Ecological Horror on Stage in Black Sunday

“Nuestro tiempo en esta tierra es un reloj de arena,” the character Jesús says in the prologue of Dolores Díaz’s new play Black Sunday, which received its world premiere at Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre in May 2024, directed by Helen Young. Our time on Earth is an hourglass. “Turn it around, the same thing happens.”

Black Sunday serves as an hourglass between the Great Depression and our current moment. It looks back at an ecological and humanitarian disaster from ninety years ago—the eponymous dust storm in 1935 Texas—and asks Chicago audiences to grapple with contemporary crises that echo it.

The script bears subtle traces of a story first written during the pandemic: the family at its center is largely confined to their home while dust storms rage outside, and when they do leave, they don masks to breathe safely.

My first encounter with the play was February 2020. Díaz and I met along with two other playwrights for the initial meeting of the TimeLine Playwrights Collective. We gathered in TimeLine’s rehearsal room and, over takeout, got to know each other as we shared our ideas for the plays we would develop over our two-year residencies. From her first description of a climate change play set during the Dust Bowl, I was entranced. Unbeknownst to us on that winter night, we would, of course, continue the development process remotely. During COVID shutdowns, I eagerly awaited a visit each month to the world of the play that became Black Sunday. The script bears subtle traces of a story first written during the pandemic: the family at its center is largely confined to their home while dust storms rage outside, and when they do leave, they don masks to breathe safely. On stage, these images resonate powerfully, reminding the audience that our recent devastation is not an isolated historical event.

I hadn’t thought deeply about the Dust Bowl since reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in junior year high school English. The novel remained my personal touchstone for the era, illustrated in my mind with Dorothea Lange’s famous 1936 photo “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California,” of a white woman with a furrowed brow looking off into the distance while her children, backs to the photographer’s lens, huddle into her body.

It’s notable that Black Sunday received its world premiere less than two miles from the theatre where Steppenwolf Theatre produced Frank Galati’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath in 1988 (at the now-defunct Royal George Theatre). Galati’s work subsequently made its way to La Jolla Playhouse, the Royal National Theatre in England, and Broadway. Galati penned a sprawling historical epic, in which thirty-five actors played sixty-two roles on Broadway. The production boasted a working jalopy, actual campfires, and a tank of water recreating a river on stage, bringing to life the Joad family—at its nucleus, Pa, Ma, Tom, and Rose of Sharon—on their journey from Oklahoma to California in search of work. When they arrive, thousands of impoverished families have beat them to it, resulting in labor abuses as wages plummet and working conditions erode.

If Steinbeck and Galati’s work intends to rouse its audience into class consciousness—and in doing so points to extractive capitalism that we now understand exacerbates the climate crisis—Díaz adds a crucial and necessary complication to that canonical narrative of the Joad’s migration: environmental racism.

If Steinbeck and Galati’s work intends to rouse its audience into class consciousness—and in doing so points to extractive capitalism that we now understand exacerbates the climate crisis—Díaz adds a crucial and necessary complication to that canonical narrative of the Joad’s migration: environmental racism.

Like Grapes of Wrath, Black Sunday tells the story of a family of white famers, Pa, Ma, and their adult daughter Sunny (we never learn their surname), who have already lost their Texas farm to the bank when the play begins. However, they refuse to accept this reality. Pa attempts to subjugate the land through violence, killing first coyotes, then rabbits, and finally locusts, while Ma receives apocalyptic visions and draws them on the back of the eviction notices with dust and spit. Sunny, no self-sacrificing ingenue like Rose of Sharon, tries to seduce her way to California via the only remaining young man in the region, a dissolute preacher. Into this troubled milieu enters Jesús, a Mexican American farm worker from California. (Díaz, in contrast to Galati, distills the world of the Dust Bowl down to these five characters, plus the more-than-human environment that animates the stage.)

Jesús leaves California after his wife and children are deported in the La Placita Raid, a 1931 raid in Los Angeles where authorities rounded up and repatriated four hundred Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans. The La Placita Raid was part of a systematic program of repatriation carried out by local governments across the United States. As many as two million Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans were forcibly deported, including many people born in the United States who had never been to Mexico before their repatriation. As the play details, Mexican laborers were originally recruited to perform jobs that white workers were unwilling to do. They were later forced out when those same white workers needed jobs during the Great Depression.

