reWilding

January 12th at 8pm
January 13th and January 14th
at 8 and 11 pm

"Listen
If you listen, you can hear the sounds still
The sound of it, still
listen"

There is a place between civilization and wilderness, where an alternative community has set down roots and use of the past tense has been outlawed. It is a society of the foreign and forgotten, the lost and the seeking, where guitars play stories people don't speak about. Today, someone new arrives and she's asking the wrong questions. Enter a haunting, a hidden woodland community of memories and mysteries, strange humor, complicated beauty, private stories and live music.

A Video Preview of reWilding

From the Playwright:

"People don't come here to find what they lost."

"New lady in town. Talkin. Askin things. Seen her."

"What do they come here for?"

There is a rural community in North Carolina that live in the wild. No one is native. The community, as it was described to me, is comprised of three types of people: progressive intelligentsia who had had it with their societies, devout Mennonites, and straight up crazy people. It is a diverse collection of people that have replaced their former ways of living for selective isolation, choosing what and whom to bring along and what, if anything, to admit about where they came from and what they seek here.

I saw photographs of their faces. The huts, caves and vans they live in, the barns and resurrected houses. The lakes they bathe in and the children they made here. The food they eat, the animals that roam. The town on its periphery where they slowly spend their savings at the Salvation Army and Texaco. This is a rewilding community, a formerly wild space carefully converted to a home for humans. The homes are varied and everyone has their reasons for being here. I looked at these photos and found myself wishing I were one of them.

Then I wondered why. What I would do and why I felt I needed to be there to do it. I wondered what these people aimed to accomplish and what I hoped I could accomplish by doing the same.

These are not their stories. They are my wonderings.

Over the past year, I became obsessed with structures of hope, the hangers that give shape to our lives. The things that are bigger than ourselves that we trust and live for. What if you lose it? What if you chose the wrong thing? What if you realize you never had it? What if you simply perceive a lack? If you don't know even the name of what you're seeking?

Some of us have our "It" and some of us are seeking. Some of us may think we're one when we're actually the other. Some will be both in our lives. Some will own solid faith. And some will fight forever. But all of us are still living. Therefore, we all have hope.

I'm curious about these different faces of hope and the paths of seeking.

These are my wonderings.

Thank you for wondering with us.

- Martyna Majok

reWilding warmups