Human Nature is a touring theater company dedicated to addressing crucial societal issues related to environment and social equity through original theatrical productions. The company was launched with a major dance, Human Nature, from which we took our name.
Our first full-on musical comedy, Queen Salmon, subtitled A biologically explicit musical comedy for people of several species toured from Santa Cruz to Seattle from 1990-1995. It was an attempt to deal with polarization of rural resource-based communities over issues of salmon and timber harvest. It played to great audience and critical acclaim in both Grange Halls and community centers in small towns as well as some of the great theaters of San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. The San Francisco Bay Guardian called it “The Funniest Ecology Lesson Ever”.
While performing, by invitation, another musical comedy, The Wolf at the Door, at a conference on sustainable development in Istanbul, company principals were made aware by leaders from the Inuit communities of the arctic of the realities of climate change that were already affecting life there.
From 2002 through 2006, we toured in the US with What’s Funny About Climate Change? a comedy review which applied our brand of humor to an issue that too often intimidated people or brought them to the need to deny the phenomenon which the coal, oil and gas industries were only too glad to further. The show was a direct attack on obfuscation and denial.
Our new climate comedy show was launched last year. We took the production, Tripping on the Tipping Point, to the United Nations international conference on climate change (COP 17) in Durban, South Africa late last fall. The show was a great hit there especially for Zulu audiences. A critic for South Africa’s Amandla magazine called the show “a side-splitting farce…a must-see political comedy.”
The show will tour in California in August and September including a month long run in San Francisco. In 2010 Human Nature received the coveted Prize of Hope from Denmark’s Institute for Popular Theater.
