In live theater, anything can happen. Put Kathryn Blume on the stage with a few simple props, 28 characters and a fuzzy green sock puppet, and a lot can happen.
Photo provided
Kathryn Blume in a scene from her play, "The Boycott."
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"The Boycott," written and performed by the Vermont actor, plays two nights next week, at 7 p.m. Jan. 22 and 23 at Bunnell Street Gallery. Tickets are $10 for gallery members, students and seniors, and $12 for nonmembers. Blume is in Alaska this week performing her play at Cyrano's Playhouse in Anchorage.
Originally conceived as a big splashy Hollywood movie, Blume adapted her idea for live theater after "it occurred to me even if I got a screenplay written, I don't know anybody in Hollywood."
And when you're tackling the topic of global warming and potentially disastrous climate change, time is running out.
"The whole point of the piece is it's my offering to save the world," Blume said. "We have a short time to do that."
It's no accident Blume brings her play to Homer. Blume and Bunnell Street Gallery director Asia Freeman were roommates when they went to Yale University.
"She's just an incredibly effervescent and truly politically inspired theater activist," Freeman said of Blume. "('The Boycott' is) one of those pro-jects that's characteristically Homer and completely Bunnell. It's meant for an intimate audience."
Blume describes "The Boycott" as "the story of the First Lady of the United States launching a nationwide sex strike to fight global warming."
It's also a bit of metafiction, the story of the First Lady, Lyssa Stratton, and the story of Blume confronting the impact of global warming.
"It's completely fictitious and utterly biographical," Blume said.
Those worlds collide through what many audiences have called their favorite character, Iniga the tree frog a fuzzy green sock puppet with googly eyes. Iniga suffers from tree mold caused by global warming. The First Lady character meets the tree frog on the astral plane when she gets drunk. Later, Blume, the playwright in the play, talks to the sock puppet.
"The worlds collide a bit. Yet again we have the possibilities of what can happen on stage," Blume said. "The joys and possibilities of magical realism and fantasy."
"I have a kind of Dr. Seuss mentality about theater," she added. "My favorite form or art is magical realism. If there's any way to bring strains of that into my work it just happens automatically."
The play's theme is obvious in the main character's name, a reference to Aristophanes' classic Greek comedy, "Lysistrata." It's a theme Blume explored through her earlier work, "The Lysistrata Project" and "The Accidental Activist," a one-woman show about her theatrical event for peace.
"It's funny how 'Lysistrata' has wound up being the theme of the last five years of my life," Blume said. "What we're modeling is a group of people who are facing an intractable situation who feel like they have no power undertaking creative solutions."
"It happens sex sells," she added.
For more information on "The Boycott" visit www.theboycottplay.com. A video of her play is on her Web site at www.kathrynblume.com/BoycottVideo.htm.
Michael Armstrong can be reached at michael.armstrong@homernews.com.
