BLOGORRHEA

A cabal for all

2011-10-27T22:09:00.000-07:00

You’ve heard of a murder of crows, a gaggle of geese and a pride of lions. I think a cabal of dramaturgs describes us nicely, don’t you? Dramaturgs together make for a disparate group, but they tend to have one important thing in common — a talent for bilocation. Because we stand inside the artistic process as well as outside it, frequently we’re able to hold on to a detached sense of perspective that the theater really, really needs. If you ax me.

That’s why the fabulous Kate Bredeson (theater prof @ Reed College) and I are hosting an informal dramaturgs’ town hall this January, during the Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival. This city-wide celebration of original work for the stage is a kaleidoscopic array of spanking new performances, a good chunk of them created just for those crazy 10 days and nights. It’s been a boon for theater folk and theater audiences both, since at this point (2012’s fest is the fourth already), many theaters are launching into new work specifically to leverage the visibility Fertile Ground can offer them.

Playwrights and dramaturgs have been gaining ascendancy in Portlandia for years now. Some of the city’s most interesting companies have literary components helping to set their artistic agendas, including Portland Playhouse, Third Rail Rep and Artists Repertory Theatre. Playwriting groups are flourishing, some which have intriguing dramaturg/producer components. Commissioning is quietly blossoming (more about that in weeks to come). And certain smaller companies have been quick to add the dramaturg job description to their development processes — sometimes, avowedly, without much idea of what their dramaturgs were actually supposed to be doing for them!

Perhaps, then, it’s a good time for a gathering of the tribes. For us to discuss whether there are ways we can better help drive artistic platforms, rather than those platforms driving us.

If this interests you, Kate and I invite you to attend this meeting when January rolls around. Details are below. Questions? Hail me at mead hunter at juno dot com — if you’re not a spambot (and I’m sure you’re not), just close up the spaces in my address and we’re in touch.

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Reed College presents
A DRAMATURGS’ TOWN HALL MEETING
Hosted by Kate Bredeson and Mead Hunter

Venue: Reed College mainstage theater, 3203 SE Woodstock Boulevard
Festival Date: Jan 22, 2012 @ 2 pm

Tickets: Event is free and open to the public

More information: directions to Reed's theater here.

Why not admit it, dramaturgs are the unsung heroes of new play development; their ideas and their connections often provide the impetus to kick-start original theater projects. Since Portland is fast becoming known as a hotbed of new work, where do we, as dramaturgs, fit into this changing topography? How can we encourage, support and even initiate innovative developments? In this informal meeting, we’ll attempt to map the new play territory locally and nationally and then brainstorm ways to pursue a proactive theater agenda.

Whether you’re a career dramaturg, an occasional practitioner, a new play stakeholder or just curious about the profession of dramaturgy, you are very welcome at this meeting.

Embraceable Her

2011-10-02T11:45:00.000-07:00

Brace Yourself: Louanne’s Benefit for Benefits

7 pm Monday, October 3

$20 suggested donation

Artists Repertory Theatre
1515 SW Morrison St.

If you live in Portland, no doubt you’ve heard that beloved theater icon Louanne Moldovan, founder of Cygnet Productions, suffered a terrible one-two punch of accidents this past August. Following a hospital stint that had her trussed up like a Constructivist installation, Louanne’s now at home in a thick C-collar that Elizabeth I might have envied, but which keeps her (Louanne) unable to do much of the work she is so respected for.

On Monday evening, the theater community is coming together to raise funds for her upcoming operation (insurance will not cover this vital procedure — no surprise there, I’m sorry to say) through a retrospective of the company she founded. The evening includes music by Dave Frishberg and two original short plays by Sue Mach and Doug Baldwin. Details below. With a lot of Portland theater royalty turning out to support one its own, this will be a night to remember.

If, like me, extant commitments prevent you attending on Monday, not to worry — just go to any Wells Fargo Bank and make a deposit to the Louanne Moldovan Fund. Or mail a check to the Fund c/o Cygnet Productions, PO Box 15205, Portland OR 97293.

Here’s some more information from the Facebook page about the event:

Cost: $20 donation suggested at the door. Cash or check only (sorry, no credit cards) for tickets and raffle items.

This will be a Cygnet-style literary cabaret — a retrospective of 20 years of fabulous theater. Food and drink will be available, and strange and wondrous things will be raffled off.

Don Alder and Duffy Epstein will emcee. Dave Frishberg will kick the evening off at 7 pm with something witty and Frishbergian, in Artist Repertory Theatre’s Morrison-side lobby. Then the action moves downstairs to the Alder lobby, and then in to the theater. The Andre St. James trio will play during the evening, and Dorothy Sermol will sing. Actors including (but certainly not limited to) Bobby Bermea, Gregg Bielemeier, Dave Bodin, Kristen Brown, Danny Bruno, David Burnett, Eric Hull and VOX, Michele Mariana, Nyla McCarthy, John Morrison, Vana O’Brien, Ted Roisum, Luisa Sermol, Marilyn Stacey, and Wendy Westerwelle will perform excerpts from Cygnet hits such as Love Letters on Fire, The Wild Party, Withering Looks, Variations on a Bard, The Setup, and more (including the command performance of Chicken Kamasutra).

Two 10-minute plays inspired by Louanne’s tumble will be performed, one by Sue Mach and one by actor/playwright Doug Baldwin.

Enjoy a delightful one-of-a-kind evening as some of Portland’s finest talent does what they do best, for a cause close to their hearts.

Once more into the screech

2011-09-20T20:52:00.000-07:00

A little post-TBA fallout for you.

Remember Taylor Mac’s larger-than-life cabaret, subtitled The Ziggy Stardust Meets Tiny Tim Songbook? Taylor gave us a wild sing-a-long version of a Tiny Tim tune that can only be filed under: OB. SCURE. “The Other Side,” it was called, and I was thunderstruck when he started in on it, because I kid you not, I had been telling James all about that very song not a week before.

