic utensils, but can access them with a quick twist.
     The other item is a small hunter green cloth napkin from Litter Free Lunch, a company set up by a pair of Naperville moms, Megan Wojtyla and Felice Farran, whose children attend Prairie Elementary in that famously family-friendly town.
    "I couldn't find cloth napkins that were the right size for a lunch box," explained Farran. "I wanted to have a zero-waste lunch."
     Don't we all?
     The Comboware is designed to be thrown away — whoops, recycled. The LFL napkin is to be used again and again, as we conserve our way toward the New Jerusalem.
     The napkin — literally green — is in perfect harmony with the zeitgeist of this year's show, a festival of the eco-friendly and earth-aware, the recyclable and recycled, the reusable and renewable. There were dozens of brands of high-tech lunch sacks, countless types of stainless steel water bottles.
     Companies like Back to Basics, CynerGreen, Green Smart, Greenair, Fertile Earth, Reduce, Preserve, all performed the rather neat mental gymnastic of using conservation as a prod to encourage more consumption.
     (If you disagree with my hunch that much environmental friendliness is corporate hype, I want you to rinse out an old soda bottle and use THAT to tote your water for a week — it works fine — then get back to me)
     Contemplating the LFL cloth napkin raised a question: How is the used napkin to be returned home for laundering?
     Our Environmental Eden will involve a lot of washing, apparently, with much toting of soiled napkins.
     In addition to cloth napkins, Litter Free Lunch also sells fold-over cloth bags for sandwiches, which means that the young environmentalist would also bring home a bag that had held a sloppy tuna fish sandwich for mom (or dad) to wash.
     It's as if homemakers, having spent 50 years freeing themselves from the drudgery of scrubbing lunch boxes, are now working their way back. Next, we'll be replacing energy-hungry washing machines with corrugated metal washboards and galvanized steel tubs, all in the name of a need Chekhov grasped: the hunger to give life significance.
     "I know those moms," my wife said dryly, and at first I thought she meant actual familiarity with the Naperville pair, and then realized she meant weary knowledge of those who combat the soul-sucking demands of parenthood and the anodyne suburban grind by grasping at the pueblo lifestyle, building chicken coops in the back of their Land Rovers and cooking blue corn tortillas on a hot stone outside their million-dollar homes.
     "When you don't have a life, you dream," writes Chekhov. "It's better than nothing."
     Or is that cynical? My favorite object in the show was a bright orange Spaceboy XL, a rocket-shaped garbage can with a chrome push front made by the German firm Wesco, which has a flair bordering on genius for naming its trash cans — the Kickfox and the Wasteman, the Big Push and the Ashmaster.
     Not coincidentally, rocketship-shaped garbage cans reflect the hot trend of my youth, when we were all going to live on the moon someday in giant domes, and so products with vague connections to the space program — Tang, Space Food Sticks — sold despite the drawback of tasting awful.
     We reflect the eras that formed us, and the question is whether this zeal for environmentalism is another atom-burst wall clock — a passing consumer gimmick — or indeed is the flowering of a new eco-friendly age that has been building for 40 years.
     Maybe someday you wouldn't dream of using a toothbrush that ISN'T made from old yogurt cups, like the Preserve, which comes in its own "easy to Recycle postage-paid mailer" so you can send your used toothbrush back to Waltham, Mass., to begin its life anew.
     The uppercase, boldface "RECYCLE" is theirs. And now, I guess, ours too.
     It's a seductive dream.
     "If in a thousand years, men are happy," Dr. Astrov says, defending his odd tree-planting behavior, "it will be in part because of me."
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 19, 2010

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated, and posted at the discretion of the proprietor.