THEATER
HISTORY reimagined America’s oldest mystery gets a new look, life, and vision by GARY PEARCE photography by JOSHUA STEADMAN
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drive that takes less than an hour from the Outer Banks can also take you back 434 years. Back to America’s beginnings. Back to the earliest English settlers. Back to America’s oldest mystery: what happened to the Lost Colony? You start the drive on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. You leave behind the beach-
es, the bars, the shops, the restaurants, the crowds, and the traffic. Cross over the causeway to Roanoke Island. Pass through the town of Manteo. Turn off the main road into the dark woods along the sound. Park and walk through the trees. It’s evening, nearly sunset. In the quiet, you hear only the wind and the water.
You’re standing where, in 1587, a band of English colonists abandoned a tenuous settlement they’d established less than a year before. They set off in search of a new home. And then… they disappeared. Today, you can sit in an open-air theater where, on summer nights since 1937, the colonists’ story and the mystery of their fate have been brought to life by The Lost The Art & Soul of Raleigh | 25
