Sunday, April 19, 2015



“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.

LISTEN TO The Newest Episodes from the current podcast heatherwoodbury.bandcamp.com 

WATCH a scene from the original crowd-funded webcast https://vimeo.com/20087486

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. 

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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