Conflicting artistic ambitions do not necessarily result in art that expresses the conflicts inherent in ambition. The spectacle of a mess being made does not necessarily enlighten why that mess had to be made. Fucking a plant does not necessarily share with others why that plant is fuckable. Repetition does not necessarily unravel the causes of compulsion. With occasional bursts of genuinely impressive acrobatics and acoustics, Botanica, for me, landed too often on the unnecessarily reserved edge of ambiguity as to whether it was creating stochastic emotional explosions or gripping narrative compositions, neither holding together nor falling apart enough to involve me against my instinct for remaining free of uncertain involvements. And since that seemed to be what the production was about (people helplessly snarled in frightening yet alluring engagements), I inevitably sat and left largely frustrated that so much was set up to be torn down for reasons that remained behind a screen which, rather than being a success of the design, felt a failure of the designers. -Kirk Bromley

“The plants just could have been sexier,” I found myself declaring during our post-performance conversation. I’m not quite sure what I meant by that, but at the time, it seemed to encapsulate my disappointment with Botanica. I had a hard time believing in the human-plant relationships—and the human-human relationships—that were the sputtering engines of this play. The charged, purposeful beginning—which held the promise of a compelling story—deflated too quickly into a familiar kind of undefined, unrelenting chaos, just premeditated enough so that when the man had sex with the plant and when the woman took off her shirt in a state of hypersexed intoxication, I felt like the whole thing was just a vehicle for those moments. I wanted a commitment to story-telling as genuine as the commitment to visual and spatial and sonic design. I wanted for the people to stop talking for a minute so that the plants could have some agency. Maybe I was, after all, empathizing with that over-watered botany; in its saturation of my senses, Botanica left me feeling wilted. –Siobhan Burke


The promise of madness/sex/breakdown is more interesting than the enactment of etc. etc. (except when he fucked the plant). -JC
I am grateful to Botanica for its wild moments of physical recklessness . And for actually creeping me out (two things I don’t often get in theaters, especially now after so many hours of sitting in them). Plant porn, who knew? And for the quicksilver flashes of plainspoken beauty in the script. “We can’t keep going in like this, hitting and missing. You have to say yes or I’m gonna say no.” I wish those moments had been given more space in which to land, and more time … for the seething, moist, uncomfortable underbelly to turn over, curl in, reveal itself to us. I wish Liz Sargent’s character hadn’t been so inevitably headed where it was headed, that the sex/woman/plant/object metaphors had been scrambled a bit. I wish that whole frat boy theater aesthetic (helloooo, Radiohole!) would die already, or at least sober up and get a shave (we could see that green vomit coming a mile away). I was left frustrated, thwarted … and yet, that memory of Ilan Bachrach flinging his body to the floor in punishing, impossible angles is burned into my retina… and Chet Mazur … ummm … is there an Obie for “sickly compelling”? Can we give it to you? I hope Jim Findlay will make another show soon. I like being able to crawl around in his brain. I hope he will maybe consider strangering his considerably strange instincts, and by this I think I maybe mean make them, just every once in awhile, a little quieter. And a little more normal, the strangest thing of all… —Claudia La Rocco

Not fully pruned, and not wholly wild, the promise of Botanica wasn’t entirely fulfilled.  It bloomed too early, then lay for too long in a decaying mess at our feet.  Yet, the morning after, I am looking at the plants in my apartment differently.  I am eyeing the spring shoots along the sidewalk with a more pointed curiosity than I gave them yesterday.  I’m seeing a small part of my world with fresh eyes.  That’s not nothing.  A little oxygen goes a long way. -Sarah Maxfield