Acclaimed Quaker author/playwright Frank Levering is spending a week (Jan. 26-29) at Wilmington College as its winter Quaker-in-Residence. He will interact with students and the campus community, highlighting the theme “Farming as Ministry,” as well as programming for the greater Wilmington community.
One of those events, a reader’s play by Levering, The Distance Between Us, will be reprised at 7 p.m. Saturday (Jan. 31) at the Wilmington Friends Meeting in downtown Wilmington. It will again feature WC alumnae readers Bekah Wall, assistant professor of communication arts, and Terri Baker Anderson, with alumna Lori Scott providing live music. WC alumnus Bill Kincaid Jr. is directing the play.
This play is set in the early 1800s as an exchange of letters between a Quaker mother in Ohio and her daughter in Virginia, the latter of whom had been disowned for marrying a Baptist. This play delves into issues of Quaker theology and practice, slavery and antislavery, family dynamics and personal struggles. This story is told entirely in letters and spans nearly 20 years in the lives of two remarkable women, one a staunch Quaker forging a life of strong principles, the other a Quaker at heart whose younger son comes to manhood with convictions much like his grandmother’s.
Can mother and daughter forgive one another, opening the door to a true reunion? Can the daughter, Maiden, come to her mother in Ohio before her aging mother’s death? These questions are in the letters – and are answered in the final drama of the play.
Levering is the author of nine books and 26 plays and has a Hollywood film to his credit. His books include the 1992 bestseller Simple Living: One Couple’s Search for a Better Life, Moving to a Small Town: along with Nothing’s Too Small to Make a Difference, Love Mom: Stories from the Life of a Global Activist, Teacher and Mother of Six, Welcome to the Country: Things You Need to Know When Moving to Rural Virginia, Blue Light: Poems from a Life and Fruit Orchard Cookbook: Over Ninety Years of Family Fruit Recipes from Levering Orchard.
As the owner of Levering Orchard, in the Blue Ridge Mountain town of Ararat, NC, near the Virginia border, he carries on the truck farming tradition started by his grandparents in 1908. In addition to apples and pears, Levering Orchard features 33 acres of cherry trees with an amazing 59 varieties to choose from. Levering calls it Cherry Mountain, the self-proclaimed “largest and most beautiful cherry orchard in the South, and with the greatest selection of cherries, both sweet and sour.”
Levering has spent decades engaged in environmental activism and promoting climate change awareness. He co-created, wrote, directed and produced the national PBS series Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska, which ran for four seasons from 2004 through 2008. The series, filmed at his family’s orchard, drew 4.5 million regular viewers and was the first continuing series on American television to address environmental issues.
In 1986, Levering and Urbanska, his former wife, left careers in Los Angeles — he as a screenwriter, she as a journalist — to return to the family orchard. The couple advocated for a simpler life on television appearances on Oprah! CBS This Morning, The Today Show and NPR’s All Things Considered.