By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Genevieve Simon’s new play, “Bloom, Bloom, Pow,” which has deep roots in Northwest Ohio, opened this weekend in a theater in the heart of Manhattan.
Simon, from Bowling Green, said this production at Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at A.R.T./New York Theater marks a major breakthrough for her. “This show is getting produced on scale that’s so beyond anything we’ve been able to do before,” they said.
The play runs through Oct. 2. Click for details.
The surreal “queet climate-doom comedy” was inspired by the Toledo water crisis of 2014.
(Ambe J. Photography/provided)
“I knew on some level I wanted to write about the algal blooms,” Simon said. The Bowling Green High graduate had already headed off to study at Ohio State when a toxic bloom over the intake valve of the Toledo water plant poisoned water throughout the region. But Simon followed the crisis on the news Their friends were taking water from Bowling Green, which was not affected, and hauling it to Toledo.
“They are so theatrical,” Simon said of the blooms. “The color is so powerful – this neon green pea soup you can’t touch. Things float on top of it. You can’t boil it. And they come and go.” At first, Simon imagined the blooms as “a great super villain,” an image inspired by comic books. But as the playwright studied more about them it was clear that the bloom is not a villain. “It just doesn’t care about us,” they said. “It’s very indifferent to us. We’re just making it stronger by what we’re doing. It’s not that the algae blooms are out to get us.”
Those blooms are not solely a Northwest Ohio problem, they noted. Prospect Park Lake in Brooklyn slos suffers from algae.
As a writer, Simon, 30, pondered: “What does it feel like to be a human right now who lives in circle of … climate catastrophes? How are we finding joy and finding connection? How do I make it a comedy, a climate doom comedy? It’s a very surreal, absurd time to be alive. We’re in very heavy times right now. We’re trying to find joy.”
Simon started writing “Bloom, Bloom, Pow” in 2019 and had a reading of the play in February 2020. The play had already been accepted to a summer festival. Then the pandemic came on, and it was canceled.
Simon kept working on “the best and safest and most sustainable way to put this show up.”
The show continued to develop that time. Simon collaborated with set designers, sound designers, and shadow puppeteers.
The play includes scenes under water and in the middle of the Great Pacific garbage patch. The Great Lakes are personified. They act, Simon said, like five kids arguing in the back of the family car during a vacation.
Speaking from New York by telephone before the opening, Simon said: “I’m extremely moved by what is possible. It feels it’s been a couple years of a lot of work and a lot of keeping at it. This will be definitely be a huge step forward in terms of what I’ve been able to achieve with my writing and putting it up.”
The play is love letter to Northwest Ohio and “to my mom and people who raised me.” Simon is the daughter Maria Simon and Marc Simon.
“It really is emotional to watch a story here that’s such to a love letter of where I’m from, the geography of where I’m from, the soundscape of where I’m from. To have references to Pisanello’s pinball machine, people talking about the local art museum. People hanging out in the middle of a field at night.”
The playwright would like to eventually share “Bloom Bloom Pow” with the community it is rooted in.
Last week in the midst of moving risers and setting lights for the opening, Simon had a flashback to their days with Horizon Youth Theatre, working in someone’s back yard painting scenery to create an imaginary world.
“These are principles and the tools I was taught at a very early age. Having that ability to do so many different jobs, having so many skills, is what I like about this field. It’s why I do theater,” Simon said.
They still act, last appearing as Caliban in “The Tempest” in North Carolina. But they don’t act in their own work. “I’ve learned that I’m not interested in doing both at once.”
Succeeding requires being self-sufficient. It’s a lesson “engrained in what I learned at HYT and high school.” It’s important “to make your own stuff,” Simon said. “If I sit around and wait on someone to get a job I won’t ever work.”
Crediting Scott Regan, the troupe’s founder and “Dr. G, high school drama teacher Jo Beth Gonzalez, the playwright said “the values they taught us to follow as children are still the values I follow as a professional. … We still need this. There’s some kid out there like me who knows they can do this. … I wouldn’t be here except for Horizon Youth Theatre … and the fact that Bowling Green had a place to experience this art form.”
