Play About Fracking Closes The Distance

Bob Martin, playing Ezell, the titular character in Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man, stands in the mud of an outdoor set that is part nature run amok, full of huge, twisting tree trunks, and part industrial drilling site, with metal poles driven into the ground and chains connected to them. In this moment, he embodies a sense of desperate defiance, as he enunciates a key sentence twice: Ain’t nobody gonna tell me this isn’t my place to be. As Ezell proceeds with its story, the audience movingly learns just how fraught and fragile that ground beneath that assertion is.

Ezell — a production by Clear Creek Creative, out of Bighill, Ken., and presented by the Yale Schwarzman Center and Yale School of Public Health HAPPY Initiative this weekend, May 20 to 22, in a surprisingly wild area behind the buildings of Yale’s West Campus in Orange — is an immersive theater piece that begins with a guided walk away from the office complex and accompanying highway noise and into a fiddle-music-soaked part of the woods that feels suddenly like everywhere and nowhere, and that’s the point. It’s there, in the woods, that we meet Ezell, born and raised on a wooded plot of land in Eastern Kentucky, who charges out of the woods whooping and hollering, but as the play progresses, peels back layer after layer of the past as he confronts a wrenching present and a deeply uncertain future.

The present dilemma regards the arrival of fracking companies in Eastern Kentucky, eager to convince landowning Kentuckians to lease to them the right to drill for natural gas. The companies are willing to pay more money than the people who own the land have ever seen in their lives. The cost, however, is something close to the desecration of their home place, as family farms, forests, and even cemeteries are turned into industrial waste sites. 

Simultaneously, however, the play is an interrogation of the landowners’ relation to the land itself. The poor Whites who own it in the present, after all, didn’t always. It was stolen from the Shawnee, who were killed or driven out. In Ezell’s grand sweep of history, the story of land in eastern Kentucky is the story of a series of thefts, from the indigenous people to poor White, Black, and Melungeon people, and now — in fact if not in deed — to energy companies. Ezell, at his most contemplative, is able to ask himself whether the land was ever his to own in the first place. On another level, however, whatever the answer to that question is doesn’t change the deep emotional connection Ezell feels to the land, from its mountainous geography to its dense woods to the mushrooms that grow there and the family members that are buried in the soil. He feels he needs to acquiesce to the energy companies — he needs the money for his family — but is the price the land pays too high?

As Ezell, Martin gives a riveting performance, swinging from raucous comedy to near-feral anger to heartbreaking sensitivity. His full embodiment of his character extends to the physicality of his performance. He climbs trees and posts, rolls in the muddy earth, drives the thick metal stakes representing the fracking drills into the ground with heaving shouts. By the end of the performance he’s half covered in the earth he lives on, a living emblem of his connection to the place. The tragedy of his decision is passed on to the next generation, with Carrie Brunk, as Ezell’s daughter, sifts through her father’s fraught legacy in hopes of finding some healing, in a quiet, moving coda. All of this is accompanied by live music from a series of accomplished traditional musicians, who reach into the repertoire of Eastern Kentucky specifically and Appalachia more generally to come up with tunes and songs that suit story, actors, and site, and deepen Ezell’s resonance beyond Eastern Kentucky, to anywhere the extractive industries have touched — and, Brunk and Martin hope, well beyond that.

“This is the first time where we’ve taken it somewhere where the issue of extraction is not prominent,” said Brunk. ​“How will people respond to the show, this little play from the foothills of the East Kentucky mountains?”

“Especially when you’re getting splattered with mud,” Martin added.

Brunk and Martin are the creative force behind Ezell as well as acting in it. After developing the piece a few years ago, ​“we opened it at home in Clear Creek, right before the pandemic. We had done it in two other parts of Kentucky, in former coal country places, and then we took it to New Orleans. So everyone has had this opportunity to connect to it in different ways.”

