Erik Peters received a grant for developing a new theater performance. Mandragora is a fairy-tale-like drag performance exploring the ancient history of the mandrake root: its magical and medicinal uses, mythologies, and its systematic erasure by church and state during the medieval witch hunts. The mandrake (or mandragora), a toxic root shaped like a human, has a history dating back to Mesopotamia and was seen for millennia as both a healer and a danger. When ecclesiastical authority sought to destroy non-institutional knowledge, its practitioners—and the mandrake itself—became targets. Erasing the root meant erasing the healers and the communities that used it. On stage, Mandragora comes back to life. Her scream awakens the earth and destabilizes Western assumptions about the landscape (nature) as a passive backdrop for human activity. What can we learn from the root that screams with resistance and desire?Erik is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher exploring the perspectives of possible new worlds. How can speculative fiction create new universes of identity, and what does the making and research process do with that? Queer ecology serves as a roadmap to the possible worlds sprouting from an earth in planetary crisis.