The Rebirth of Wonder by Lawrence Watt-Evans EPUB

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The Rebirth of Wonder by Lawrence Watt-Evans EPUB

Art Dunham had worked in his father's small-town theater all his life, and had never before seen anything like the group that rented it one summer.

The Bringers of Wonder, as they called themselves, wanted to put on a single performance of a play called The Return of Magic -- but is it a play, or something more?



The Rebirth of Wonder is pure fiction, of course, and Bampton, Massachusetts is my own invention -- but Bampton Summer Theatre is an amalgamation of some real experiences of my own. In fact, this novel is about the most autobiographical work I've done yet.
In Concord, Massachusetts, there's a small theater on either Thoreau or Walden Street -- it's been a long time, and while I could go straight to it from any point in town I don't remember the street names. It was never a church, so far as I know, nor is it obviously magical, but still, it served as the inspiration for the Dunhams' theater building. I was on the lighting crew for an amateur production of "A Midsumer Night's Dream" there, back around 1972 or '73 -- a very good production, I thought.
I and two of my sisters were, at various times, members of a group called Bedford Summer Drama, in Bedford, Massachusetts, also in the early '70s; several minor characters are very loosely based on members of BSD.
The Bringers of Wonder, while drawn from various historical sources, also owe something to the cast and crew of a not-very-successful production of the Berlioz opera "Beatrice and Benedick," put on by Princeton University's Theatre Intime, that I worked on as master electrician.
Virtually every name in the story is drawn from either a real, historical person or place, or a legendary one, or from something in my own past, though often there's no connection beyond the name -- as examples, Bampton is named for Bampton-in-the-Bush, England; I knew a horse named Span, though not Spanner, once; there was a Mr. Christie who kept chickens and provided eggs for most of the families in Bedford; Mr. and Mrs. Dunham ran a bookstore where I bought comic books when I was a kid. The name Dunham means "dark village."
There are other connections to real life, as well, but I won't detail them all here. Suffice it to say that I've been planning this story for a very long time, and I'm quite pleased to finally send it on its way to publication.-- Lawrence Watt-Evans
Gaithersburg, 1991

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