Mother Nature isn’t mad, she’s just disappointed. She’s poured so much beauty and care into us, her children, and what have we done with it? Burned it all down. But she understands. She’s seen destruction before (she still misses the dinosaurs), and she’ll see it again.
But the title character of Bhama Roget’s cabaret show, “Mother Nature, The Farewell Tour,” isn’t here for any sort of audience excoriation or rant about climate change.
“She’s like, ‘I’m just here to make sure you have the best apocalypse ever,’” Roget explained. “And then she does a PowerPoint presentation.”
“Mother Nature,” coming to Erickson Theatre on Capitol Hill from April 2-5 as part of Intiman Theatre’s ongoing cabaret series, can’t be tidily summed up. As expected from a multidisciplinary artist like Roget, the show is many things: a rock concert, opera, comedy and ritual — a treatise on cosmic creation and destruction and the agony and ecstasy of a creative life.
“But it’s also funny — I do bite the head off of a bat during a heavy metal song,” Roget said.
Written and performed by Roget, alongside a five-piece band, the show is directed by Jennifer Jasper and music directed by Brendan Milburn, who also contributed additional music.
“I hope it has the catharsis of a party, but also the catharsis of the truth being told,” Roget said. “This is the show that I’ve been trying to write all my life, my whole career.”
Roget landed in Seattle from Garland, Texas, nearly 30 years ago, along with her sister who’d landed a job at Fantagraphics. In 2004, Roget’s Seattle career launched when she played Yitzhak in a remounting of the rock musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” starring Nick Garrison at Re-bar. (The 2000 production, starring Garrison and Sarah Rudinoff, was the first-ever regional production of “Hedwig” following the show’s meteoric off-Broadway run and a smash success.)
Roget went on to perform in plenty of high-profile Seattle shows — including the frenetic farces “Noises Off” and “Boeing Boeing” at Seattle Rep and the apocalyptic comedy “Mr. Burns, a post-electric play” at ACT Contemporary Theatre — to name just a few.
Along the way, she’s supported herself as (among other things) a barista, server, facilitator of corporate leadership programs and, for a while, star of Bartell Drugs commercials.
But over time, Roget became less and less interested in being a vessel for other people’s art and ideas.
In 2019, she’d come back from a second unsuccessful (and expensive) sojourn to Los Angeles. “I’m about to turn 50 and the theater in Seattle is kind of gone,” she remembered thinking. “I was working in a restaurant, I had no retirement and I thought, ‘I can’t be an artist anymore.’”
But friends, some of whom Roget has been improvising with (primarily with the Bainbridge comedy group The Edge Improv) for decades, gently insisted that she write a proposal for a show. They took that proposal to a longtime friend and champion of artists, in hopes of funding Roget’s work.
“She supported me for a year while I wrote this show,” Roget said.
While the COVID-19 pandemic exploded, Roget poured all her frustration and hope into her work. “What kept coming to me is, ‘We are not meant to be living like this,’” she said. “‘We’ve made a world that is toxic to us. We’re in our pods, and many of us Gen X ladies are just sweltering — the world is on fire, I’m on fire.’” Who better to tell this story, she realized, than Mother Nature herself?
“Mother Nature” may be the culmination of Roget’s artistic life so far, but it’s also what she called an “unbecoming” of all the things her career imposed on her, not least of which are the struggles of surviving as an independent artist and performing in a female body.
“I literally have a slideshow of photos of me in shows in Seattle, and I’m in my underwear in almost all of them,” she said. “I was unbecoming the person that I had to be to survive, which is the person that people hire, the person that gets picked for the job.”
She toured “Mother Nature” to Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2024 and the High Performance Rodeo festival in Calgary in 2025 before bringing it home to Seattle. For the first time, Roget said, she knew her job was just to make this show exist, as an offering. Anything else just isn’t up to her.
“It’s very hard to put language to the anxieties of the moment we’re in, and to acknowledge collective grief and the collapse of a shared worldview,” she said. “But I have tremendous faith in humanity’s capacity for creating beauty and loving one another. I want people to remember how beautiful we are.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com ’
