‘Neither of us were very charismatic. That was a problem.’
This play is based on the true-life story of two very eccentric American individuals whose vision of establishing an alternative utopia in the depths of rural Pennsylvania didn’t quite play out.
It happened that a cast member was working at The New York Times when he came across an article about the two men written by Penelope Green. Fledgling Theatre have sprinkled the fairy dust and reimagine this fascinating story with sympathetic subtly, wry humour and dramatic panache.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/style/they-built-it-no-one-came.html?_r=0
It is as heart-breaking as it is uplifting, inspiring as it is dumfounding. The cannier in the audiences will soon check-out the Company’s cheeky riff on the leap of faith quote from Kevin Costner’s Field Of Dreams.
‘Their ideals were lofty but simple: They would live off the land, farming with Colonial-era tools, along with a band of like-minded men dressed in homespun robes wielding scythes and pickaxes. They would sleep in atmospheric log cabins and other 18th-century structures that they had rescued from the area and that they began to reconstruct, painstakingly, brick by crumbling brick and log by log.’
‘But what if you built a commune, and no one came?
Fledgling Theatre Company is an international theatre company based in both London and Sydney and formed by Callum Cameron, Christopher Neels, Chris Huntley-Turner and Patrick Holt in 2013. Ben Maier, award-winning writer and composer, joins the ensemble for his first Fledgling Theatre show. This is their Fringe debut.
They Built It. No One Came. – Fledgling Theatre Company
Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker Two). Venue 33. 5 -29 August
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/they-built-it-no-one-came
