The world’s a stage. The theater is burning. Four strangers walk into a mysterious theater in the middle of the forest outside of Athens, Georgia. A tree, bathed in moonlight, springs from the center of the open air stage. They don’t know who they are. They don’t know why they are there. At the same time, five individuals, each affected by a relationship between a professor of Shakespeare and a forty-year-old graduate student, struggle through the pandemic, and the emotional aftermath of a series of betrayals in a world that is beguiled by two mysterious fungal towers that have emerged from the ice of Greenland.
Ethan, a frustratingly hapless professor of Shakespeare, is in the middle of a crisis. His wife Jenny leaves Athens—and Ethan—to play Desdemona in a staging of Othello in Houston directed by Santi, an old friend and lover. In her absence, Ethan begins an intimate relationship with Ana a musician and creative writing grad student who he bonds with during quarantine. They share a deep-seated concern for global warming, a love of literature, and a general sense of disconnection from a world that is growing increasingly obscure to them, but the perception of something illicit in their relationship has brought them in front of a university appointed board. Ana, who put her music career on hold for graduate school, is initially drawn to Ethan’s approach to environment and literature. Her hip aesthetic and spiritual affect push him to open his political and personal horizons even as his attitudes towards literature lead her to read in a way that helps her reconnect to nature. Ethan and Jenny’s daughter Mia, an archeologist, lives and works in Madrid with her husband—a doctor deep in the throws of battling a global pandemic—and their newborn daughter. She contemplates the meaning of rummaging through the layers of Earth as she reminisces about a dig that led to the excavation of the body of Richard III, remembers a lost night in an English forest, and contemplates the Spanish Civil War in the context of the pandemic.
Each of the characters struggle with past abuse that prevents them from seeing and loving the people and landscapes that surround them. Their incapacity to process emotions becomes entangled with their incapacity to heal themselves and by extension the planet, as little by little, their connections to the mysterious strangers on the stage, and the tree at its center, are revealed.
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