How My Review of The $18-Billion Prize Got Spiked

The review of Phelim McAleer’s new play about the Chevron case was apparently too dangerous for public consumption.

National Review - Daniel J. Kennard 04/06/2018

Chevron station in Cardiff, Calif. Photo: National Review

I knew next to nothing about the playwright Phelim McAleer or his new play The $18-Billion Prize before reviewing it for the Bay Area theater site Theatrius.com. I certainly didn’t expect that reviewing this play would lead to the loss of my position. There were warnings, however; there was an email from the San Francisco Critics Circle going around to reviewers, cautioning that McAleer’s play might be dangerously biased against the environmental movement, among its other sins.

McAleer’s $18-Billion Prize, cowritten by Jonathan Leaf, recounts aspects of the famous Ecuador v. Chevron case. Some brief background is in order. In 1972, Texaco Petroleum began drilling for oil in Ecuador. Later, Texaco transferred management to the state-run company Petroecuador, ending its operations in the country by 1993. Before leaving, Texaco spent $40 million on a remediation program to replace contaminated soil and replant cleared lands, and audits have concluded that this work was done responsibly. All of this was overseen and approved by the Ecuadorian government. Twenty years later, however, Ecuador changed tack and sued Chevron (which had merged with Texaco) for billions of dollars in environmental and social damages.

New York attorney Steven Donziger represented Ecuador, suing Chevron in any court that would hear the case. Ecuadorian courts ruled against the company, awarding $18 billion in damages, but the judgment has proved to be unenforceable. After years of this global chase, Steven Donziger’s own alleged misdeeds surfaced, and he was sued by Chevron under the RICO Act for conspiring to corruptly influence the Ecuadorian litigation. It is this six-week trial,Chevron v. Donziger, that is the focus of McAleer’s play. Using court trannoscripts, the play uncovers the extent of Steven Donziger’s corruption, including fraud, fabrication of evidence, and the bribing of an Ecuadorian judge.

I found the play to be wildly entertaining and refreshing, and I was eager to meet the cast and crew at the reception afterwards. It was there that I first met Phelim McAleer. I congratulated him and told him that I was reviewing the play for Theatrius and that I had received an email warning me of his play’s contents. McAleer wasn’t surprised and told me that the group that had drafted the email was the environmental NGO Amazon Watch (members of which had attended the previous night’s performance in order to disrupt it). Eager to give the play the fair shake that I suspected it wouldn’t get elsewhere, I told the playwright that I would get the review out as soon as I could. I didn’t yet know what I was getting into.

My editor, Barry Horwitz, a 79-year-old retired U.C. Berkeley English professor and the founder of Theatrius, had first been described to me by a mutual friend as “Berkeley through and through.” Barry talks fast: Within the first 20 minutes of meeting him, I learned of his dodging the draft by fleeing to Paris, of his marching with Mario Savio during Berkeley’s “Free Speech Movement,” and that Reagan ruined everything. So I can’t say I was too surprised that Horowitz found my positive review of a play in which Chevron is portrayed as the victim to be problematic.