#PhillySavesEarth is part of the Painted Bride’s Re-PLACING-ing Philadelphia project – a series of performances, exhibitions and events that reflect on Philadelphia’s past while re-envisioning its future.

The show is a kaleidoscopic remix of history, ecology, protest and personal narrative that reveals the essential connections we share with the natural world. Philadelphia experts join the performance as Philly’s social justice history comes to life through the words of Frederick Douglass, astronaut Guy Bluford, urban ecologist Scott Quitel, a SEPTA bus driver, Delaware Riverkeeper Maya von Rossum, and Pope Francis.

Directed by David O’Connor, and designed by Sara Outing, the score for the piece will be provided by Nioka Workman on cello and some Philadelphia Sound hits from Teddy Pendergrass, Patti LaBelle, and Boys II Men.

Pottenger wrote most of #PhillySavesEarth during her residency at The MacDowell Colony after a year-and-a-half of research and story exchanges with Philadelphia residents. At its heart, #PhillySavesEarth is an intimate, uncompromising look at impact of humans on the environment and the opportunity for Philadelphians to revolutionize that relationship.

“Philly’s been home to game-changing social justice victories,” says Pottenger. “Writing #PSE has given me the courage to consider climate change and the consequences around us and up ahead. As many of us struggle to find time and mind to contemplate climate change, where better than theater to come together with heart, science, humor, and hope?”

Pottenger asks the audience to look at their own histories as mirrors of what we are doing to the earth: “Witnessing. Participating. Benefitting. My story maps may be wrong but anchoring them in history is not. There are those of you who have bloody tales of your own. There are others here tonight damaged to the core by silence, abandonment, by measured affection. We have won such victories and we have lost so many. We are not doing anything to the earth that we don’t do to each other.”—

About Marty Pottenger

From her Obie award-winning City Water Tunnel #3, about New York City’s engineering feat to ABUNDANCE, a look at America and money through interviews with multi-millionaires and minimum wage earners, theater artist Marty Pottenger brings her unique theatrical mind to Philadelphia, exploring the city through interviews, research and story exchanges.  A long-time New Yorker, Marty’s pioneered Art At Work, in the city of Portland, Maine, and has directed the program since 2007. A part of the Painted Bride’s family for over 20 years, you can listen to her TEDx Talk here.

“Lyrical…speaking with intimate knowledge, and yes, even love…a blending of Studs Terkel, Anna Deavere Smith and Pete Seeger.” — The New York Times

“Rejoice that you have another chance to catch Marty Pottenger… a triumph of this genre… the erotics of work… stucturedas tightly as a sonata, juxtaposing video with live action, motion with stillness, music with storytelling; it’s truly a labor oflove.” — TheVillage Voice

“Abundance is a clear-eyed, barrier-ground breaking, unsettling, an ultimately optimistic new play that lives on in the mind days after you see it.” — NYTheater.com

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This event is part of Re-PLACE-ing Philadelphia, the Painted Bride’s project focusing on building an expanded archive of cultural memory that includes multiple histories, re-place-ing the established with new narratives and understandings of Philadelphia. Visit www.re-place-ing.org for more information on the project and the culminating April 2016 events.

Re-PLACE-ing Philadelphia has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.