Mugwumpin Postpones BLOCKBUSTER SEASON Due to Performer's Health

San Francisco's adventurous, award-winning theater ensemble Mugwumpin has decided to postpone the world premiere of Blockbuster Season, a hilarious critique of the Hollywood disaster film genre. Created and performed by Mugwumpin founders Joe Estlack and Christopher White, Blockbuster Season is a co-production with Intersection for the Arts. The reason for the decision to postpone is health related.

Blockbuster Season leads audiences on a perilous tour through the billion-dollar disaster flick industry. Giant asteroids, nuclear Armageddon, alien invasions are just a few of the more spectacular ways human civilization may come to an end, and Hollywood has made a specialty of serving up variants of the same stories and characters again and again: the panicked masses of humanity in disarray and the high testosterone heroes who save them with a mix of chutzpah, high-ammunition artillery and mano a mano combat.

Mugwumpin dramatizes these familiar clichés with a critical eye aimed at exposing their darker implications and real-world cognates. New York Mayor Rudolf Guiuliani after 9/11 and George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina are each conjured by Estlack and White over the course of a play that seeks to offer an alternative ending to the classic disaster flick narrative. Blockbuster Season suggests a way out of the fiery explosion that doesn't involve a commanding leader or superhero.

Blockbuster Season is directed by Susannah Martin with sound design by Teddy Hulsker, scenic design by Sean Riley and costume design by Ashley Rogers. Wolfgang Lancelot Wachalovsky serves as producer.

ABOUT MUGWUMPIN: Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, Mugwumpin reaffirms its mission to reinvigorate live performance as a communal event. Since its founding, Mugwumpin has created 13 evening-length productions and many smaller performances, all of which premiered in the Bay Area. Mugwumpin's first show, Rabbit Causes Dog, was named Best Play at the 2004 SF Fringe Festival. In 2008, Mugwumpin thrilled international audiences at the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre with its original work Super:Anti:Reluctant. In 2010, This Is All I Need played to packed houses and universal critical acclaim in San Francisco. It was named Best Play by both SF Weekly and the San Francisco Bay Guardian before embarking upon a successful European tour in 2011. And their most recent productions, Future Motive Power and The Great Big Also, have reaped sold-out houses and critical praise for their "provocative images and ideas" and their "urgent call for us to question our ideals and associations and to cultivate that other, neglected American quality: staunch individualism" (Lily Janiak, HowlRound). For more information, visit Mugwumpin.org.

ABOUT INTERSECTION FOR THE ARTS: Established in 1965, Intersection is a pioneering arts and community development organization that brings people together across boundaries to instigate break-through change. Intersection's programs emphasize relationships, collaboration, and process. Intersection works with hundreds of artists through residencies, commissions, fellowships, fiscal sponsorship and incubation, performances, exhibitions, workshops and public art projects. Annually, Intersection works with more than 50 community partners across sector and field. Intersection is a lead collaborator on the 5M Project, a 4-acre multi-phase, mixed-use development project located in downtown San Francisco. With The 5M Project, Intersection is helping to prototype the next generation of urban development that embraces diversity of thought, life experience, and culture as essential to positive economic and social change in our neighborhoods.

Pictured: Joe Estlack and Christopher White photographed by Pak Han.

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