Part of the fun of Tiny Tim back in those halcyon days (talking the 60s here, and I was very young, okay?) was that you were never quite sure whether Mr. Tim was for real or whether you were totally being had. This was before Andy Kaufman, mind you; it was pre-DEVO and all kinds of other, later stunts designed to make sure your laughter was nervous.

Everything on the God Bless Tiny Tim album was downright bizarre, and it ranged from retro chic (a pacifist Irving Berlin song) to novelty songs like the familiar “Tip-toe Through the Tulips”; there was even an old vaudeville gag (“The Viper”). But nothing was odder — or more prescient — than “The Other Side,” a song about melting polar icecaps and the world’s subsequent drowning “to wash away the sin.”

Don’t take my word for it. Check out this video tribute to the song, which pairs original footage with the vintage Tiny Tim recording. Pay special attention to the televangelist’s voice at the end, urging you to wade into the water and “having a swimming time” as sea swells.

Then congratulate Taylor Mac and me on our fiercely omnivorous tastes.

Twentytwentytwenty-four hours to go: Mike Daisey’s All the Hours in the Day

2011-09-18T17:22:00.000-07:00

Getting into Mike Daisey’s epic, 24-hour monologue, All the Hours in the Day, was a lot of like boarding a really popular Disneyland ride. Long lines snaked all over Washington High School, and I passed FOUR checkpoints before even making it to the lines. On the way I got my left wrist stamped with a jack o’lantern image and a grey wristband affixed to my right wrist and my ID checked TWICE.

But Andrea Stolowitz, Kate Bredeson and I snagged excellent close-up seats and settled in for a good hard sit on ancient auditorium chairs. We were the lightweights, however; along the sides of the auditorium, along the first floor’s side exits, were the True Believers: people with coolers, folding chairs and sleeping bags.
And then it starts. Promptly at 6pm, words are projected onto an onstage screen: The Hour We Begin to Speak.

We all scream. And out comes Mike.

He sits at his signature wooden desk, a stack of papers preset there along with the water pitcher and empty glass we expect. Mike is still for a long time, peering into the audience as though mulling over what to say. This is prolonged. We titter. Still he waits. Then from the darkness that surrounds him on all sides, he extracts an bottle of vodka and a shot glass. Downs a shot. The audience cheers. The Mike produces a gun and lays it on the table. Nobody cheers.

Later on, Mike will assure us that both the vodka and the gun are real. And so the stage is set for a Chekhovian moment.

Before that, though, we are still waiting. The man who is going to spend the next 24 hours talking is silent. Finally, he opens his mouth and says:

There isn’t enough time to tell you everything you need to hear.

From there he wanders through a series of stories so crafted with such immense artifice that they appear to natural — which is to say, all but extemporaneous. Mike confesses he’s a very, very angry person, and we segue to the best friend of his teen years, Gibbs, and the stunts they would pull to vent their anger. Then we hear about a bad gambler whose face and body are riddled with “tells” that repeatedly give him away. (“He would have been a great actor,” says Mike, “but made a terrible gambler.”) The gambler had a brilliant but broken son, trained on the piano by Stravinsky himself, whose name was Warren Zevon.

For hours our man goes on, wandering into this odd vein and whatever dark substrata seem to occur to him at the moment — as in a sudden and apparent digression about his wife (and director) Jean-Michele Gregory has always had this astonishing memory, and recalls with absolute clarity friends, teachers, etc., from earliest childhood. And so skill is Mike Daisey that we forget what we came in knowing: that there are no digressions, and this man knows exactly where he’s going.

It’s all never not compelling. Like a novelist who knows how to end a chapter in such a way that you just have to turn the page to see what happens, Mike ends every 45-minute segment suddenly, arising and disappearing into the gloom and making you hunger to see what’s coming next.

In between each “chapter” are divertissements. The first is Holcombe Waller, who does a vocalise of a passage from a science fiction novel (not an inadvertent choice, as we'll find out). Later, not long after dawn, Nikki Weaver will guide the audience in restorative yoga. It’s all icing, of course, because Mike’s narrative skills are all-encompassing.

*

After some time, I’m tranced out. I go home and start watching the live streaming, and try to get to bed early, planning to return in the wee hours. But attempting an early bedtime never works for me. I don’t drift into sleep till around 1:11 am, and I'm in the middle of an extraordinarily vivid dream when the alarm clock goes off at 2. I reach over, turn it off, the next thing I know it’s 7:17 and I have a migraine headache.

Oy. I shuffle into the bathroom, take a triptan medication that guarantees I won’t be able to leave home all day. Discouraged, I cancel the ZipCar, wash off my Halloween tattoo and cut off my wristband. And turn on the live video feed.

But it turns out that being in an altered state is a great way to watch All the Hours in the Day.

Eerily, wherever I come into the story seems to be the perfect place. Early on in the performance, it happens several times that Mike describes a state of mind and says, “If you’re like that — like me — you know exactly what I mean,” and 10 hours into the show, I’m beginning to feel like the show has been written expressly to speak to me personally. Does everybody feel like that? In my own private magical mystery tour, going in and out of consciousness, I guess it’s only natural that my mind would seize on whatever seems to be of greatest moment. Even so, there is a lot about Mike’s narrative that sounds downright cosmic.

For instance. The lengthy and spellbinding sequence about a lucid dream of Jean-Michele’s (remember how Mike established her preternatural memory?) in David Bowie appears, playing Nicola Tesla, and gives her specific instructions. Which she acts upon. Mike delivers this sequence totally in the dark.

Dreaming is a frequently iterated motif on this sleepless night. Mike inveighs against society’s strictures and “how much we’re allowed to dream” — and goes on to castigate the arts and its artists for not dreaming big enough.

…and how our dreams are a big part of producing the “signs and sigils and portents” that shape human perception, which in turn shape reality -- are we therefore creating reality? “That can’t really be true, can it?” Mike asks, and the question is not rhetorical.

