If you’re very lucky, you may have a chance to see one particularly provocative play that’s on tour right now. It’s called The Boycott, and its premise is over this thought: what if the absence of global warming policy could mobilize women to practice abstinence as a form of objection?
No, seriously. And global warming isn’t the first to explore the tactic. One review of the play provides background and then some:
The play is a contemporary incarnation of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata, in which women from Athens and Sparta refuse to consort with their husbands until the men have stopped their warring. The twenty-four-hundred-year-old idea has been recently revived, and not only in dramatic form. In 1996, the women of Pergamon, Turkey, denied their husbands until a gold-mining company notorious for its cyanide-leaching techniques was ousted from their village. The women ultimately prevailed.
What’s so captivating about The Boycott, and the perhaps preposterous notion that the global warming movement uses it to garner momentum, is that it jettisons assumptions about what environmental activism should look like; door-to-door canvassing and marches on Washington appear pass© in comparison. Indeed the play’s titillating leitmotif combined with its spot-on statistics may even eclipse Al Gore’s infamous PowerPoint presentation.
Unfortunately, the show doesn’t stop in too many cities. But if you are lucky enough to see it, let us know! Otherwise, just think a bit about that banner — “Hot enough for you?” Perhaps a cold bed could solve the trick…