Apple Season centers on Lissie, who returns to the family farm after her father's death and confronts a fraught relationship with family legacy and trauma. An old friend, Billy, visits under the pretense of condolences while raising the possibility of selling the farm. Lissie's brother, Roger, reappears for the funeral, exposing emotional distance and the long shadow of a violent childhood. The play frames questions about whether people can heal from or carry childhood violence and how that history shapes identity. The setting draws on a rural, fourth-generation farm upbringing and vivid childhood memories of outdoor labor and family routines.
Apple Season, E.M. Lewis's new play that opens this week at 21Ten Theatre, is a piece about Oregon, but not on the grand scale. Apple Season opens an intimate, precise lens into the souls of its isolated and emotionally desolate characters, and into the dark recesses of their familial wounds and the scars those wounds leave behind. It's a play, as director Francisco Garcia explains, about "how we heal from that trauma, can we heal from that trauma, how do we carry that trauma?"
Apple Season follows Lissie (Paulina Jaeger-Rosete), who has returned to her family farm in the wake of her father's death. She's working outside when an old friend, Billy (Michael Heidinsfelder), stops by for a visit - ostensibly to offer his condolences, but also to inquire as to whether Lissie might want to sell the farm. And perhaps there are other reasons, as well. They are complicated questions, because Lissie's relationship to her family legacy, and especially her father, is at best complicated and at worst, deeply traumatic.
"I grew up here in Monitor," she says, "on my family's small fourth-generation farm. It was my great-grandparents' when they moved from Wyoming out here. I grew up climbing trees and playing in the creek and going fishing with my dad, growing the vegetable garden, picking berries every summer for school clothes. It was both a really simp
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