You can go home again

Wayne Theatre Alliance presents special performance of Hamner’s Homecoming

Staff Report
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The Wayne Theatre Alliance has engaged the Hamner Theater to present a reader’s theatre version of Earl Hamner’s beloved family Christmas story The Homecoming on Saturday, Dec. 19 at 2 p.m. as part of Waynesboro’s Christmas in River City celebration. The performance will be staged at the Blue Ridge Christian Fellowship space at 329 W. Main St. in Waynesboro.

The production is “pay what you will”, but seats are limited. Reserved seats are available for a small fee of $5 per seat for adults and $2 for children 12 and under. Call 540.943.9999 to request a reservation.

The Homecoming is the heart-warming story of a family waiting for the magic of Christmas Eve to arrive – not Santa, but Daddy – told from the perspective of the adult Clay-Boy as he remembers the journey he took, on that snowy evening long ago.

Clay-Boy searches for his father and encounters some colorful characters that expand his growing understanding of the world.

Says writer Earl Hamner of The Homecoming, “It is remembered in my family that on Christmas Eve of 1933 my father was late arriving home. That, along with the love he and my mother bestowed upon their eight red-headed offspring, is fact. The rest is fiction.” The script became the genesis for the popular TV show “The Waltons.”

The production is directed by the Hamner Theater’s co-artistic director, Boomie Pedersen. The cast will include a number of the actors from the current staging of The Homecoming at the Hamner Theater in Nellysford.

The Hamner Theater, a non-profit project of the Rockfish Valley Community Center, receives funding from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and anonymous donors to support its mission of bringing professional theater to Nelson County.

The WTA’s production of The Homecoming is partly supported by a grant from the Community Foundation of the Central Blue Ridge.

For more information contact the Wayne Theatre Alliance or visit its website, www.waynetheatre.org.