After leaving Portland more than a decade before, artist Licity Collins had no intention of returning. It was nothing against the City of Roses, but moving back to someplace she’d already lived wasn’t her style.  Then one day in 2023, a character from a piece she was working on suggested it was time.

“I looked into my future — I talk with my work,” said Collins, then living in Southern California.  “And it just kind of said to me, ‘This isn’t on the page. This is bigger than you think. This piece is on the stage.’ And I just knew at that moment I could not do that work where I was living, but I knew I could do it in Portland, and I moved.”

She hasn’t looked back. In August, the Oregon Community Foundation awarded Collins a $74,000 Creative Heights grant for her spoken-sung opera, One Death in Seven Doorways, a story of grief. “There have been — there are — a lot of dead people in my life,” Collins said. “What I’m curious about is how do the dead remain a part of our lives and also how is grief expressed?”

One Death in Seven Doorways centers on two characters, Sam and Suzy, who were part of Collins’ 2022 spoken-word music collection, The Flower in the Mirror Was Dead. She wanted to explore further with both characters, then unnamed, but still wasn’t sure where that might lead. Then came news that a dear friend — her high school prom date and chemistry partner — had suddenly and unexpectedly died and the idea for One Death in Seven Doorways began to form.

“Sam was my favorite character,” Collins said. “Actually, his awkward personality reminded me very much of my friend who died. Sam became a voice for everything I was feeling.”

Collins grew up in Washington, D.C., studied at Brown University, and earned a master’s in fine art from Portland State University. She’s a singer, guitarist, and performer and self-described “multidimensional genre-busting artist.” She co-founded the defunkt theatre company in Portland; helped create community-based scripts with Cornerstone Theater in L.A., and designed and founded the Women’s Theatre Project in Providence, R.I.

After returning to Oregon in 2023, Collins was awarded a residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on Cascade Head. It was there she began calling One Death in Seven Doorways an opera, and there, she wrote a considerable portion of the libretto. She continued the work this spring with a second residency at Sitka. Today, all the characters have been written, the dialogue is complete, the music, about halfway finished. She expects the opera will be staged for audiences in 2027.

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“As an opera, it pushes the genre because it’s a lot of spoken word, and there’s just one singer,” Collins said. “But it’s an opera in the fact that it’s just like an epic, grand … that kind of big issues, big stage feeling.”

While there are only two characters, there are numerous actors on stage. Suzy dies after scene one and when she returns, she can only sing. But Sam lives, and he gets the speaking parts.

“One of the ways we see Sam’s grief displayed is that Sam then becomes played by seven different actors of all different ages, genders, races — all kinds. And this is why it shows us that inside each of us is all of us. Grief is a universal experience and Sam being split into all these people shows us that.”

Collins drew heavily on her experiences at Sitka, crafting nearly all of Sam’s scenes from her life. There’s a scene at the copy center where Sam asks a friend how he’s doing. “‘My dad died,’ the friend tells him. ‘So, there’s that.’” In another, Sam — played this time by a woman — is yelling at the refrigerator because it’s so noisy. “And the funny thing is, I wrote that scene at Sitka because I was living in Gray House and the refrigerator was driving me crazy…. So, the Sitka refrigerator is in the opera. That’s the best Sam can do, is to just be angry about the noise. At the very end of the scene, he says, ‘I don’t talk to anybody about her. I don’t tell anyone.’”

Accompanying each of the seven Sams are seven different instruments, each representing “the sound of history,” Collins said.

“It’s not always an ensemble,” Collins said. “Sometimes, if there’s more than one Sam on stage, you’ll get three or four instruments playing at the same time. Each of those instruments has a different composer, so it’s really a collaborative process.” 

In one “sweet, sentimental scene where Sam, played by a Black woman, says, ‘Oh, I miss walking through the streets with her’ … there’s a waltz in the middle of that scene.” The waltz is performed on bassoon and was composed by Nicole Buetti, award-winning composer of more than 400 musical works and contrabassoonist with the Vancouver Symphony in Washington.  

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In 2024, Collins, the recipient of an artist residency at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center in Portland, workshopped the opera. In the discussion facilitated by Grounded Grief Therapy that followed, a friend described it as “widow’s humor.”

“I loved that,” Collins said. “It told me I had met a big goal — portraying how grief really is. We need to laugh and not feel guilty. We need to cry and not feel ashamed. We need to say, ‘I am a widow,’ and not have people cringe. It was the first time I heard that friend call herself a widow. I thought, ‘Oh, I see how she has allowed herself to be changed.’ That’s beautiful and it is horrible — at the same time. So, when she said that, I felt like she had told me, ‘Yeah, you get it.’ It was an honor.”