So far, in their experience of performing the piece, beyond the story’s specifics about the ravages of extractive industries, she said, lies something more general. ​“We found that there are other presenters who are drawn to the work as well because of the themes of climate change and intergenerational trauma. It’s giving them a window, it’s through a particular lens, but the broader themes translate. It’s about domination in relation to the land, and all of this land — this whole continent — has experienced that in one way or another.”

“We’re using this one thing that’s a focal point for our community to talk about these bigger, broader things that we think we should all be considering and thinking about,” she added.

But Ezell moves quickly past simply being preachy, both because Ezell himself is far too complex to be reduced to a rural stereotype, and because the question put to rural landowners about whether to work with fracking companies isn’t easy. It’s easy for environmental activists — especially in places like Connecticut, where fracking isn’t possible — to condemn the practice because of the obvious damage it causes, both in the destruction of the landscape and the continued reliance on fossil fuels. Those activists find sympathetic allies in the places fracking has visited, too. But is it fair to ask poor landowners to forgo the life-changing amounts of money that energy companies offer? Do they have to stay poor for environmental justice to be served?

“That is a really important point for us, because we obviously have a point of view. We’re community activists, and we were inclined toward social engagement before all of this. But that’s not everybody in our community, and people need that money — they need those possibilities and options. And it’s really important for us not to be putting a piece together for our community, or anywhere, where we’re didactically saying ​‘this is our point of view, listen to us.’ Because that’s part of the problem,” Brunk said. ​“We wanted to create a piece of art that complicated the issue. Who is this man who makes this choice? And how do we develop some level of compassion and sympathy for him? And how do we see ourselves reflected in him? We do dominating things as well, every day of our lives — we do, all of us, in one way or another. It might not be at the extreme level that this character makes that choice, but we’re all culpable.”

Though also, ​“we’re not trying to make people feel guilty or shameful,” Brunk added. ​“We’re trying to bring people into a consciousness, an awareness. We don’t want to leave people in the tragedy of the story,” but rather ask ​“how do we talk about it? How do we invite ourselves into a future that looks and feels different?”

The play is visceral on a few different levels. Martin recalled a time performing it when a glob of mud hit him straight in the face after he drilled the earth beneath him. ​“It’s a very dirty play. You got to get in there and wallow in it. It’s not clean, and I love that, how tactile the space is. And it’s different everywhere. New Orleans is different from Berea, Kentucky, and from here.”

The natural setting has a certain effect, Martin said, on people’s expectations. For some people in the audience, he imagines them thinking, ​“I am in nature, and I’m waiting for the horror movie to start. And now this dude’s coming out, and hell no, this is happening.”

That sense of initial uneasy dislocation is intentional, and in the service of a broader move. ​“When you journey into the space, and there’s chains hanging, and there are tarps, and you don’t know what it is — the design is meant to put you in a position of witnessing the other. And then hopefully, through the story, that wall comes down — stuff disappears, literally and figuratively, and by the time the rope comes down and the fourth wall is broken, we’re all in a ritual together,” Martin said. ​“You have some empathy for this human who might have been the most opposite from you at the beginning, and hopefully that opens things up enough that there’s an insertion point for you, an attachment point somewhere to your heart.”

“And then you eat, which is also part of the formula,” he added. After Brunk’s portion of the play, the guides take the audience to a barn where they feast on a full-course meal made from local produce. The Clear Creek team found their local food providers — Meg Fama of The Farm Belly, working with food from Clover Nook Farm, Hindinger’s Farm, Laurel Glen Farm, Starlight Gardens, Stone Gardens Farm, and Waldingfield Farm — by visiting New Haven’s farmer’s market.

“We know in our rural community the farmers’ market is one of the places where people gather and connect,” Brunk said. They didn’t know if it would be the same way in New Haven, ​“but it was,” she said. Perhaps in some ways the distance from New Haven to eastern Kentucky isn’t so great after all.

Ezell: Ballad of a Land Man, presented by the Yale Schwarzman Center, runs at Yale’s West Campus from May 20 to May 22. Dress appropriately for the weather and visit the Schwarzman Center’s website for tickets and more information.