On a recent sunny afternoon, the experimental playwright Sibyl Kempson was on a porch in Margaretville, New York, in the Catskills, working a new gig: teaching, via FaceTime, a course called “Foraging for Edible & Medicinal Plants.” Kempson was framed by puffy clouds, blue sky, and a bit of wooden rocking chair. She wore a fuzzy green hat. “It’s a great time to learn something!” she said. Her foraging course is available on HireArtists.org, a site created to help artists weather the financial upheaval of COVID-19. There, one can hire artists for lessons in, say, the ukulele, Korean, creative coding, or the use of epoxy resin. “We’re all giggers and freelancers,” Kempson said. “Stuff got cancelled, and it’s, like, tough cookies.” Cancellation had happened to her—in German, no less. “I was supposed to be in Austria right now, directing an Ibsen adaptation that I wrote,” she said. She stood up. “Do you want to look at some plants?”
A wild area behind the house was coming into spring—green shoots poking through dead leaves. “I’m going to start with one very familiar friend that is all over New York: the white pine,” she said, in the focussed tone of a professor. (Kempson also teaches theatre at Sarah Lawrence.) She propped up her phone and presented a cluster of dried needles to the camera. “These are good for right now: they’ve got a ton of vitamin C, many times higher than citrus fruits,” she said. “Just take the leaves right off and boil them, for a tea.” She found some wood-ear mushrooms—gelatinous, good for the immune system, and tasty when thrown into a soba-noodle soup—and then came across some tufts of wild garlic mustard. She breathed in, appreciatively. “I wish you were here to smell it,” she told her pupil. “You’ll find this everywhere—it grows out of the sidewalks in Manhattan, and in Tompkins Square Park.” She had once livened up an Easter turkey breast with wild garlic mustard and oniongrass: “Everybody went crazy.” She held up a small sprig of cleavers, “a little charmer,” good for allergy symptoms, and “in the mint family, I think.” (It’s in the coffee family.)
Kempson, who runs a theatre company she founded, called 7 Daughters of Eve, lived in New York City for many years and now lives in Newburgh; the Catskills house belongs to a friend. “Nature is nonnegotiable for me,” Kempson said. She learned foraging a few years ago, at a wilderness-survival-skills course at the Tracker School, in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. “It changed my whole life,” she said. A couple of years later, she studied with “an incredibly knowledgeable guy who goes by the name of Dan De Lion, who drives around the country by the season,” teaching people from his Foragemobile. “He has an apothecary, and he’s constantly making tinctures and salves.” Kempson considers herself a foraging enthusiast, not an expert: “I never would have presumed to teach it, except for these extraordinary circumstances that we are in.”
Kempson’s foraging pupils, likely in extraordinary circumstances of their own, get a dose of thrifty survivalist scrappiness alongside their medicinal-plant identification: foraging can yield not just tincture ingredients but food. “The other day, I ran out of greens, and it’s, like, wait a minute. There’s a supermarket right outside,” she said. She held up some roughage: curly dock, then prime for harvesting, when it was “more like spinach, less like collard greens, and delicious sautéed with olive oil and salt, and a little garlic, if you have it.” Daylilies have edible tubers; Kempson dug into the earth and exposed a gnarled mass of bulbousness and roots. “I just wash them off, and I cook them like a little potato,” she said. “Last night, I put them in a cast-iron frying pan with olive oil. And it was wonderful.” Kempson loves potatoes: “I wrote a whole play about them.” “Potatoes of August” was part of a trio of Kempson’s “vegetable plays,” in which potatoes, pumpkins (“Ich, Kürbisgeist”), and asparagus (“Spargel Time!”) gain consciousness, and occasionally wreak havoc. In a similar vein, the Ibsen adaptation that she’d planned to stage in Austria takes a Symbolist approach to “A Doll’s House,” among other plays, exploring “Nora’s origins as a wooden doll that Ibsen carved,” she said. “And before that she was a block of wood. And before that she was a tree, and she had tree consciousness.”
Consciousness, in both Kempson’s life and work, is expansive. She’s been eating curly-dock seeds—“I’ll just grind them up and put them in my oatmeal”—which, she explained, are “said to bring prosperity.” She looked thoughtful. “I have found that, when I eat them regularly, I am less worried about money, for whatever reason.” She smiled. “Maybe it’s my imagination. But whatever’s in our imagination, I think, is part of reality.” ♦
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