What is real, actually? Or to put it another way: what is actually happening? This will drive the narrative arc’s second half, in which we’re informed that there is no magic without sacrifice. Mike implores us to consider this. “You need to stop thinking about why things happen and start thinking about how. And I don’t mean how in the epistemological sense, but in the Jungian. Why are the symbols in your life -- of which I am one -- in your life?”

For me personally, the story’s philosophical dimensions are its strengths; I’m less interested in story per se, and this is what drives the event’s closing hours. All the same, it’s a great, great pleasure to be told a story really well, and Mike Daisey is always mesmerizing. This is even true — or maybe I mean especially true — when the story naturally comes to devolve around his own epiphanies.

“I am after all a monologist; my job is to draw attention to myself. My ‘tells' are everywhere,” he says, recalling his earliest accounts about Zevon Sr.’s failed gambling career. Mike story ends in Tomorrowland, underneath the Carousel of Progress, but we feel he has brought us up to the present moment. Twenty-four hours ago, we entered Washington High while it was still “today,” and now tomorrow awaits us outside.

Not that this decides anything. "There is not enough time," Mike says by way of conclusion, "to tell you everything you need to hear."

*

There’s one last sense of passage: Holcombe returns to the stage and sings a Warren Zevon song that graced Mike and Jean-Michele’s wedding. Followed by Holcombe, along with Sarah Dougher and many TBAers, singing “We All Need Somebody to Lean on.”
All the Hours in the Day is over, and so is TBA11. And I feel like I’ve lived through an extraordinary moment with hundreds of Portlandians — and others far and wide, thanks to the live feed — that will never be repeated.

tEEth: a dance company with bite

2011-09-14T18:56:00.000-07:00

It’s high time I saw a performance by tEEth, the wildly popular dance company reprising its critical success Home Made in this year’s TBA Fest. Judging from the mob scene at Zoomtopia on Monday evening, I’m the last guy in town to find out about the company’s powerful work, choreographed by co-artistic director Angelle Hebert.

“Audience response is critical to the work,” Hebert said earlier this year, when she was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission. “Something we hope for in every performance is to impact our audience in a meaningful, emotional, and visceral way.” How, exactly? “By creating juxtapositions in movement through displaced limbs or unconventional phrasing, I can investigate these extreme states — our inner beast and gentle nature, weaknesses and strengths, our light and dark side, et cetera.”

And that’s exactly what I saw when TBA presented Home Made this week. Some people like to compare tEEth’s disturbingly physical performance style to Butoh, but this is misleading; Hebert is much more interested in tension between humans than in grotesquerie. In the course of this performance, the two dancers, Keely McIntyre and Noel Plemmons, lead us on a constantly evolving danse macabre that evinces everything from plaintive appeal to outright rampage.

As the audience scrambled for seats on Monday, the stage was pre-set with what appeared to be a soft sculpture of a small mountain. But as soon as the lights went out, the “mountain” became lit from within. Its contents, projected on a back wall scrim, were a man and a woman cocooned within a pod, who began exploring each other’s face with hands, mouth, tongue — teeth.

Once out of the pod, Hebert used the figures as colossal shadow puppets at first, whose silhouettes alternately took on menace and tenderness. Plemmons and McIntyre soon moved from the shadows and acquired human dimensions, and thus their bodies also took on an alarming plasticity; they continually distended muscles and limbs to create unnatural postures (hence the frequent mention of Butoh, I guess). Most surprising of all was the protean nature of their faces; in dance performance, we are so accustomed to see performers whose expressions are perfect masks of impassivity, so it was startling to see facial structures molded into something so startlingly telling.

Equally important to the evening’s sense of dislocation was the music compositions of tEEth co-artistic director Phillip Kraft, whose otherworldly sounds — largely vocal — provided a sense of dramatic throughline. This was especially evident in the performance’s climax, a paroxysm of tortured emotions that called out for explosion but instead devolved into a sense of inarticulate loss.

Were the man and the woman worse off than ever at the end? Or simply starting over? Hebert and Kraft deny us any sense of narrative closure, but their gift to us is an evening of superheated emotion. If you tend to think of dance as a lovely, pastel cultural duty, not to worry — Home Made is the opposite of all that.

By the way: good news for those who missed the show’s initial TBA run. An extra performance has been added for Thursday night.

Method and Madness

2011-09-13T22:30:00.000-07:00

There’s a moment in The Method Gun in which a character is being interviewed for a television show. To the host’s consternation, the guest is of the irascible persuasion, and isn’t much interested in sticking to the subject. The funny thing about television, she tells her host (and I’m paraphrasing) is that you only see what the camera wants you to. In the theater, everything’s all around you at the same time. She looks around the performance space. She look at the host, grinning like an imp.

She might have been describing the Rude Mechanicals’ entire aesthetic philosophy. Taking honesty in the theater to its logical extreme, Kirk Lynn’s script gives us a Foremanesque universe in which everything is on stage at once and the implicit promise is that all of it will be used some time very soon. Of course this extends to the titular gun, enshrined in a bird cage—an inheritance from the group’s acting guru, Stella Burden, who meant it to remind the actors that they could kill one another at any moment.

Unlike Richard Foreman, however, The Method Gun has a definite ubernarrative to tell, even if it’s buried in several layers of metatheatrical conceit. Essentially, Stella Burden disappeared nine years previously, and her students have been rehearsing A Streetcar Named Desire ever since. A very special Streetcar it is, since their exercise instructions were to work through the entire script without ever playing Mitch, Stanley, Stella or Blanche.

Everywhere you look, there is the entire evening in miniature. Whether it’s a menacing tiger (“Think how much better Death of a Salesman would have been if it were Death of a Salesman from Tiger!”), crying practice, or shlongendorfers held aloft by helium balloons, the play has something to say about how our sources of inspiration mold us into something entirely unexpected.

