As Apple Season begins, we hear birds softly chirping and see pails full of red apples that suggest a cheerful childhood of climbing trees and snacking on sweet, wholesome fruit.

But playwright E.M. Lewis had something more serious in mind with her intricate and engrossing exploration of childhood trauma and the now-adults who have physically, but perhaps not emotionally, survived it.

The play, onstage at Southeast Portland’s 21ten Theatre, takes place in the orchard of Lissie and Roger’s childhood home in rural Oregon, which they fled as teens 25 years before. Returning for their father’s funeral, Lissie (Paulina Jaeger-Rosete) is visited by Billy (Michael Heidingsfelder), someone she briefly knew in high school. When Billy offers to buy the property, memories of her painful childhood come back to her.

In director Francisco Garcia’s skillful hands, the story smoothly travels between the past and present, using lights, the soft sound of wind chimes (designed by Daye Thomas, who has created a sort of subtle score for the play), and small costume changes to signify when the story is slipping into one of Lizzie’s memories.

The first of these slips is terrifying. Without showing explicit violence, the young Lisse and Roger (Jonathan Hernandez) cower in the branches of an apple tree at nighttime, clinging to each other as we hear gunshots, footsteps, and the drunken cursing of their father.  

Together, the two siblings speak in soft Spanish, a secret language that presumably their white father doesn’t know, which makes the fact that we see little of the adult Lissie and Roger onstage together in later scenes all the more moving. They may have run away from home, but trauma has long, winding roots that have kept the siblings apart.

Further evidence of their isolation comes in their separate scenes with Billy, where neither sibling can trust him enough to talk truthfully about their past. In the present day, which according to the program is 1996, Lissie mocks Billy, assuming he’s a simplistic soul because he’s a 41-year-old farmer who still lives in his childhood home.

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But her cynicism also keeps her from appreciating the complexity behind his gentle demeanor. After all, when he quietly suggests she can’t flee from the voices in her head, he reveals a keen understanding that serves to widen the gap between them.

All three actors give sensitive performances that are at once down to earth and spellbinding. In this intimate space, they can speak with their eyes as much as their words, and without big dramatic displays, we can feel the tension of the story steadily building throughout the play’s taut 80 minutes.

The simple scenic design by Olivia Vavroch is also evocative. In addition to the pails and some wooden pallets, two dark, leafy apple trees frame the space and create such a vivid sense of an orchard that I could almost taste the sweet crispness of a perfect Pacific Gala and, at the same time, smell the vinegar of fallen fruit.

Of course, at the heart of this play is Lewis’s masterful writing, which encompasses both trauma and tenderness with touches of poetic language that makes the hard subject matter easier to contemplate. When Roger remembers his Latina mother, saying she barely spoke above a whisper, he may be romanticizing her, but this is in stark contrast to the fact that both siblings – and even Billy – can hardly bring themselves to say “father” at all, as if the word itself were rotten.  

Lewis’s script is also rich with symbolism, like the orchard itself, which was never a Garden of Eden for these characters, although at least when they lived there, the young Lissie and Roger experienced the comfort of each other’s presence.

We also learn more about Roger through his dreams of horses, which represent freedom, and the Louis L’Amour novels he loves because they all follow the same plot: “Someone does something terrible, and the hero has to do something about it.”

Without excessive sentimentality – and without promising that everything is going to be okay – this production still glows with unspoken affection. After all, perhaps some of the characters’ pain stems from their thwarted desire to heal each other.  

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• Apple Season will continue at 21ten Theatre, 2110 S.E. 10^th Ave. in Portland, through Sept. 21. Find tickets and schedules here.
• Also see “E.M. Lewis’s ‘Apple Season’: Biting into a tale of many flavors,” Bobby Bermea’s ArtsWatch conversation with playwright E.M. Lewis and director Francisco Garcia.