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“There have been—there are—a lot of dead people in my life,” Licity Collins said in a statement. “What I’m curious about is how the dead remain a part of our lives and also how grief is expressed.”
Collins, a Portland singer, guitarist, performer and multidisciplinary artist, received a $74,000 Creative Heights grant from the Oregon Community Foundation supporting the development of her opera One Death in Seven Doorways. The project will offer an intimate exploration of grief and connection told through storytelling and song, with a single role played by seven actors representing a different stage of grief. The actors are of varied ages, genders and races, with blind casting used to underscore the universality of grief. Each of the “seven Sams” is paired with a different instrument—and music written by a different composer—effectively creating a collaborative auditory tapestry onstage.
“I looked into my future—I talk with my work,” Collins said. “It just kind of said to me, ‘This isn’t on the page. This piece is on the stage.’”
Collins co-founded the now-defunct Defunkt Theatre Company, which ended during the pandemic. She has collaborated with Cornerstone Theater in Los Angeles, and founded the Women’s Theatre Project in Providence, R. I. One Death in Seven Doorways is slated for its stage premiere in 2027. It centers on characters first introduced in Collins’ 2022 spoken-word music collection The Flower in the Mirror Was Dead. She developed large parts of the opera’s libretto and music during residencies at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology and Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center. An album blending modern classical, folk, and experimental music, also born from that Sitka residency, Evolution + Trust | THE SITKA SESSIONS Vol. 1 & Vol. 2, was released Oct. 2.
“We need to laugh and not feel guilty. We need to cry and not feel ashamed,” she said. “Portraying how grief really is — that was a big goal for me.”
