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.

Her brother, Roger (Jonathan Hernandez), rescued them both from the situation when he was sixteen, and he returned for the funeral, but their life experience has left them separated in space and perhaps even further away spiritually. “What is it like,” asks Lewis, “to grow up in a family of such violence? This story of Lissie and Roger and whether they can escape the violence of their childhood became the question of this play.”

 E.M. Lewis, long one of Portland’s most gifted playwrights, is an Oregon native, a farm girl from the Marion County, Oregon, area, where her play is set.

“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 simple and rich way to grow up.”

That sense of place is something Lewis holds dear, and features prominently in what she calls her “Oregon plays.”  

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Francisco Garcia is from the same area of Oregon, having grown up in Salem. “My grandparents lived in McMinnville, my father’s family lived in Dayton, so I spent a lot of summers there with them, which is very much a rural community, a tiny little town,” he says. This intimate history with the area is what made the two artists’ partnership on this project a natural one. “We’ve had a lot of fun,” says Lewis, “seeing the overlap of our childhoods, the places that we have in common.”

Lewis, who is never not working on something and usually has two or three projects going on at the same time, first started working on Apple Season more than a decade ago. It started out as a ten-minute one act.

“This is the only ten-minute play that I’ve ever expanded into a full length,” she says. “It had a couple of productions in that ten-minute form and everybody was always like, ‘Oh my gosh, what else happened?’ It wanted more room to explore these characters and the explosiveness of what was living underneath for them.”

Lewis started talking to Garcia about Apple Season and the possibility of producing it in Oregon in 2019, soon after the play had its rolling world premiere via the New Play Network, in New Jersey, Iowa and California, an experience that Lewis calls “fantastic.”

“That was three separate productions across the country,” says Lewis. “New Jersey Rep, Riverside Theatre in Iowa, and then Moving Arts in Los Angeles. I got to be in the rehearsal room for each of them, different casts, different directors, different everything and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.”

Then, the pandemic happened. All plans to stage Apple Season in Oregon got shelved.

But neither Lewis nor Garcia forgot the project, or their desire to work together on it. They are both playwrights with LineStorm Playwrights, a Portland-based playwrights’ collective, and periodically spoke to each other about this project. Eventually, when they separately suggested the project to Ted Rooney, artistic director at 21ten, he responded, ““It seems like it’s meant to be.”   

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The rolling premieres were extremely valuable for Lewis to work out some of the kinks, because although there are only three characters, the play is deceptively complex, dealing as it does,with history, memory, and healing the scars of the past. “Trying to get the slips in time right was really complicated,” says Lewis. “I literally had scissors and tape and was moving scenes around in pieces.”

Likewise, Garcia also talks from a director’s perspective about the complexities and opportunities of going back and forth in time during the play.

“I just got back from paper tech,” he explains, “and was talking this through with the designers, how these shifts are happening for our main character, Lissie, because they’re so emotionally jarring for her. What does that look like physically, in terms of when we’re adding the lights, adding the sound? We’re having these moments of transition where she is being pulled from one moment to the other. How can we bring that to life and still have it all exist in this very naturalistic world?”

Although not explicitly laid out in the script, this production of Apple Season takes place in 1996. For Garcia, this was an important aspect. “We were the last generation before social media,” he says, “so that’s a time period where it would be completely reasonable that these people have not seen each other for twenty-five years, and they might have no idea what the other person has been up to in that time period.”

But there was more to it than that.

“In the last five to ten years there has been a big emphasis on self-care,” says Garcia, “which is wonderful, and the importance of sharing these things and the importance of dealing with trauma. But if we go back in time – that wasn’t always the case. No one was like, ‘Oh, if you feel this inside you should seek help. It’s important. Go talk to a therapist.’

“For me, when I was thinking about this play, when I was talking about it with the actors, we talked about the idea that [these characters] are living in a world and in a time where sharing your feelings with someone, especially for the men in the play, was very frowned upon. It’s not done that often. It’s easy to carry that for so long until it boils to the top and explodes.”

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Although Lewis’s own immediate family life growing up was largely idyllic, she is not entirely unfamiliar with the phenomenon of the sins of the father being visited on the children. “My great-grandfather, who lived in the house across the road, in the house where my grandpa grew up, was not a nice man,” she says. “He was violent, angry, and mercurial. His wife, my great-grandmother, was institutionalized when her last child was just a few years old, and never came out.”

The situation only got worse for the children of that family, and only Lewis’s grandfather made it out whole. “My grandpa was the outlier,” she says. “He voiced at some point to my dad, having grown up as he did, he was never going to yell, and he was never going to hit, because he knew what that felt like.”

Garcia also knows something of the darkness that sometimes lies at the edge of small towns.

“Similar to Ellen but in a different way, growing up there were times in my life when violence was present, whether that’s family violence or people I was very close to were going through violence,” he says. “And that really hit me when I read Apple Season – yeah, I know these characters. Some of them I know really well.”

One other significant instance in the development of the script happened during the third of the rolling premieres, at Moving Arts in LA.

“It was actually in the third of those productions at Moving Arts,” recalls Lewis, “which was my home theater when I was living in Los Angeles, that we happened to have actors that were Latino. There were discoveries I made there and with that cast. I really liked what that intersection of cultures did for the characters in the play.”

“One of the things we’re exploring a lot in this version of the show,” adds Garcia, “is the idea of what it’s like for the brother and sister to also be caught between two cultures, because we have their father, who in the play is white, and their mother, who is Mexican, and be pulled in both these directions?”

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None of the questions or situations that Apple Season raises have simple answers, and Lewis takes her art and her characters seriously enough not to try to provide them. Although Lewis has hope for Lissie, Roger and Billy, she makes no promises. Even as the characters quietly drive towardsan incendiary ending, the important thing for Lewis is the journey.

“You want a play that has transformation,” she says, “but you don’t always get happy endings.”