Because this is also about actors seeking the truth in their practiced art of pretend, there’s also lots of references to honesty and to realness. It’s fitting indeed, then, that the play’s stunningly beautiful ending comes from a tense sequence that’s as honest as it gets on any stage — since we’re genuinely scared for the actors, even while we see watch enact their spellbinding version of Streetcar (previously seen only in glimpses) in its fullest realization. This vision is such a coup de theâtre that I won’t describe it; I don’t want to blunt its impact for you when you see it yourself.

I’ll just say you’ll never see the Tennessee Williams staple quite the same away. And that I hope we see the Mechanicals again soon, with PICA bringing them back for subsequent TBA fests. The company is a national treasure, though the Austin-based company (whose town copped a “Keep Austin Weird” motto years before we adopted it here for local use) has a shape-shifting sensibility especially endearing to Portlandians.

Taylor's lament: “everybody wants to be God’s exclamation point”!

2011-09-12T17:35:00.000-07:00

Two things to know about Taylor Mac: yes, he is as absolutely fabulous as you’ve heard; and no, the faint of heart should not sit within easy reach of him.

I caught Taylor’s uproarious cabaret last night, on the hottest night of the year, at Washington High School, where his latest performance event has been a conspicuous offering of this year’s Time-Based Art Festival. Entitled Comparison Is Violence or The Ziggy Stardust Meets Tiny Tim Songbook, the evening’s ostensible premise centers around how a lone critic pegged his act as a cross between these two legendary performers, and immediately other Google-dependent journalists adopted the description as Mac’s tagline.

But that’s all a feint, as it turns out.

Early on Mac tells us — after asking us to sing along with the chorus of an obscure Tiny Tim song — how much he hates audience participation. At once point, after having just asked a question of the audience, he goes so far as to reassure us, saying: “Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you do anything.” Yet after singling out a few terrified spectators, he adds: “Okay, the drag queen lied.” And climbs off the stage and into the audience, where he proceeds to embroil his victims in various degrees of participation throughout the evening.

Another feint: after decrying the “niches” that Bowie and Tiny Tim were put into, the artist voices his concern that he’s always getting invited into highly specialized performance occasions such as TBA and No Boundaries. “The trouble is,” he says, “I have boundaries.”

But this too is not true. Because the entire screamingly funny evening, peppered throughout with impressive vocal gymnastics and punctuated by glitter throwing, is all about busting boundaries. Even the glam-rock drag Mac wears gradually gets shed as the cabaret continues, until by the end the bitch goddess towering over us in cothurni is revealed as a smallish bald guy (albeit a strikingly sexy one), whose voice has gone from thunderous to softly appealing.

If I’m making this sound like a jumble, much of the evening it feels that way. But yes, you’ve guessed it—this too is marvelous sleight of hand. Following this performance, director Megan Kate Ward observed: “He acts likes it’s all just a conversation, like he’s just chatting and make it up as he goes along, and then of course it turns out he knew exactly where he was taking us the whole time.”

This much IS true. At the end we’ve learned, among other things, that while comparison may be violence, sometimes a little violence is good thing.

Reportedly The Irish Times has said: “Taylor Mac seduces you, breaks your heart, patches it back up again and sews sequins along the scars.” I know now what the Times means. Once Taylor Mac sprinkles you with glitter, you’ll follow him anywhere.

Made in Oregon gets up close and....

2011-07-15T10:04:00.000-07:00

JAW’s Made in Oregon series comes to an appropriately heady climax on Sunday evening with Personal, a new play by Portlander Brian Kettler directed by Jessica Nikkel.

Brian, we don’t often get treated to dramas like Personal in the theater; to me it’s thoughtful investigation of the nature of identity that nevertheless plays like a like a thriller. Apart from just being told a good story, what do you hope audiences will take away from seeing your play?

Well, I love thrillers about memory and identity, and I certainly see Personal fitting into that genre. I hope the audience comes out of the play feeling angry, hopeful, and maybe even a little scared. Personal is written as an attack against unrealistic portrayals of happiness and fulfillment, especially in celebrity journalism. I hope that Personal inspires some sort of catharsis in its audience.

We are all humans, we all fight through pain and muck, and we all have some sort of gap between our ideal selves and our actual selves. I think just about everyone has looked at the beautiful people in magazines and felt crappy about themselves. I hope people come out of the play realizing that we are not alone, we all share the same shit, and we have to help each other through it.

Personal debuts this Sunday, July 17, at 8pm on the Main Stage of the Gerding Theater; no reservations are required, and admission as always is freefreefree.

MIO continues with Continuum

2011-07-14T09:55:00.001-07:00

What is real in a hall of mirrors? That question comes to the fore at Made in Oregon this Sunday with Patrick Wohlmut’s Continuum, directed by Stan Foote. Commissioned by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, this tense cat-and-mouse game will stick in your head a long time after the actors have taken their bows.

So Patrick. Continuum is a play of many reversals, and we have to revise our beliefs about the characters several times during it. What does this say about your world view as a writer? Do you feel that human character is essentially a constantly shifting work in progress?

I do believe that. Many people tend to think of themselves as presenting different faces to different people at different times. I think the truth is more complex than that, more rooted in the Buddha’s observation that (depending on who translates it) either “What we are is what we have thought,” or possibly, “What we think, we become.” I think our personality encompasses the full sum of anything we are in the habit of thinking, and that different situations bring out different parts of us. We don’t have many faces; rather, like Walt Whitman says, we are all large, and contain multitudes that may seem contradictory depending upon the situation in which we find ourselves. However, those aspects are not contradictory — they are all, in fact, us. That means that different people and situations reflect us in very different ways. The world is a hall of mirrors, and we see different aspects of ourselves in everything.

That’s why I tend to appreciate — and try to use — an aspect of playwriting that Paul Castagno describes in his book, New Playwriting Strategies. He describes a trend set by playwrights such as Len Jenkin and Mac Wellman, where character-specific dialogue is eschewed in favor of sometimes rapidly shifting vocal strategies, meaning that several speech genres — ways of speaking — can emerge in the course of a scene, an act, or a whole play. I’m not a die-hard adherent of this strategy of writing, because I think that people do tend to fall into specific speech patterns; it’s not all chaos. However, there’s something in that flexibility of character that attracts me and rings true.

