Huh? Bethlehem’s “Forgotten Utopia”?

(37th in a series of posts on Touchstone Theatre)

“Hidden Seed: Bethlehem’s Forgotten Utopia” plays Tuesday, October 8 – 7:00-8:30p and Wednesday, October 8 – 7:00-8:30p and Thursday, October 9, 8:00-9:30p
http://festivalunbound.com/hidden-seed/

The stories we tell shape the lives that we lead

Gadfly attended the performance of “Hidden Seed: Bethlehem’s Forgotten Utopia” with a small group in Single Sisters House last night.

It was special.

It was like going to Mass in the Catacombs.

What is our “forgotten Utopia”?

“In the first two decades, the Moravians built a racially integrated city that abolished poverty, shared wealth equally, emancipated women to be leaders, and provided free education, health care, child care, and elder care to all.” (Seth Moglen)

Three 18th century female Bethlehem ghosts — a formerly enslaved West African woman, a Native American woman, and one of the original Moravian immigrants from Europe — agree to tell everything, the whole story not just the happy parts, without lying.

Everything . . . the whole story . . . not just the happy parts . . . without lying.

This is the way to learn history.

First-person, multi-perspectiv’d, tension-filled, contrarian.

Not text-bookish and smoothed out.

What is the “hidden seed”?

“We brought the hidden seed here, to Bethlehem, yes, yes, we came here to evangelize, but we also came to build a model of life, an example for the entire world, a City on a Hill, that would spread its light far and wide. We had no interest in personal wealth, we didn’t come here to build private houses or family farms. We came here to build a community in which everyone’s needs would be met communally.”