PLANT LIFE

Rebecca Gilman's "Swing State" and Theresa Rebeck's "Dig." 

- HELEN SHAW

Technically, there are only four characters in Rebecca Gilman’s “Swing State,” a melancholy new drama, now at the Minetta Lane. There’s a retired guidance counsellor, Peg (Mary Beth Fisher); her troubled young neighbor, Ryan (Bubba Weiler); the local sheriff, Kris (Kirsten Fitzgerald); and Kris’s niece and deferential new deputy, Dani (Anne E. Thompson). They all cause problems for one another, even as they try their clumsy best to offer help. But the fifth character—and the one we should really be worrying about—is Wisconsin. Is anyone doing anything for Wisconsin? In 2021, the swing state of the title is teetering, both socially and ecologically, and Gilman deposits us in that trembling landscape, even though her play takes place entirely indoors.

Peg’s sprawling house sits on more than forty acres of so-called remnant prairie, a rare sliver of the tallgrass Plains, an endangered ecosystem that dates back roughly ten thousand years. “There used to be millions and millions of acres of it, all down the middle of the country, but there’s only about four per cent left now,” she tells Dani. Sheriff Kris hankers after the untilled property—she’s dying to see it “put to good use” as productive cropland—but Peg is committed to protecting her wild remnant from the corn and soybean monocultures that threaten it on all sides. A biome doesn’t necessarily obey boundary markers, however, and nitrates from huge farms are leaching into Peg’s groundwater, as pesticides drip over her fence line.