The one-woman show that artist, architect and now playwright Jill Karlin is bringing to Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe will first be performed for one night here in South Florida, where Karlin and her solo foray into theater have deep roots
Called The Dolphins Are Still Singing. Can you hear them? The Epic Story of Lee, Me, and the Tree, it’s a love story at heart. Through poetry, monologue and real-time onstage painting, Karlin recounts her life with influential architect Lee Porter Butler, who died in 2005, and the shared passion for environmentalism that they called their “Dolphin Dream.” She also relates the couple’s quest to champion a passive, zero-emissions indoor climate control system that designer and homebuilder Butler invented in the 1970s.
The play is, for Karlin, a way of continuing that work on sustainability. “It’s the most important thing we can do on the planet today, because architecture is foundational for everything,” she tells PureHoney. “So this has been my life mission.”
The husband and wife founded Ekotecture in South Florida as a firm and a building philosophy whose centerpiece is Butler’s pioneering “gravity geothermal envelope.” The envelope is a layered form of construction with space between walls that allows natural air flow and ambient temperature to cool or heat an interior.
The Dolphins Are Still Singing is “the origin story of how Ekotecture gets started,” Karlin says, adding that “it’s also woo-woo and spiritually driven, and [with] dolphins and trees — I mean, it’s out there! And this is a way to get the story heard and seen, and into hearts and minds. Again, the goal is to get the buildings built.”
The Dolphins Are Still Singing director Kleber Soares calls the show “a poetic, humorous, mystical, and deeply moving journey through love, loss, spiritual awakening, environmental activism, and the extraordinary true story of Jill and Lee’s partnership in creating Ekotecture and The Dolphin Dream.”
Jill Karlin Butler performs The Dolphins Are Still Singing. Can you hear them? The Epic Story of Lee, Me, and the Tree, 6pm Sunday, August 9 at the Stonzek Studio Theater in Lake Worth Beach. An afterparty with Karlin Butler at Man Ray in Lake Worth Beach follows. thedolphindream.com ~ Tim Moffatt
