Notch Theatre Company Presents WILD HOME: An American Odyssey, A Community Event and Play Reading Based On Real Stories From The Ohio River Valley

Wild Home: Ohio River Valley, a play by Gwen Kingston directed by James Dean Palmer, tells the (his)stories of coal and oil land and the people who live on it. The play will premiere as a dramatic reading on August 27, 2021. This FREE public event will feature food, music, theatre, and community conversation.

Created by Artistic Director Ashley Teague of Notch Theatre Company and Jessica Kahkoska, Wild Home: An American Odyssey is a national theatre project that brings to the stage the fears, struggles, and experiences of local communities in areas under serious threat from oil drilling and gas fracking.

In each rural community, Notch Theatre Company holds public story-sharing events from which a professional playwright crafts plays based on shared testimony. The plays explore topics of climate change, land sovereignty and the industrialization of public lands and are then performed by professional actors (Lennox T. Duong, Nayib Felix, Eliana Rowe), and community members in outdoor spaces. The plays are paired with facilitated dialogue about local efforts to protect our lands and neighborhoods.

"I'm not afraid of standing up to industry [ ...] But it's been a hundred years since 10,000 union miners took up arms against a corrupt corporation. Maybe this time we can fight with our words. Maybe not so many of us have to die this time. [...] When they call you a redneck, they think they're insulting you. But I think it's something to be proud of." -Wild Home: Ohio River Valley by Gwen Kingston

Wild Home: An American Odyssey aims to magnify stories about American lands under threat and the people who depend on those areas, specifically at this crucial moment in time when the region faces continued oil and gas development and its damaging effects. Wild Home seeks to deepen the conversation around protecting our lands at both a grassroots level and on a national scale. The program strives to connect and create capacity between disparate communities as it partners with rural towns all across America.

On the ground in the Ohio River Valley, Community Partners include representatives from the Center for Coalfield Justice, Clean Air Council, FracTracker Alliance, Ohio Environmental Council, Ohio Environmental Council Action Fund, Earthworks, Save Our Roots, Keep Wayne Wild, Public Herald, the Indigenous Environmental Network, as well as many unaffiliated individuals across Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley.

Wild Home has been featured on HowlRound in their Theatre in the Age of Climate Change series and on Broadway World. Wild Home is made possible by the generosity of Amy Aquino and Drew McCoy, through a grant from the Network of Ensemble Theaters' (NET/TEN) supported by lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and by a National Endowment For The Arts ArtWorks Grant. To learn more, get involved, support the project, or bring Wild Home to your theatre, visit our website: www.notchtheatre.org.

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