In the first place it would take your average husband several weeks to a month to notice. Then would come the feeling of relief........

But seriously. Drive down to your local elementary school. Arrive at 7:50 and stay till 8:30 out front. I have yet to see a kid delivered in a tractor trailer but everything under that size is used. Giant SUV's and quad cab diesel pick-ups abound.

When the pope is a bear and all catholics carp in the woods this will happen.

Put the Carbon Back

This play is noteworthy for the same reason that making a movie about climate change is, ie, make a movie and reach all those people who don't want to attend a conference about climate change (and win an Oscar).

Make a play and maybe you'll reach some of those people who don't watch movies but will see performance pieces like this one.

And while you're at it, bend the definitions of the words "activism" and "radical" in new ways.

Erik

The Orion Grassroots Network: supporting grassroots groups working for conservation, justice, & more

Thanks for the shout-out and for deflecting the missed point.

To continue the clarification, the show is a farce.  The uber-message is not about an eco-sex strike.  It's about the wild, hairy, creative solutions we each need to undertake to inch ourselves a little farther back from the brink.

Also ongoing thanks to all the great guys and gals at Grist for the fantastic, world-saving work!

- Kathy

Whether or not by accident, the heroine's first name, "Lyssa," is a real ancient Greek noun.  In the Iliad, it means violent rage.  As a proper noun, it is the name for the hellish goddess who personifies that emotion.  In Euripides' "Heracles," she is sent by Hera to madden the title hero, who murders his wife and children under her influence.

The red-eyed tree frog (from what I can tell) as animal spirit guide (if that is what it is) is an excellent choice.  Polar bears are beginning to be over-used as mascots.

Did you see Nathan Lane's "The Frogs," here in NYC at Alice Tully Hall, the summer of 2004?  We loved it, not least its anti-Bush subtext.  Unfortunately it had little or no effect on the Republican National Convention -- when the delegates came to town, they did indeed see lots of theatre, but usually the friendly stuff.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

While many of the people who come to the show already sensitized to the realities of climate change,  in many cases, there is still a rather large gap between knowing that action needs to be taken, and actually taking action.

That gap is usually a product of some combination of overwhelm, inertia, and despair.

The purpose of the show isn't to alert people to the realities of climate change or convince them that it's real.  Al Gore and the media (finally) have done a pretty good job of that.

The goal of the show is to help folks across that gap into a place where they feel inspired to actually go out and take action.

I can't tell you how many people have come up to me after the show and said some combination of A) Thank you for articulating what I've been feeling - I thought I was the only one who felt that way; B) I've known about what was going on, but I haven't done anything yet and now I'm going to; C) I'm going to come back with friends.

I've also had people tell me some time after seeing the show that they finally got around to toting re-usable shopping bags and coffee mugs with them everywhere they go.

Or, as a friend of mine put it when I told her I'd been accused of preaching to the choir, "Even the choir needs a good hymn."

- Kathy