Review: "Coyote Oughta Eat That Salesman!" Takes a Mythic Approach to Capital’s Ecocide

Coyote Oughta Eat That Salesman!

Written by Padraig Bond

Directed by Luis Felicano

Presented by Torch Ensemble and FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks

94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC

January 23-25, 2025

L to R: Kristen Hoffman, Samson MacDermot, Nolan Donahue, Danny Gomez, Jess Lauricello. Photo source at this link.  
With the hottest year on record just having ended and with a U.S. government newly (re)committed to now doing worse than nothing about the unfolding climate catastrophe, the debut of the newest installment of The Climate Fables arrives bearing a burlesque of and a call to self-reflection regarding our arrogantly anthropocentric determination to destroy the world ecology which enables our existence. The Climate Fables, written by playwright Padraig Bond, will ultimately comprise a classical-epic-length twelve plays, and the latest production in Torch Ensemble's residency at FRIGID New York, The Climate Fables: Coyote Oughta Eat That Salesman!, marks the halfway point in this cycle. Coyote Oughta Eat That Salesman! offers broad comedy, pointed satire, and urgent empathy wrapped in an outsized adventure fitting for its immortal trickster protagonist and for highlighting, as that protagonist does, the interbeing of existence.

Of the Climate Fables so far, Coyote Oughta Eat That Salesman! is set closest to our current time (Fox News still exists), but, given its non-naturalistic approach, one could simultaneously picture it as a story told further down the cycle’s timeline, a new, post-climate-collapse Coyote myth. Coyote–played by Daniel Gomez, who captures the trickster's cocky charisma with indelicate flair–appears in the cosmologies of a number of Indigenous peoples of what is now North America. When the play opens, he is locked in an ongoing conflict with the Farmer’s Wife’s Husband (a very funny Kristen Hoffman wearing a very impressive mustache), whose chickens Coyote enjoys consuming. The Farmer’s Wife’s Husband’s other major problem comes from within the family: neither the Farmer’s Wife’s Husband, a caricature of the conservative self-identified patriot, nor the Farmer’s Wife (Nolan Donohue) is willing to accept that their teenage child (Jess Lauricello) is non-binary and wishes to be known as Crow and not Jason, leading to an early scene of chaotic crosstalk at the family table. It is tempting to see this non-exchange as emblematizing the national discourse in the United States, and both the naming and casting of the Farmer’s Wife’s Husband and the Farmer’s Wife as digs at the same reactionary ideology that has produced the recent governmental declaration that there are only two genders.

Into the midst of these conflicts arrives the Salesman (Samson MacDermot), cut from a similar cloth as the Merchant in The Climate Fables: The (Green Apple) Play (also played by MacDermot), who promises that he has the solution for Coyote (who is poaching more than chickens from the Farmer’s Wife’s Husband): a product called Miasma that he says is both a pesticide and a fertilizer at the same time. Whether his claims are trustworthy is another matter. Suffice it to say that the Salesman doesn't need more reason for killing off entire species than that they are unappealing or inconvenient. And, of course, profit. As Miasma spreads and Coyote is pursued and the Farmer’s Wife’s Husband has apocalyptic dreams, the characters’ escapades escalate to a more cosmic scale.

Comedy is the show’s default mode, making space for banana peel gags, a scene that might be fairly described as a bit of Noël Coward bedroom farce by way of Looney Toons, and some metatheatrical moments that, for example, see the characters acknowledge the existence of a playwright. But there are also scenes of moving pathos, such as Lauricello doing a lot with silence and a slideshow as Crow feels the effects of Miasma or when Gomez’s Coyote recalls his love affair with a shooting star (whom he met at Mount Denali, another recent target the U.S. government decrees); when, at another point, he describes his experience of becoming part of literally everything in the periods when he is dead; and when Crow raises the question, asked by characters in other of the Climate Fables as well, of whether a human life is worth what it costs the rest of the world ecology.

The production leaves where this story ends up in the hands of the audience, deciding between two possible endings based on a choice that simply and perfectly encapsulates the choice that humanity must make on the individual, national, and transnational scales in the age of climate collapse; the ending that we got, in which MacDermot abandons the cool, slick amorality which has characterized his Salesman for something markedly more aggressive nailed an uncomfortably real feeling of powerlessness and frustration with which many in the audience are no doubt familiar these days. Coyote definitely oughta eat the salesman, and probably some others for good measure, but will you help him or hinder him?

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

Read our reviews of previous shows in the series:
Review of The Climate Fables: Debating Extinction
Review of The Climate Fables: The Collapse of the Hubbard Glacier
Review of The Climate Fables: Ogallala
Review of The Climate Fables: The (Green Apple) Play
Review of The Climate Fables: The Trash Garden

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