Edmonds Stories

A Father’s Impossible Dreams, A Mother’s Uncompromising Love: An Immigration Story

Jonas embraces all that is new and American. Johanna refuses to learn English. Their four daughters are caught between his fantastic dreams and her crippling fears. Johanna wants her children to get ahead but realizes she may have to lose them to a foreign culture in order for them to do so. These family stories of high hopes and unfulfilled dreams are the stories of many immigrants and reflect much about life in the west at the turn of the last century.

“Is this our Sacrifice to the new land? Our love for each other?” – Jonas, Act II

“Douglass’ play is a well crafted, interesting piece of work that manages some light, even raucous moments (like a food fight!) within the pervasive black-cloud atmosphere created by Johanna, self-described as ‘always the nay-sayer, the sour one.’ Writing the play must have been an exorcism of sorts for Douglass, a way of coming to terms with the memory of her great-grandmother; a barbed, iron-willed woman like Johanna would take some dealing with generation after generation.”

– Wayne Johnson, The Seattle Times

Valerie Clelland, Sri Bangaru, Dean Espitallier, Christina Twigg and Matthew Dickson, Theater Company of Lafayette; Photo by Nora Douglass

“Theatre Company of Lafayette brings on stage Nora Douglass’ poignant and affecting tale of an immigrant couple from Sweden who settled and raised their daughters in Edmonds, WA. Douglass also wrote Shorn which similarly dealt with issues of family relationships, sacrifices, and of being a stranger in your own land. Edmonds Stories…is not a play you just watch. It is a play you listen to, observe, and feel. Because understanding the immigrant’s story requires you to understand the choices and sacrifices she makes, especially if loving is an even more painful choice than letting go.”

– Richard Tagle, Independent Reviewer