Alchemysts Theatre Presents Ruins of Memory

The performance group Tales of the Alchemysts Theatre will bring their most recent production, Ruins of Memory: Women’s Voices of the Holocaust, to the Wallingford United Methodist Church this coming Sunday.

First, the details:

• Date: Sunday, October 23, 2022
• Time: 3:00 pm
• Place: Wallingford United Methodist Church, 2115 N. 42nd St.
• Free-will donations at the door

Ruins of Memory follows the stories of Jewish women during the Holocaust. From the WUMC website:

This theatrical performance piece, adapted and directed by Laura Ferri, features inspiring selections of resistance and resilience from fiction, poetry, and oral histories by survivors and victims of the Holocaust, spotlighting the stories of women from both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities. Combining live music, sound and movement with spoken word and song, the production captures emotional snapshots of the time, delineating the mounting tension and fear that swept throughout Europe as Jews were led inexorably to their fates.

Tales of the Alchemysts, who will be performing Ruins, was constituted back in 2016 from a group of four performers who had worked together since the early 2000s. In the words of Shellie Shulkin, an actor and Executive/Managing Director:

We toured Chicago and Washington D.C., and performed yearly at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall until Nextbook [a national Jewish literature organization] reorganized to its present online format, The Tablet. In October of 2014, I began making contact with my fellow artists to see if there was an interest in picking up where we left off, sans Nextbook. Indeed there was an excitement to start working and reading together again. In January of 2016 we made the decision to expand our literary salons into an official company and thus Tales of the Alchemysts Theatre was born.

The Wallingford United Methodist Church, who are hosting this production, is proud of its nearly 40-year commitment to stand in solidarity with all who are marginalized and oppressed. The Alchemysts’ current production comes as a result of a long-standing relationship of a church member and the Seattle Holocaust Center.