Soft Life, Hard Lessons: The Luxury of Letting Go
“Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. You look ten years younger.”
That’s what a man told me recently, and I had to smile. He didn’t know he was looking at a woman who had survived a tsunami. He didn’t know that just as I had finished a hard, honest conversation with myself about the state of my marriage, a hidden betrayal hit me with a force that nearly annihilated me. I had no time to brace for the impact; I just had to decide if I was going to swim or float away aimlessly.
As If Theatre Debuts New Works Program with ‘Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down’
Described as a “dramedy about what happens when the skeletons in the closet meet the ashes in the jar,” Ashes, Ashes is Gretchen’s first full-length play produced for the stage. The playwright has over thirty years of experience as an actor, ten years of writing as a theater critic, and more recently joined the storytelling community à la The Moth. She first began developing the idea for the play in 2017 while taking a playwriting class with Rebecca Touriño Collinsworth, founder of Parley Productions.
Twin Peaks: The Return Offers Meditation on Grief, Feeling Life in the Moment
Two days after the dream, I entered a darkly lit theater in Northwest Film Forum to the familiar sound of the synth-heavy, nostalgic yet eerie Twin Peaks theme song, and shuffled into a seat. I was about to spend two hours watching episodes five and six of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), as part of a collaborative screening of the entire 18-episode season held by Northwest Film Forum, SIFF, The Beacon, and The Grand Illusion Cinema between November 13 and December 16 of this year. I had only watched the first four episodes of the first season of David Lynch’s masterpiece series set in our home state. But there I sat, going in blind.
Impossible Maps Questions Life and Grief Through Dance
Impossible Maps, a dance concert choreographed by C. Asa Call and performed at Yaw Theater, explored the ever-agonizing experience of grief and how, despite its wretched terrain, it can and must be navigated. Under a mythic lens, it interwove expressions of humanity’s despair with the mourning of Earth’s seasonal cyclical deaths and its inevitable final destruction.
