Adapted from the popular play and featuring an original soundtrack, Mary Jane A Musical Potumentary tells the true story of the marijuana industry like never heard before.
In Mary Jane: A Musical Potumentary, Mary Jane (Joan Schirle) leaves the wreckage of the Summer of Love and lands in northern California’s Humboldt County, where the hippie becomes a back-to-the-land farmer and helps establish the largest cannabis-producing region in the U.S. As she comes to terms with her life as grower and now mother – and on the eve of federal legislation – she must face down a corporate raider with limitless capital (Ed Asner), who plans to take over the industry. Can this female entrepreneur survive … Or will her career go up in smoke?
In 2011, Dell’Arte International premiered Mary Jane: The Musical at its annual Mad River Festival in Blue Lake, Calif. Partnering with 12 local songwriters, the play featured Humboldt County-centric characters facing various issues in the marijuana milieu. Quickly gaining notoriety, the show was a sellout hit and the highest-grossing play in the troupe’s 35-year history. Wrote the Los Angeles Times, “Behind its original songs and humor, the play about marijuana cultivation is a bittersweet, multi-generational tale that celebrates the plant while laying bare the industry’s dark side.”
Now, in partnership with Emmy-nominated filmmaker John Howarth, this rockin’ expose has been reimagined as a film, Mary Jane: A Musical Potumentary, examining Humboldt County’s marijuanaindustry on the eve of federal legislation through music and levity. Featuring Ed Asner, 16 original songs and documentary footage of the marijuana-growing world to illustrate the reality behind the fiction, the film asks: Can illegal growers finally become upright members of the community as entrepreneurs in a new industry?