Continuum plays this Sunday, July 17, at 4pm at Gerding Theater. Admission is free and no reservations are necessary, though I’d advise getting there early if you like sitting up close.

A banner year for Made in Oregon

2011-07-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

Antartikos, a powerful new play by Andrea Stolowitz, kicks off JAW’s Made in Oregon weekend this Saturday. I’ve listened to this play several times in rehearsal and I’m always moved by it; I think you will be, too. I hope to see you there this weekend.

Andrea, while clearly Antartikos is not your personal story, it’s also evident that it comes from a very personal place within you. That’s unusual nowadays, when so often real feelings are cloaked within layers of irony. Will you feel exposed or vulnerable when people hear the play performed?

Hearing the play for me is always hard. The play is about saying goodbye to those you love and about accepting the ultimate closure that happens when someone dies. It is hard for me to hear because it makes me feel those things, but also because it is exposing the way I think about the world — a kernel of sadness I have — to people who don’t know me. It feels like suddenly everyone knows more about me than I know about them and what they know are the feelings that I never really talk about.

On the other hand, what I ask of my audience is to go to a deep emotional place with me, and if I weren’t willing to go there, neither would they be. So in the end it is an even exchange. I write plays to create that shared experience with an audience, so even though it feels raw to hear it, I am proud of the experience it creates. In my view, anything you care about and share with a room full of others will always feel raw. But isn't that why we are alive?

Antartikos is directed by Gemma Whelan and performs this Saturday, July 16 at 4pm at the Gerding Theater. No reservations required and always free of charge.

Where to be this weekend

2011-07-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

This Saturday kicks off the JAW Festival with....well, moi-même. Funnily enough, I believe my Community Artists Lab happens to be the first event this year. Enrollment for the Lab is closed, by the way; I only mention it to pique you.

More importantly, the big event this weekend is Made in Oregon, where four of Oregon's most intriguing playwrights will share their latest work with you. Matthew B. Zrebski's new opus, Forky, debuts this Saturday, July 16, at 8 pm on the big stage.

Matt, part of the fun with a new play of yours is that all bets are off when it comes to content, style, voice – you name it. No two MBZ plays are alike. Where did this play come from? Will any demons get exorcized in the course of our seeing Forky?

I think more than any play I’ve written, this one reflects my age. At 38, I can no longer pretend that one day I’m going to be an adult. I am an adult. Like it or not. Life is “now.” The future, though still something to dream about, is less about “what I will be” and more about “how I will grow as I am.” And at it’s most basic, Forky is about the choices we’ve made to reach this adult self – and how we deal with that both literally and spiritually. God, could that sound more banal? I suppose a sexier way to describe the play’s genesis is to reveal the first visual image I had: someone dancing romantically with a giant dead sperm. I mean, of course, right? Sexy! And from that image, the tone and content of the play emerged. I hope it’s both silly and devastating, earthly and ethereal – but mostly, I hope it’s a swift and thrilling 80-minute ride for the audience . . . maybe even entertaining. Who knows?

Add/endum

2011-07-10T22:54:00.001-07:00

Never fear, this blog will not become all about Mac (see previous post). But I feel compelled to add the story of his death, because in describing I may get a small measure of closure.

The days leading up to last Thursday were fraught with a confused tangle of worries, fears and hopings against hope. When Mac became mired in a depressed funk, unreachable and unresponsive, I turned again to Patricia Schaller, animal psychic extraordinaire.

Maybe you remember Patricia from her first house call to my home about two years ago. This time, when I made the phone call to her, she was already tuned into Mac. Immediately she said, “He wants to go but he has something to tell you first.” We made an appointment two days later, for that Thursday.

By then, Mac was so bad off — struggling for breath, wincing from pain — that I worried he would die before Patricia could get there. Yet he was working so hard to stay in his body that it occurred to me he might be living just for her visit. And I believe this turned out to be true.

Patricia was expected at our home that last day at 3pm, and it had been a terrible day, beginning with — well, never mind all that. Suffice it to say that Mac was more dead than alive by the afternoon; he was lying on his favorite bench, the one by the picture window, gasping for air. At 2:30 — a full half-hour before Patricia was expected — Mac stood up, shook his ears out, jumped down from the bench and wagged his tail. We gaped at him.

“Patricia must be drawing nigh,” I said, thinking maybe she had just left home or exited the freeway or something. Just then there was a soft knock at the door and we knew what Mac already knew — she was there.

Once in, Patricia got on the floor and looked directly in Mac’s eyes, nuzzling him with her nose. They communed silently for a few minutes, with a look on Mac’s face of immense relief. Patricia had James and I do a meditation/visualization to calm down Mac’s breathing — and yes, this actually happened — and then she began to channel information.

Right away after that, Mac announced through Patricia that he had two important things to say. The first, not surprisingly, was that he wanted to get out of his body and be free, but he needed our help to do that. Patricia explained that the vet would arrive soon and help him to do that, and he thanked us. The second thing was much as he wanted to go, he also wanted to come back and live with us again. He said he liked being a dog and hoped he could be that again, but it was okay if it was something else. In a year or two, we were to look into the eyes of animals until we saw the one that was him again.

For James this was getting really woo-woo; he wasn’t sure what to make of it. But he could see the merciful effect Patricia was having on Mac. There was nothing Age of Aquarius about that. The dog was focused wholly on her.

Those were Mac’s message in essence. Patricia also conveyed some very personal things that came from her. After a time I started urging her to go — she refused to accept any payment from us (it was a gift, she said, but I don’t know why we deserved it), and I knew I was not her last errand of mercy that day. Twice, though, Mac asked her not to leave and she stayed. Finally I convinced her she must go, which now I regret. The little guy might have appreciated having something he could communicate with directly when the end came.

