Uncle Buzzy's Hometown Theatre | Civil Eats

Uncle Buzzy’s Hometown Theatre

During Slow Food Nation on Labor Day weekend, Uncle Buzzy’s Hometown Theatre will be volunteering their performance at the Soap Box area and other surprise appearances near the Marketplace and the Victory Garden.

Uncle Buzzy’s character, based on the group’s leader Michael Sommers, is a transplanted small town farmer from Vermont who moved to the city. The group is a comedy theatre dealing with issues of lost community and the feeling out of place in a modern, industrialized society.

Michael says the group wants to “bring small town entertainment to the big city” with short acts of street theatre, adapted and original music and a variety of comedy sketches customized for every particular audience. The group tends to improvise and localize its pieces because they want to “provide entertainment that has to do with local issues and local people,” as opposed to the normalized models promoted by big industries such as mainstream movies and music.

One of the group pieces is Uncle Buzzy’s story, from the moment when he’s tricked out of his farm by a corporate conglomerate, to his work as a “spokeschicken” on an industrial chicken processing plant, to culminate with “the world greatest chicken impression”. Another piece, “The bananas,” tells the story of two Chiquita bananas trying to convince a local heirloom banana to lose the splotches and straighten out its curve in order to fit into the bunch. Make sure you don’t miss the fun and be prepared to join a sing-a-long of the “Pig Song” and “The list of the Omnivore’s Dilemma”

A detail schedule of the Slow Arts program will be published in August on the Slow Food Nation website.

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Lena Zuniga is the Agrarian Arts Coordinator for Slow Food Nation. She has previously worked designing and facilitating knowledge sharing processes and the use of new media for a variety of multicultural groups and non-profit organizations, especially within the social economy movement in Latin America. Read more >

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  1. Uncle Buzzy
    That's a delicious piece on me, Uncle Buzzy, thank you! You know Slow Food and Hometown Theater are two peas in a pod- how will we understand our local food, our local farmers, our localities if we only get our news and entertainment from National Global Super Bradpittaglomerates? Hometown Theater is live- it is alive- it is local- it is animal,vegetable, mineral. It is hospitable and personal... and just like the food we eat it's fun! So dig in!!
    Uncle Buzzy

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