Black Sunday reminds the audience that when white farmers migrated to California, they weren’t arriving to orange groves miraculously empty and awaiting their arrival. The government systematically cleared that land of its previous inhabitants. Díaz conveys this through a Ken Burns-inspired prologue, which lays bare the racist and xenophobic rhetoric of the time (presaging the language of right-wing nationalism today). She also accomplishes this through Jesús’s interactions with the family. Each member regards him differently: Sunny as a hypersexualized fantasy through which she can enact her desire to get to a fantasy land of milk and honey, Pa as more dehumanized than the animals he murders, and Ma as the key to decoding her visions. Jesús has his own agenda: to buy the land that the bank has foreclosed on so that his wife and children can join him to start anew.

But the land is devastated. During the Dust Bowl, dozens of so-called black blizzards roiled the Great Plains. The dust storm that came to be known as Black Sunday hit on 14 April  1935, stretching more than a thousand miles long and removing up to three million tons of topsoil. The play pays fastidious attention to the environment, even taxonomizing the dust: “When it’s in the ground it’s soil. When it’s in your house, it’s dirt. When it’s in the air, it’s dust …When it’s wet, it’s mud. When it’s in your teeth, its grit.”

Díaz describes the play as an ecological horror, but it’s not a traditional horror story. At first, the monster seems to be the environment itself. Ma warns her daughter that something is out to get them:

Time. And the land. The relation between the two. This land, seems to me’s, at the point it’s bringing more death than life. Drought. Dirt…you’ll see you have the same problem no matter where you go. You’ll off to California and see orange groves the first year and by the time you’re an old lady you’ll look outside they’ll be fire. The land woulda found you again. Mark my words: FIRE.

Chyrons projected on the set count down the days from 9 April 1935, until 14 April, cultivating a sense of foreboding.

The play, however, subverts a simplistic dramaturgy in which the environment is the antagonist, a narrative played out onstage and onscreen in many disaster stories from The Grapes of Wrath to The Day After Tomorrow. Pa pits himself against the land again and again, indiscriminately mutilating animals and further ravaging the ecosystem. He decimates the coyotes in revenge for their eating the chickens without realizing that the coyotes kept the rabbit population in check. Then he gathers the region’s remaining men to eradicate the rabbits. Absent the rabbits, the locusts descend, a factual historical detail that evokes Black Sunday’s Biblical themes. Ma sees herself as an Old Testament prophet: Daniel in the lions’ den. The preacher, throughout the play, works on a sermon about that same parable and the true nature of faith. Jesús finally translates Ma’s visions—in her drawings he sees his family on their way to join him in Texas—but reminds her that Daniel was the interpreter of dreams. Instead, Ma is the king from the story, slowly going mad.

The play’s true horror is revealed neither through Ma’s prophecies nor Jesús’s interpretations, but through the monster himself: Pa. As the black blizzard closes in, he spirals deeper into vitriol and violence. Jesús reclaims Pa’s attempt to dehumanize him through a comparison to the black blizzard. When Pa calls him dirt, he replies: “Dusters: they’re brown, not black. Earth, dirt lifted up, where you don’t expect it to be. So used to looking down at it. But the dirt rose up. And the brown buffalo still exists. You don’t.”

In the play’s final moments, Ma and Sunny leave, symbolically joining the Joads, while Jesús persists on the land. In the prologue, the play unearths a racist headline from the Chicago Tribune from the 1930s calling for the removal of Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans. An epilogue explicitly connects this history of xenophobia to Chicago’s contemporary migrant crisis. More than forty-two thousand asylum seekers, mostly from Venezuela, have arrived in buses and planes chartered from Texas from 2022-2024, and Chicago has lacked the infrastructure to support them. This migration is partly fueled by climate change. “[W]hile global warming isn’t in the foreground of the Venezuelan story, it may be part of the backdrop,” Jean Chemnick reported, noting that for a decade Venezuela has experienced “a severe and persistent drought, an occurrence that scientists say will become more frequent due to warming. Venezuela has also lost four of its five glaciers since the 1990s.”

In Chicago, asylum seekers face significant barriers in accessing housing (as they face eviction from city shelters) and accessing jobs. Discussing her impetus for writing the play with dramaturgs Bryar Barborka and J Isabel Salazar, Díaz said, “I want us to recognize in ourselves the capacity to commit crimes against humanity, so we can be internally vigilant to work against our darker natures…I hope that U.S. citizens and legislators recognize the complexity of these issues and the humanity of migrant and immigrant communities.”

The hourglass turns.