An hour after Patricia departed, another soft knock came at the door. This was Dr. Lori Gibson, from an organization aptly named Compassionate Care, which performs in-home euthanasia. At the sound of her knock, Mac wagged his tail for the last time. Did he think it was Patricia returning? Or was he welcoming his deliverer, along with the plan for releasing him from his body as it had been explained to him.

Lori was indeed compassionate; she carefully explained what was going to happen. I held Mac (who was back on his bench now) and his back legs trembled — a revealing sign that could indicate fear, but more often for him indicated anticipation. Lori explained how one shot would sedate Mac, and when we were ready, the second shot would stop his heart.

We were there at the moment I had dreaded since he was a puppy —the moment of saying goodbye. But we had already said our farewells and expressed our love through Patricia. All that was left was the actual send-off. So Lori administered the shot, and just like that, Mac disappeared. All we had was the body of handsome old dog with no spark of animation in him.

Lori wrapped up Mac’s body in a blanket. She tucked in his legs on each end, so he looked like he was running. James picked up the body and carried it into Lori’s van and she drove off. We went back indoors, stricken and distraught. Our beautiful, soulful boy was gone.

We cried for hours, then got in the car with some food and drove out to Sauvie Island. Dark clouds fringed the foothills, and rays of sunlight burst through them at one point, the way they do in those old-timey images where the rays are meant to suggest God. We looked at each other and said “Mac.” We ate our picnic dinner near where the road ends on the island, looking at the birds skimming the water and talking about Mac.

Then we went home to face a house without him in it. Not physically in it, anyway. Ever since then I’ve been talking to him as if he were here. Don’t worry, he doesn’t talk back, but I get impressions of feeling from him, and derive great comfort from these “conversations.” You’ve seen TV shows where characters die and then their survivors keep on talking to them in subsequent episodes? Turns out that’s no metaphor.

The days since have been very, very hard. Most of our friends understand; they’ve been through this or at least have the empathy to intuit how it must feel. Some others, I am sure, think “what a lot of fuss, it was just a dog.” But I always felt Mac was not a dog at all, and was actually someone I’d known from somewhere else in the cosmos, someone who was just visiting me here on a prolonged stay.

We got to borrow him for a while, then we had to return him.

Do you remember the first season of Six Feet Under, from way back in 2002? A woman with a tear-stained face asks one of the morticians the eternal question: Why do we have to die?

His answer: To make life important.

That may not be the only answer. But it will have to do for now.

Dog gone

2011-07-04T14:44:00.000-07:00

Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

We always liked to refer to MacHeath, our Kerry Blue Terrier, as the Clown Prince, because his disposition was so antic. Fiercely independent, he only wanted to be touched when he was in the mood (though he was always in the mood for brushings). He let us know when he wanted to go for a walk, and to get him to eat dinner, you had to all but provide a menu and a fresh rose in a bud vase.

Mac died today, aged 14 years, 1 month and 18 days.

People always say you know when it’s time to put your dog “to sleep.” We didn’t know until just today, when we moved beyond certainty. During Mac's last few weeks, he alternated terrible days — seizures, mental confusion, difficulty breathing — with bright days when, though he was clearly an old dog getting older fast, he was still very much the tenacious terrier. Completely present mentally, still urging us to toss the rubber ring for him that had been his favorite toy since puppyhood.

Letting him go today was one of the hardest decisions of my life. But his leave-taking was as good as it could possibly be. An extraordinarily compassionate vet came to the house; we all sat by his favorite squirrel-watching bench together, James and I both holding Mac, as his last breath went out and did not come back.

Gone. Like snow on the river, goodbye.

In fact those were my last words to him. Goodbye, old friend.

Yet I guess I started my farewells last fall, when Mac’s terminal illness first came to light. At that time I inaugurated an odd form of spiritual exercise: taking the occasional walk around the neighborhood without him.

Don’t worry, he still got plenty of walks — three a day, sometimes more. But increasingly I was aware that our walks together were numbered. My solitary strolls were therefore rehearsals for a day when Mac would no longer be around to accompany me.

Today I realize how patently fatuous that exercise was. Mac’s shadow is everywhere I look.

This will always be so when I walk the familiar routes. During Mac’s blessedly long life, we had thousands of walks (eight years’ worth here in Portland) and countless car trips together. He lived for his outdoor adventures, and delighted in peeing on as many trees and shrubs as possible, scratching up the ground afterward in triumph. Up until just a few months ago, that dog still rushed from tree to tree like a kid on a Halloween outing.

I can only hope that in time my circumambulations and their constant reminders will become joys — celebrations of Mac’s long and happy life — rather than the sorrows they are now.

***

Mac was born in Pinetop, Arizona, the only male in a litter of three pups, the offspring of champions. His breeder, Kathy Bergen, was a devoted caretaker of the Kerry Blue breed; she put us through considerable correspondence and a couple of phone interviews before she was satisfied Mac would have a good life with us. And thus, at 12 weeks old, Mac undertook what must have been a terrifying adventure, leaving his first family to spend several clamorous hours in the dark hold of an airplane, only to wind up among strangers at LAX.

But he adjusted immediately to his new home in South Pasadena; he didn’t cry even on his first night with us. He astounded the trainers in his puppy classes by learning every command on the first try.

Among many favorite activities, Mac loved to ride in the car, and moving up to Oregon was a high point in his life. We came up three weeks in advance of James — Mac and I together on a journey that lasted two days and had several adventures. He was thrilled with it all: the dazzling array of new scents and sights, the constant forward motion. And he loved his new home in Ladd’s Addition, where he must have sniffed out every square centimeter on our first night there, when we wound up dozing on sleeping bags.
That following year I put a lot of energy into hunting for a permanent home, and Mac was a born realtor. Every new house held promise; he was as happy looking in the front windows and scoping out the back yard as he was inspecting the rooms inside. He was always a purposeful pooch who appreciated a sense of mission; unlike many dogs, he rarely liked to sit idly and just relax. He wanted to always be doing, much like a human being.

