Our Mission

Savage Wonder Art Center is a 501c(3) non-profit with the mission to invigorate American performing and visual arts by selecting, developing, and producing exceptional work across disciplines that is created by military, first responder veterans, and their immediate family members.

Through fully produced plays, staged readings, comedy, music, immersive art, and multimedia festivals, Savage Wonder delivers to audiences impactful live performances and gallery shows as whimsical, intimate, absurdist, and jarring as the veteran community that created them.

OUR ORIGIN STORY

Savage Wonder was born when its founder, Christopher Paul Meyer, came home after 14 years of military service and multiple deployments unsure where he stood in civilian America. Theater was different. The country was different. And he was different—no longer the actor, comic, or director he had been before the military. What he wanted was a sandbox with people who shared his lived experience, a common operating picture, where veterans could turn their humor, their idiosyncrasies, and their vision into art - art that stood peer-to-peer with established venue, art that was born of a very different experiential pipeline. Out of that need, and from a phrase Meyer coined to describe the intersection of warrior and artist, Savage Wonder took shape.

In 2021, Meyer launched Veterans Repertory Theater (VetRep) in a tiny parlor in Cornwall, NY. With just sixteen seats, the work was intimate by necessity but explosive in energy. Equity actors staged readings with the intensity of full productions. Characters entered through windows, fight scenes broke out mid-script, and at one launch party two actors ambushed the audience with a guerilla scene in a VA waiting room. From the outset, the work wasn't therapy. It wasn't war stories. It was theater—irreverent, absurd, professional, and surprising. In other words: play.

By 2024, VetRep had outgrown its parlor roots. Meyer acquired the historic Mechanic Savings Bank on Beacon's Main Street—a 12,000-square-foot granite landmark built in 1929. In 2025, the company rebranded as Savage Wonder Art Center (SWAC), a multidisciplinary institution curating, developing, and producing work across theater, music, comedy, visual art, and culinary craft—all created by veterans, first responders, or their immediate family members.

Phase One launched in May 2025 with three public venues:

  • The Parlor – a 50-seat living-room style theater, opening with Ionesco's The Bald Soprano and continuing with Noel Coward's Fallen Angels, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and Gogol's The Inspector General. Every performance features Broadway-caliber Equity actors.
  • Savage Wonderground – a 4,000-square-foot underground gallery devoted to veteran and veteran-adjacent artists, curated by Manhattan art-world veteran Jeannie Freilich. The gallery opened with Radical Fun, a multimedia group show of 13 artists, followed by KaleidoSCAPE, an exhibition of geometry-bending sculptures and canvases.
  • The Grape Rebellion – a wine and dessert bar inside the century-old vault, helmed by chief hospitality officer Jeremy Plyburn offering adventurous wines and globally inspired desserts drawn from veterans' overseas experiences.

And the vision continues to grow. Backed by a New York State Council on the Arts grant, SWAC is building:

  • The Kristofferson – a 60-seat theater opening in 2026, named for Kris Kristofferson, who famously turned down West Point to pursue songwriting.
  • The Main Stage – a 125-seat modular performance space, designed as an indoor sculpture garden, opening in 2027.
  • A vaudeville-style second stage and expanded hospitality venues, rounding out the building's transformation into a multidisciplinary cultural hub.

Savage Wonder's emblem is the octopus—strange, nimble, many-armed. Its logo is a splash—paint, wine, or blood, depending on the eye. Both reflect the spirit of the place: intimate, surprising, whimsical, and alive.

What began as one veteran searching for a creative sandbox has become a permanent home for art that rewrites expectations. Savage Wonder is not here to help veterans. It exists so veterans and first responders can help the arts—and the invitation is simple: Come play.