“Ladies and gentlemen, hold onto your seats. Things are about to get hot, sticky, and dirty.... thanks to Heather Woodbury’s As the Globe Warms.”
Earth Day, April 22nd, 2015 - AS THE GLOBE WARMS is a gripping, funny and sexy serial performance connecting the
dots between climate change, America’s religious-secular polarity and economic
inequality. Conceived by THIS AMERICAN LIFE alum Heather
Woodbury, the startling new 12-part eco-comic serial
is released in audio format on Earth Day,
April 22nd, 2015. The serial is an
adaptation of Woodbury’s solo stage tour-de-force directed by Michael Yawney. (“Top
ten play of 2012”- Austin Chronicle).
Crowd-funded since its inception, AS THE GLOBE WARMS the audio serial unfolded for fans between Fall 2014 and Earth Day, 2015 when it launched for
general release as a complete serial- now on iTunes as free podcast!
GLOBE began as a series of live webcast performances in Los
Angeles (2010-11). The stage play was originally adapted by
Woodbury and director Michael Yawney in 2012 at Florida International
University in Miami, the city where global warming dare not say its name; the
play’s premiere run in Austin, Texas coincided with Hurricane Sandy.
THE STORY
The Fight over one small frog in one small town collides with the world-wide-web and the web of life itself.
Endangered amphibians, whirling dervishes, desperate scientists, and Evangelicals gone wild--all the inhabitants of Vane Springs, Nevada tell their tale in this eco-comic epic.
AS THE GLOBE WARMS explores surviving in America today on a planet veering toward social and ecological crisis. When a handsome herpetologist (that's a frog scientist) meets a preacher’s daughter speaking in the tongues of dying animals, their unlikely friendship has far-reaching consequences for our world. At the center of the story is a working class family - itself on the brink of extinction. And flinging about in the mix are Tea Partiers, closeted gay Christians, and eyewitness reports from polar bears, whales, bees, bats and frogs.
The Fight over one small frog in one small town collides with the world-wide-web and the web of life itself.
Endangered amphibians, whirling dervishes, desperate scientists, and Evangelicals gone wild--all the inhabitants of Vane Springs, Nevada tell their tale in this eco-comic epic.
AS THE GLOBE WARMS explores surviving in America today on a planet veering toward social and ecological crisis. When a handsome herpetologist (that's a frog scientist) meets a preacher’s daughter speaking in the tongues of dying animals, their unlikely friendship has far-reaching consequences for our world. At the center of the story is a working class family - itself on the brink of extinction. And flinging about in the mix are Tea Partiers, closeted gay Christians, and eyewitness reports from polar bears, whales, bees, bats and frogs.
WHO
“Stand-up novelist"
Heather Woodbury is known for novel-sized solo works that combine serial
storytelling with high-wire performance. What Ever, her 1990s stage
tour-de-force, was broadcast on radio, with host Ira Glass, and published
by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Filmmaker Richard Linklater (Boyhood) likens
being engrossed in her serial works to "living INSIDE a
novel." Woodbury’s epic serial performances have been published by
Semiotext(e) and FSG and excerpted in The Paris Review, Extreme Exposure
(TCG) and Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (U. Michigan Press). She
is the recipient of the Spalding Gray Award, NEA, and OBIE awards for
playwriting and performance.
The Irish Times writes of her work "What if the great
American novel turns out to be a piece of theatre?" (Fintan O'Toole). And Laurie
Anderson calls her "an incredible one-woman Dickens."
WHEN and WHERE
The complete AS THE GLOBE WARMS is available for high quaility audio download as a complete serial - and now on iTunes as free podcast!
Beginning Earth Day, April 22nd, 2015, Woodbury hopes to tour
cities, towns and eco-encampments, performing segments and offering the on-line
serial, as a means of opening conversation across the religious–secular divide and
engaging with the spiritual and ethical dimensions of the ecological challenge
we face.
“In
this 12-episode eco-comic epic, I hope to contribute to a new paradigm of
sustainable culture, by embodying a spectrum of characters, animals and natural
places struggling for survival in today’s America. The animal and human lives
resonate with yours and mine. My aim is to fuel empathy: between rural and
urban, confirmed atheists and devout Christians, wired up humanity and the
world-wide-web of life itself. Sending well-targeted ripples into
the cultural stream, I envision sharing on-line and in person, a new, inclusive
folktale around the global campfire - be it on a church podium in Tennessee, at
a science conference in California, an eco-festival tent in Portugal… or in
your ears as you trudge to work.”
LINKS
Watch a scene from
original webcast
More info at www.heatherwoodbury.com
PRAISE
for AS THE GLOBE WARMS
“Heather Woodbury's new 12-episode masterpiece, As
the Globe Warms….is a beautiful experiment in soap opera meets PSA. The
drama will suck you in, and then pointed commentary on climate change will
knock the wind out of you.”
- Austin Chronicle
“The sympathetic hearing (that) the character
Lorelei Ray demands for nonhuman animals is thus mirrored in the sympathetic
portrait the performer offers of individuals and communities (such as
Pentecostals or the working poor)….She represents a buzzing pluriverse of
characters who traverse religious and secular spaces to bump up offline and
on.”
-Ann Pellegrini, ANIMAL ACTS, (Univ. Michigan
Press)
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