SAXTONS RIVER — Art and activism are natural links for 44-year-old writer and actor Kathryn Blume of Charlotte, who will perform her one-women show, The Boycott, at Vermont Academy next week.
Though the show is a benefit for Destination Bellows Falls and The Green Island Project, a local sustainable business group “facilitating a green economy,” Blume said, “I never really thought of myself as an activist before. I think of it as being a responsible citizen.”
Blume has been performing The Boycott since its premiere at the Vermont Stage Company in Burlington in 2007. She has taken the show to Alaska, Copenhagen, New Hampshire, California, Missouri, and the web, where a full-length video version can be viewed on website, The Boycott “tells the story of the First Lady of the United States launching a nationwide sex strike to fight global warming and save the world.”
The site urges people to “[c]ome for a raucous tour of Oval Office affairs, psychedelic absinthe trips, enchanted frogs, movie star cameos, and land in a heap of unabashed hope.”
Or, as the Anchorage Daily News put it, Blume is “Al Gore on crack. With red hair. And a uterus.”
Blume, also an artistic associate at the Vermont Stage Company in Burlington, has a long list of roles in off-Broadway, regional theater, and film. She also teaches a number of acting workshops and has written fiction, nonfiction, plays, and songs.
She traces the roots of her performance work to her college years, when she started to see the “interconnection of the world” and its social and environmental problems.
“I couldn't, in good conscience, be a citizen of the planet and not try to fix what is seriously wrong and should be the response of every responsible person,” she said.
A plot device from ancient Greece
Blume's response to the announcement the United States intended to invade Iraq was to launch the Lysistrata Project with cofounder Sharon Bower.
The project, described as “a worldwide theatrical act of dissent,” featured worldwide readings of Lysistrata, a play by Aristophanes first performed in Greece in the third century B.C.E.
That play portrayed one woman's response to the Peloponnesian War, where Lysistrata, the title character, tried to persuade the wives of the soldiers and politicians to withhold sex from their husbands.
Within two months, more than 1,000 readings of the play took place in all 50 states and in 59 countries. The project raised more than $100,000 for peace-oriented charities.
While Blume isn't advocating women withhold sex from their mates to get what they want, she found the plot device from Lysistrata too good to pass up and gave it a contemporary environmental spin in The Boycott.
“There's a metamessage [in Lysistrata] about a group of people who feel they have no power in the face of the difficult and impossible,” Blume says. “It's a wildly heroic and creative act, and it has been used by women many times over the ages to make them heard when all else failed.”
Did she feel that action was successful?
“That depends on what your definition of success is. What we know in retrospect is there was no way that war was going to be stopped.”
In the end, “We let the world, and especially the Muslim people, know that not everyone was behind Bush. Not all Americans hate Muslims,” she says.
“We were very well heard,” Blume says.
Blume adds that the Lysistrata Project gave people who are not normally involved in politics a chance to express their disagreement with the Iraq invasion, engaging “people who otherwise wouldn't be engaged.”
As a result of the project, Blume says classes are taught in college theater history with teachers using her Lysistrata Project as an example of how live theater ties in with social action. “I call that a sort of success too,” she says.
“As actors, we're using tools to make our voices heard about things we care about [like climate change and war],” Blume explains.
Laughter helps
Since the play's opening in 2007, Blume said her personal response to climate change in The Boycott has “stayed intact,” even though in the interim science and politics have begun to address the issue.
To do so, “I'm trying not to tie [the play] in with any [particular] social or political agenda.
“I wanted it to be a pretty universal story of the impact of living on a planet in peril,” she says.
Blume says that The Boycott was born of “frustration and grief and hopelessness [and myriad] attempts at creatively responding to that instinct to do something and survive.”
The play is intended to be funny, witty and, in its simplicity, sustainable in its use of minimal props and the audience's imagination.
Blume says that her use of humor throughout The Boycott allows the audience to laugh about a subject that is deadly serious.
“I may be performing for the choir, but for some people, seeing the play is like refilling their cups among like-minded people,” she says.