Considered one of the most influential writers of his generation, Lin Yutang said, “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familia pillow.” So if travel is all about returning home again, Dorothy may have gotten it right when she clicked her ruby slippers, and perhaps those who never leave the place where they grew up need to look no further than their own backyard. Amy Herzog’s 4,000 Miles playing at PlayMakers’ Repertory Company presents this very question. With a character who treks across country with a back pack and another who’s packed 50 years in a Greenwich Village APT, does all the traveling only bring us back to where we began?
West-coast based Director Desdemona Chiang, who co-founded the Seattle performance group Azeotrope, has traveled a long way from her undergraduate degree in integrative biology to work with us here in North Carolina. Born in Maryland, and with a former career as a police officer, Actress Dee Maaske traversed whole careers to join us fresh from an acclaimed run in ‘4,000 Miles’ at Capital Stage Co. in Sacramento last year. Costume and Set Designer Jan Chambers, an Associate professor at UNC, with credits ranging from the west-coast Oregon Shakespeare Festival to DC’s east-coast Folger’s Theatre.
TS Eliot said “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know it for the first time” But what if the end of all our exploring will be just to arrive where we started?
Today we’ll talk to the artists who are doing just that.