Until this past year, of course, when he probably spent more time asleep than awake.

***

With dogs as with humans, it’s natural to berate oneself for the ways things might have been better for them. I regret that we never got Mac a canine companion. We expect so much of our animal friends, and our major expectation is that they will automatically adjust to our ways. Mac was a bright, inquisitive dog who appreciated as much stimulation as the world could give him; if I could have a do-over, I would get him a pal from his own species, to keep him company during the many lengthy days I used to spend working in the theater.

Too late for regrets, though. There’s nothing left to do or say, except to reiterate:

Mac, my beloved comrade. Goodbye, old friend. You are lost and gone forever, but doggie, we will never ever forget you.

Monday night and the dramaturg is IN.

2011-06-27T22:17:00.000-07:00

Admittedly, I love all aspects of dramaturgical service in the theater. Rehearsals. Think pieces about the shows. Contextualizing a production for audiences. Hanging out with the actors. Design conferences. You name it.

But there’s something especially pure about the research phase of a new project, when I’m simply reveling in the universe a writer has created, that for me is especially luxuriant.

In the past couple of days, I’ve looked into spaghetti westerns as one way to inform the new Milo Mowery/Rody Ortega musical, El Zorrito, which will debut at Northwest Children’s Theater this coming season. And I’ve searched for images of Boise streets, morbidly obese English teachers and Mormon underwear as we start work on Sam Hunter’s The Whale for its production next year at Denver Theater Center.

And tonight I’ve been looking into the story behind the story of a classic fairy tale, also for Northwest Children’s Theater, that James Moore is adapting. The title gives you a good sense of the playwright’s overall tone: Rapunzel — Uncut!

Here’s a tidbit from my research: “rapunzel” was an old-timey name for a leafy plant they used to cultivate in old Europe, more commonly called rampion, which we now call lamb’s lettuce. When Rapunzel’s mother was pregnant with her, she (Mom) had major cravings for the plant, which led to stealing it from the garden of a very talented and lonely witch — and you know the rest of the story.

As Karen Finley has wryly pointed out in her play The Theory of Total Blame, everything is always the mother’s fault, from Clytemnestra to Lynne Spears. So I appreciate this poem I came across by Carolyn Williams-Noren, where she gives voice to the least sympathetic character in the fairy tale in “Rapunzel’s Mother.”

I can't explain why I wanted that simple
thing so much: dark green rampion leaves, the curled
coverlets of them stacked together on the sideboard,
the rainy steam of them cooking, the hot full softness
and the bittersweet bite in my throat, mouthful
after mouthful. It was as if there was no other way to keep alive.

On with the show

2011-06-14T21:01:00.001-07:00

Now that the 2011 Drammy Awards are laid to rest, we can look forward to the 2011-12 season, which is already shaping up to be exceptionally exceptional. Here are just a few of the many, many upcoming shows I wish were opening today.

First of all, check out Portland Playhouse’s entire season, which starts with my favorite August Wilson play (and also his most mysterious), Gem of the Ocean, and ends with one of America’s most dazzling young playwrights (Terell Alvin http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifMcCraney). In between are Tony Kushner AND Portland’s very own Greek goddess, Eugenia Woods. Wow. Plus here’s a teaser: stay tuned for some more good news from the Brothers Weaver very soon now.

ART has one of its strongest seasons ever coming up. Just two of its must-see productions are a new adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi by the Joe Fisher and Annie Baker’s profoundly affecting Circle Mirror Transformation. PCS looks strong, too; I’m especially looking forward to Universal Mind, a piece utilizing The Doors’ music and Allen Ginsberg’s writing.

Not to be outdone, Miracle Theater’s looking very groovy next year with strong plays by José Rivera (Boleros for the Disenchanted) http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifand Oedipus el Rey by Luis Alfaro. Theater Vertigo also has a strong line-up; I can't wait for the production of Scottish writer David Greig's play, The American Pilot, which will be directed by Matt Zrebski.

Northwest Children’s Theater has commissioned new plays from Milo Mowery, who wrote this year’s bracingly original version of Snow White, and James W. Moore (yes, he of defunkt fame). Who can resist James’ title: Rapunzel — Uncut!

And then along comes CoHo. Among three strong offerings this year, look out in particular for a demented new comedy by Ebbe Roe Smith titled Day of the Docent. Yes, that’s right. Prepare to be totally unprepared.

We expect an audacious season from Third Rail, but next year is downright gobsmacking. All three plays will astonish you, and also, I think, extend your sense of what this boundless company can accomplish. My personal fave: Penelope, by Irish genius Enda Walsh, which looks at the situation of Odysseus’ wife from the POV of……her suitors.

However, the grooviest production of all next year just might be Oregon Children Theatre’s adaptation of The Storm in the Barn, the celebrated graphic novel by Matt Phelan, adapted here by the always superb Eric Coble, about a boy’s startling face-down with a sinister presence in a Kansas barn, circa 1937. Original music by Portland band Black Prairie! Here’s a taste from the book’s trailer:

Nor do you have to wait till fall for good theater; next month brings the inaugural production of the long-awaited Portland Shakespeare Project with As You Like It, directed by AD Michael Mendelson.

So color me whatever, but if you ax me, we’re looking at the best season in Portland theater in a long, long time…..

That most wonderful time of the year

2011-06-12T14:13:00.000-07:00

Ah, The Drammy Awards, 2011 edition. We always call it the year’s largest cast party. And every year it really does feel that way, as a good chunk of Portland’s theater community gathers at the Crystal Ballroom to honor another season of gobsmacking theater. Darius Pierce, whose sense of humor make Stephen Colbert look like a stiff, hosts. The famed JAW Festival gets a special achievement award. And beyond that, all bets are off.

