September 6, 2004
Once again, the intrepid comedy idealists of Human Nature ride out into the American hinterlands to joust not so much `with' windmills as `for' them. Since February of last year, the company has been performing its threeperson comedy review, What's Funny About Climate Change?, throughout the United States in efforts to help provoke new and effective responses to global warming.
Recent forays have taken the company from the Bay Area to the Southwest and on to the American heartland. The show has been performed in a disparate series of venues--Grange halls and community centers in small rural communities as well as great theaters like the Memorial Union Theater in Madison, Wisconsin and the Taos cultural center in New Mexico.
True to its plan to perform this shamelessly political show up until the November election, Human Nature will head out across the country, back to Wisconsin and then on to Vermont and finally to New York City. For those who might want to warn friends, the show will run in New York from October 20-24 at the Theater for the New City at 155 First Avenue.
After the election, the company plans to move forward into its larger show, the working title of which is Global Warming: The Musical. Our hope is to incite popular audiences to prod the soon-to-be-new, mildly democratic, wildly cautious Kerry administration toward taking some of the desperately needed actions that the Bush and Clinton administrations have desperately avoided year after year.
It must be noted that in this absolutely crucial election year, with two candidates vying for the most powerful political position in the world, that issues of climate change and planetary survival have more or less disappeared from public forums. This should not come as a surprise to those aware of what must be one of the most magnificent misappropriations of national attention ever--a recent study by ADT research revealed that while the Iraq war was given 4,047 minutes of news coverage by the three major TV networks in 2003, global warming got a total of 15! Without a wakeup call, how can Americans stop walking in their sleep? Forward, toward that promising windmill!
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TOC for Forest & River News, Summer 2004