Created in partnership with Delhi-based theater Guild of the Goat, Toronto vocalist Fides Krucker, and local Chicago artists, The Raveling is an avant-garde family history drama that teases apart the knotted expectations of coming together for dinner. In a surrealist interweaving of personal narratives, song, fairy tales, and food preparation the cast grapples with the dissonance between the need to belong and the agitation of organizing one’s life around other people.

What is the work of coming undone? In The Raveling, each family member follows the thread of an old story, an inherent lie, a childhood promise, or a shared fantasy that leads them from homeleaving to homecoming and back again. The family’s reality is stretched across decades of myth and misadventures. Inspired by true personal narratives of the performers, there is a living question for the ensemble in tracing something of where they each come from and asking what is needed for them to come together.