Two man-made disasters inspired How to Build a Forest: the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, and the failure of the levee system during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Each of these calamities revealed the intimate, intricate connection humans have to nature – and our society’s systemic and pervasive denial of that connection. On a more personal level, the piece was inspired by the loss of 100 trees at a Louisiana family home following the storm. On the scale of Katrina-related tragedies, the loss doesn’t seem significant. But to this family, it was profound. The trees were snapped and uprooted during the night. When the family opened their front door in the morning after the storm cleared, it was as though a giant had played pick-up sticks: trees lying everywhere around them, toppled and leaning. Their once-familiar landscape was now unrecognizable and, seemingly, unnavigable. After living and growing with those trees for generations, they felt lost without them, unmoored and at sea.

I began to think about how long it takes for things to come into being and how quickly they can disappear. Mountains and forest systems evolve over hundreds or thousands of years and are routinely leveled in a workday. An entire city is destroyed by a storm in just hours. A theater production that takes months (or years) to prepare may be seen for only a few performances before being struck and thrown out. I wondered: what can we learn by giving our full attention to the length of a process?  By inviting an audience into both the long duration of growth and the relative speed of demise?  

What can we learn if we rebuild those trees on a stage?