Carlee WrightERRATA — Show dates are 7:30 p.m. April 16–18, 22-25, and 2 p.m. April 19 & 25.
Unlocking the Room of Forgotten Souls: Willamette University Theatre brings an immersive, ensemble-created performance to life.
In 2004, a tour group unlocked a small room at the Oregon State Hospital and uncovered thousands of copper canisters inside. The remains of more than 3,000 former patients had been reduced to uniform containers, many unclaimed, many unnamed. The discovery would eventually lead to a memorial honoring those who had been forgotten.
This spring, that history becomes the inspiration for Room of Forgotten Souls, an original production from Willamette University Theatre directed by Jonathan Cole.
The piece is not a traditional play.
“It is a form of theater that upsets traditional, typically more hierarchical forms,” Jonathan said. Rather than a director interpreting a finished script, an ensemble-devised performance turns that structure on its side. Performers, designers, musicians, and technicians collaborate to decide what the story is and how it will be told. There is still a director, but more as a facilitator. “My job is to bring the group interesting questions to solve,” Jonathan said, “and to respond to what they create from the perspective of our future audience.”
The idea has been quietly evolving for years. Jonathan first encountered the memorial in 2017 through a grant-funded project with a colleague. He never let it go. A recent sabbatical gave him the time to dig deeper and research the hospital’s history, the discovery of the cremains, and the construction of the monument.
That research expanded in the classroom. Students gathered patient stories, photo records, flood maps, and texture samples. They even composed a musical score based on the visual spacing of the claimed cremains at the memorial.
But the production will not reenact individual lives.
By creating an original fictional narrative inspired by the research, the ensemble can explore the themes that moved them — memory, institutionalization, identity — without putting specific personal stories on stage. “We will explore the material from a respectful distance,” Jonathan said.
One idea in particular has stayed with him. In an interview with a descendant of one of the “forgotten souls,” Jonathan heard something that shifted the lens: “Despite all attempts by institutional systems of care to make patients uniform, homogeneous, the spirits contained in those canisters found ways to blossom, to bloom forth and assert their individuality even after death.”
“It’s a powerful message,” Jonathan said, one that resonates in conversations today about identity and belonging.
Rehearsals are just beginning, but one thing is already clear to him: the students are all in. All performers and designers are students, tackling what Jonathan calls “a very complicated puzzle together.”
That puzzle includes the physical space itself. Room of Forgotten Souls is immersive. Rather than sitting in rows, audiences will begin together, then disperse, choosing which rooms to enter, which characters to follow, which moments to take in. Scenes may unfold simultaneously in different spaces.
The student designers have been rising to the challenge, said Jonathan, using limitations as resources and thinking beyond the typical theater vocabulary. “The audience will drive their own experience, choosing who to follow and how to engage with actors and environments.”
For those who know the story of the locked room, it offers a new way to reflect. For those who don’t, it opens a door into a piece of Oregon history.
Room of Forgotten Souls
When: 7:30 p.m. April 16–18, 22-25, and 2 p.m. April 19 & 25
Where: Willamette University
Tickets: $15 general admission. Available at wutheatre.com
This story originally ran in Press Play Salem issue 27 (Spring 2026)
We run on coffee, curiosity, and community. Fuel our next story (and our next cup) by supporting Press Play Salem. 
buymeacoffee.com/pressplaysalem
Author: Carlee Wright
Carlee Wright is a community instigator with a grand love for Salem and notably fashionable shoes (Hello, John Fluevog!) who turns waste into wearable art in her "spare" time.
