Could denying bedroom privileges save the planet?

There will be a record number of side events at the United Nations-sponsored climate talks in Copenhagen next month, but one woman’s one-woman show could give the delegates, most of whom will be men, the incentive they really need to agree a new global warming treaty.

In “The Boycott“, Kathryn Blume plays Lyssa, First Lady of the United States and climate crusader.  Loosely borrowing from a play from ancient Greece, Lyssa launches a nationwide sex strike to fight global warming. As the play unfolds, Lyssa is forced to take on her indifferent husband, a hostile press and a romantic rival who’s not only in bed with the President, but with the oil industry as well.

Blume is co-founder of the Lysistrata Project, named after the Aristophanean comedy on which The Boycott is based.  Originally performed in ancient Athens in 411 BC, Lysistrata tells the tale of one woman’s attempt to end the Peloponnesian War by convincing all women to withhold bedroom privileges from their husbands.

“I’m an obscure solo performer from Vermont … And I’m in a chronic, weepy panic over the fact that serious climate change is happening now and while the whole point of this piece is to help save the world, I’m afraid it’s already too late,” Blume writes on her website.

Blume will perform her play in Copenhagen at 8pm on Thursday, Dec. 10 at Klimaforum09, a parallel “people’s” climate change summit featuring live debate, art, music and film.

More than 20,000 people will congregate in the Danish capital between Dec. 7-18 as government officials from nearly 200 countries try negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which is due to expire in 2012.

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