Following sold out engagements at 54 Below, The Triad NYC, United Solo Festival, Barrington Stage Company (Tony Award-winning William Finn’s Cabaret Series) and a nationwide tour from Washington D.C. to Hawaii, the captivating Amy Oestreicher presents Passageways: Songs of Connection, Abnormal & Sublime. An adventurous multimedia journey of original song, art, story and humor as an unexpected passageway through crisis to home, Passageways is written performed, composed, and with mixed media art created by Amy Oestreicher (Gutless and Grateful at 54 Below, RAINN & TEDx Talks) with musical direction and arrangements by Bob Goldstone and direction by Shellen Lubin.

Performances of this new theatrical event will coincide with the launch of Amy Oestreicher’s new book My Beautiful Detour (Singing Tree Publishing, 2019), and a talk-back and book-signing will be held after each performance.

Passageways is an original multimedia fantastical one-woman musical theatre piece, with almost all elements created by the performer. Through art, music, humor, and a deep love of nature, a young woman with a wild passion for life and self-discovery forms a bold, new identity in spite of relentless adversity. Through the piece, she discovers that “home” cannot be re-found, but must be re-imagined as we are liberated through the creative telling and sharing of our stories. This unique theatrical experience is a compelling and uplifting journey through the physical and emotional repairs on the path to recovery, as the creativity of the artist is itself the passageway through profound crisis. There’s no way in, no way out, only through. So why not laugh, dance and paint our way towards the light?

Certainly Passageways: Songs of Connection, Abnormal & Sublime, a theater piece of original songs, mixed media art, dance and storytelling created, written and performed by Amy Oestreicher echoes 20th century French painter Georges Braque’s statement, “Art is a wound turned into light.”. Passageways (part of HERE’s Sublet Series which provides artists with subsidized space and equipment and technical support) tells Ms. Oestreicher’s harrowing autobiographical journey from the trauma of sexual abuse as a teenager through a decade of medical calamities starting with a gastrectomy, a coma, organ failure, 28 reconstructive surgeries and coping for six years without eating or drinking anything, because she didn’t have a digestive system; a story she deeply explored in her earlier play Gutless and Grateful. Passageways is more interior, a fantastical journey at times inside Amy’s mind as her life takes a radical spin into devastating emotional and physical pain. Many of the lyrics to the numerous songs in Passageways (the piece is practically sung through) embody a private mythology that Ms. Oestreicher earnestly shares with the audience. Trees and nature are important symbols, refle …Read more