Home / Chronology / Natural Selection / More About Natural Selection The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2006 Humana Festival NATURAL SELECTION It’s been a long time since the American West was forcibly tamed, and the legacy of Manifest Destiny reverberates through this huge country, from the canyons in the Four Corners to Florida, from sea to shining sea. We ascribe a romance to the Old West where there probably never was any—neither to the Marlboro Man nor to the Noble Savage. Maybe we should be grateful that museums are devoted to preserving this past that isn’t real, and be glad that we can stop in the desert to buy turquoise rings and clay pots. And isn’t it handy that there are so many new casinos? We probably shouldn’t worry too much about whether the Native American population is becoming increasingly assimilated, because the Wild West wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be anyway. In days of yore you could visit the pavilions of World Fairs, and today you can visit the Epcot Center—isn’t that just as nice (and so much easier) than going to an actual Navajo hogan—and you can catch the Japanese gardens and the African market all at the same time. Really, what’s so great about reality anyway? Now, we’re not trying to get overly philosophical; we’re simply approaching an essential question of Eric Coble’s Natural Selection: How do you restock the natives in the Native American Pavilion these days? In a parallel world, in the not-so-distant future, in Florida, Henry Carson and his family live in a small, enclosed, seemingly safe world. His kid is in a virtual school, where he can play soccer or the violin, even play an Indian in the school play, without ever leaving the safety of his room. His wife blogs about how wonderful he is without looking up from her wireless laptop, and he is in charge of the Native American Pavilion at Culture Fiesta. Outside the world is ruined—scary viruses, no ozone, blistering sun—but, inside Culture Fiesta there’s every color and creed you’d ever want to see up close, behind glass: American Indians, Africans, various Asian groups, even Swedes! And—rides! A gift shop! So much cleaner and more convenient than visiting what is left the natural habitats of these peoples; and thank goodness they were all saved from extinction. People come from all over to see the world in authentic recreation. But when Henry makes his first foray into the wastelands of the West and captures his very own native, the apparently Navajo Zhao, neither he nor Culture Fiesta will ever be the same. Should we worry about Zhao’s pure-breed status, or just enjoy our lasagna burritos and lo mein with cheese? In Navajo creation stories, the people keep moving from world to world. The first few worlds are too small to sustain community without strife. The people came to The Glittering World, our world, because of a great flood. When the trickster Coyote stole the Water Buffalo’s children, she loosed her wrath in torrents of water that drove the people up to the sky, through it, and into the next world. This is only one of many instances of chaos wrought by Coyote, and the chaos always inspires some kind of change. We are still in the Glittering World. The monsters were slain long ago, Coyote made a mess of what used to be an orderly display of the stars in the sky, the clans split into tribes, the white men came, the Long March led to reservations, and recently coyotes have been spotted in the cities… There’s been a lot of talk about the end of the world recently. The natural disasters of the last year or so could make one believe in the wrath of God, even if, on most days, one is not so inclined. Is this Armageddon? Is it time to abandon this world for the next? Perhaps it’s just a new opportunity for us to see the world on CNN.com or on vacation. There are tourist packages to visit the ravaged city of New Orleans, companies are buying up land for new resorts in Aceh, and Angelina and Brad are pitching tents in the mountains where Osama bin Laden might still be hiding. As Vanderbilt heir Anderson Cooper feels the pain and anger of the victim/refugees, and we see Oklahoma and Texas burn while California floats away on a torrent of mud, it’s hard not to wonder if all this is really real. Maybe we should pack up the station wagon and bring the kids to Culture Fiesta…while we still can. — Julie Felise Dubiner ERIC COBLE Eric Coble adjusts rapidly to the rhythm of any landscape. The skill may have developed pre-natally when his mother, a U.S. government employee based in Iceland, moved to Edinburgh, Scotland for Eric’s birth after researching global infant mortality rates. After his birth, she applied to teach in reservation schools. He spent his early childhood on a Navajo reserve in the Four Corners area of New Mexico. The mythology and history of the Navajo were a low hum beneath daily life on the reservation. He spent his early childhood on a Navajo reserve in the Four Corners area of New Mexico. The mythology and history of the Navajo were a low hum beneath daily life on the reservation. The Hogan was present but Coble—and many of the children on the rez—knew little of its significance to the Navajo people. Coble didn’t start to explore Navajo history until he was a student at Fort Lewis College, and later when he came to write Natural Selection. "At the time, you’re just a kid growing up. There’s no sense of exoticism," Coble muses, "Wherever you live, if it’s Chicago or Kuala Lumpur, it’s not exotic when you live there. Running around free like little coyotes collecting cactus and snakes by the water tower—how is that not a normal childhood?" Now normalcy encompasses being a husband, a dad, and a resident playwright at Cleveland Playhouse where he began as an intern while pursuing his MFA in acting at Ohio University. "All of my plays start out with some little seed of anger or something that’s bugging me, and then hopefully it gets channeled enough to where it’s an interesting story and not just a rant." Coble’s protagonists are tourists and adventurers, special-ops and aliens, corporate junkies and cogs, marionettes and CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies, go-getters and slackers, anxious bourgeois parents and their head-start toddlers. Coble imagines the universe as is—but slightly skewed—exploiting particularly uncanny pockets of madness within American consumer culture. His shrewd comedies (The Dead Guy, T.I.D.Y., Bright Ideas, Pinocchio 3.5, among others) parody obsessions with entrepreneurship, nest eggs, family values, and purchasing power without demonizing the characters because Coble recognizes their desires for comfort, stability and success as his own. The seed for Natural Selection came after Coble’s visit to the Epcot Center with his family. Like all Superbowl champs and ice queens, he too wanted to go to Disneyworld, but found himself ambivalent about the experience. Coble and his family could visit not only the whole world in one day, but a better, cleaner, more comfortable world—one with recycling bins every forty feet, no hunger, and little or no employee facial hair! Even the trashcans sparkled at Epcot: you could eat off the floors and—given all of the "ethnic" snack options for sale, you would have ample opportunity to do so. Bite-sized tastes of exotic cultures (and some not-so-exotic ones): samosas, hot dogs, egg rolls, and sushi all within crawling distance! Tidy inscriptions captioned each country’s exhibit sans politics, sans colonialism, sans time and change. The entire continent of Africa enclosed in a solitary thatch-roof hut! Coble could take his kids everywhere without leaving Orlando! His ease in consuming Epcot and adopting the American Tourister ethos of "controlled adventure" nagged at his conscience, and he channeled that dissonance into Natural Selection’s Culture Fiesta theme park. As a playwright, Coble says he is fascinated by our gestures of self-preservation: "What choices do we make to confine ourselves for our own comfort?" One might also ask what we lose when we substitute virtual reality and packaged environments for the messiness of the real world? What are the consequences of our self-induced myopia? How do we limit ourselves in striving for coherence and simplicity? Coble pushes the bounds of his secure world through drama, offering a send-up of American normalcy through just-a-bit-larger-than-life scenarios. — Joanna K. Donehower