DON'T CALL IT A JOURNEY Solo Show to Open at eSe Teatro in Seattle

eSe Teatro has announced Don't Call It a Journey, a new solo performance written and co-created by Julieta Vitullo and performed and co-created by Iveliz Martel. The show runs Wednesdays and Saturdays at 7:30pm, September 18 through November 18, at the University Heights Auditorium in Seattle.     

Don't Call It a Journey resists the tidy arc that "journey" suggests. Instead, it's built from the objects, the inside jokes, the mistranslations between Spanish and English, and the absurd bureaucracy of illness that actually make up a life — and a loss. Told through the use of analog technologies like a tape recorder, an overhead projector and a rotary phone, plus a house full of tchotchkes, this solo performance moves between a Seattle kitchen, a hospital room, and a dreamscape where crabs, hydras, and robins carry what words can't.

The play grew out of an unexpected special friendship. Vitullo and Martel were already collaborating on Vitullo's play Two Big Black Bags when Vitullo's husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the same time Martel's father and brother were each diagnosed with cancer of their own. The two started trading notes on treatments and checking in on each other's families. Don't Call It a Journey grew out of that friendship as much as out of the loss itself — proof, in Vitullo's words, that grief has to be witnessed to be processed, and that no one heals in a vacuum.

Funny when you don't expect it; heartbreaking in the same breath. In the end, we know that grief doesn't travel in a straight line. Neither does this play.

About Julieta Vitullo (Writer, Co-Creator)

Julieta Vitullo is a Seattle-based bilingual author, playwright, and typewriter artist born and raised in Argentina. Her novel La huella de tu nombre ("The Trace of Your Name") won the University of Mexico in San Antonio's First Prize for a Novel Written in Spanish in the United States and is forthcoming this fall from Arte Público Press. She is the author of Islas Imaginadas (2012), about the fictions written in the aftermath of the Malvinas/Falklands War, and the protagonist and co-script writer of the award-winning documentary film La forma exacta de las islas (2014). Her work has appeared in Into the Void, The Fabulist, Hawaii Pacific Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a core member of eSe Teatro, and her plays have been read and produced in and around Seattle, including Fermín's Great Book of Dreams, Two Big Black Bags, and Cornelia's Visitors.

About Iveliz Martel (Performer, Co-Creator)

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