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 Funny times these: If the best Hollywood movies now are TV shows, then it’s entirely appropriate that the best TV series might be a live, solo performance piece in a grungy part of Los Angeles.
Award-winning “performance novelist” Heather Woodbury is quietly in the home stretch of her latest 30-episode dramatic serial, As the Globe Warms, winding up a multi-character, multi-plotlined epic that makes no sense in traditional theater, but complete sense to anyone who watches cable television. Laurie Anderson has called Woodbury “a one-woman Dickens.”
With her near-legendary ability to somehow perform scenes featuring a dozen or more characters at once, Woodbury (whom this writer has worked with in the past) gets epic this time with a hilarious and haunting tale of evangelical Christian teens-gone-wild, environmentalist scientists battling mega-church zealots (in defense of a “Macguffin” frog), and the struggling, often meth-terrorized “new poor,” who can’t quite believe they aren’t middle-class anymore.
Like Woodbury’s previous works, What Ever and Tale of 2cities (available as books at Amazon.com), current events become part of Globe‘s narrative, so you can pretty much count on finding the day’s headlines wound into the night’s show. In the early 2000s, 9/11 completely re-routed Woodbury’s narrative the same way it re-routed the lives of her audiences.
If you’re in the L.A. area, you can join the carnivalesque adventure each Tuesday through April 5 at the Bootleg Theater (with one wild-card show March 15 at Wordspace). But being there isn’t absolutely necessary; go to Woodbury’s Vimeo page to catch up on the story so far.
Watch a recent clip from As the Globe Turns here:
AsTHeGlobe Warms EP 27SHORT:TownHallUSA! from Heather Woodbury on Vimeo. |