If you're not from around these parts, you may be surprised to learn that Portland has a lot of theater — much more than you’d expect, for a town of this size. Every year the work of over a hundred companies is considered for distinction. And, yes, why not admit it, some of that work is subpar (London’s about the only city I know of where you can walk into a theater at random and probably have a good experience), but an astonishing amount of each season’s offerings is of impressively high quality.

Even so, it’s actually pretty hard to get a Drammy Award. Only Committee members who have seen a particular show get to vote on it, of course (there are 15 of us in all), and a nomination must get a whopping 80% of ayes to carry the award. Which means that if all 15 can vote on a particular nomination, that’s 12 people who have to be in agreement. Yikes.

This also means that often a show arousing strong feelings pro and con will fall victim to a hung jury. How this pans out if that for me personally, every year I’m proud to have nudged an award or two in being that wouldn’t have carried the day otherwise . . . and contrariwise, there are some that I really, really regret not being able to inspire enough swing votes. I bet if you polled all 15 Committee members, all would say the same thing.

2011’s ceremony, which takes place Monday evening at the fab Crystal Ballroom, will much of a muchness only more so. There are going to be a few surprises that will astonish people. And some popular favorites that will cause standing ovations and verklempte acceptance speeches. And then too, as Ben Waterhouse points out, part of http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifthehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif fun is griping about all the deserving people and companies who were — yet again! — “overlooked.”

See you there. But you might not see me. I’m thinking of pulling a Ruth Reichl. Not because anyone's looking for me, but just because how often do you get to go somewhere incognito?

You are now watching New Play TV

2011-06-10T18:06:00.000-07:00

Dare I wonder if the new play universe is slouching toward reinventing itself? Between the provocative water cooler that HowlRound instantly became, and now New Play TV, the marginalized art form we call the theater is showing signs of jumping from the margins and the footnotes right into the headlines.

New Play TV is is a "collective media outlet for live events and performances relevant to the new play sector." It's interactive and media-savvy and fun, and it's open to any and all new play "stakeholders." Right now it's covering an amazing amount of The Dramatists Guild conference currently in progress, and tonight, par example, you can watch a full performance simulcast from the FURY Factory Festival of Ensemble Theater.

Just today NPTV posted an excellent interview by our own Andrea Stolowitz interviewing the legendary Emily Mann. And you can watch it here or watch it there. How cool is that?

newplay on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

"Hippies of endless variation"

2011-06-09T21:14:00.001-07:00

"We're so thankful for all we've got
And so sorry for everything we're not..."

As the only person in the great State of Orygun who has not yet weighed in on the TV show Portlandia — well. Seeing as how the IFC social satire’s been renewed for a second season, it’s high time I added to the general blogritude to say that I thought the show was.........intermittently amusing. Brilliant when it stuck to lampooning things genuinely Bridgetown, but tepid when it resorted to warmed-over SNL-style sketches.

My favorite episode of Season 1 was the second or third one, where the Mayor (played by the eerily apposite Kyle MacLachlan) commissioned a pair of local roustabouts to write a theme song for the City of Roses. Their ham-fisted attempts to hack out something suitably anthematic served as an ongoing motifs for that episode, with each songwriting attempt worse than the one before, of course.

The punch line for the storyline didn’t come till the credits, when you were treated what the two songwriters actually turned in to the Mayor. And the wonderful epiphany was that it was good — dippy and DIY and beguiling at all once, the combination of which is, after all, very much a Stumptown specialty.

I wish it really were the city’s theme song. Here it is, see you what think.

A Moment's Hesitation, chapter two

2011-06-06T22:33:00.000-07:00

Then.

And now.

Scene.

Are you an Oregon playwright?

2011-06-05T11:35:00.000-07:00

Fantastic. Do this now: submit your application to Literary Arts for the Oregon Literary Fellowships. It costs nothing to apply; application is E-Z; and if you’re selected you get a nice chunk of change and probably a serious career boost along with it. The deadline for application is June 24 (not a postmark deadline, by the by).

Genres up for awards include poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction, drama, and young readers literature. Which I mention because of all the genres, playwriting is, for some reason, still not on the radar of Oregon’s burgeoning playwriting community. Hence your chances of grabbing the brass ring are much, much greater, statistically, than if you submitted, say, literary fiction.

Questions? All the coaching you could ever need can be found at Paper Fort, an excellent writer’s resource created by the fabulous Susan Denning.

What you are waiting for, get off the interwebs and starting crafting that application. You’ve got nothing to lose but your undeserved obscurity.

And if you still need encouragement, here’s a little Alice Cooper to inspire you to take action:

JAW 2011 preview, part one

2011-06-03T22:44:00.000-07:00

I’m way late in relaying this information — it was released nearly two weeks ago — but I’ve been reallyreally busy. Which calls for another blog post altogether, but for now...

…I want to focus on the first weekend of the festival formerly known as Just Add Water. This first leg of the festivities is called Made in Oregon, and it’s a reading series of new works by — who else? — all Oregon-based writers. This year’s a special one for me personally, because 3 of the 4 participants are former members of PlayGroup (the writers group I ran for seven years back at PCS), and these same writers are now charter members of Playwrights West — a group of playwrights committed to fully producing one work per year of a member playwright, along the lines of 13P and Workhaus Collective.

M in O boasts of a brand new play by the fab Matthew B. Zrebski with a title I find fulsome, for some reason: Forky. I haven’t read it and plan not to, so as to be totally awed by this playwright’s always spellbinding dramatic vision. For now I can only say: Expect to be startled.

Another must-see: Andrea Stolowitz’s beautiful and moving play Antartikos, fresh from its workshop at the New Harmony Project. ART presented an early version of this play for this year’s Fertile Ground Festival, directed by Gemma Whelan, which came off splendidly. Someone is going to up and actually produce this play and do very well by it. Theaters, take note!

Rounding out the Playwrights West juggernaut is Patrick Wohlmut’s play Continuum. Megan Kate Ward presented an early version a couple of years ago in her popular Now Hear This series at PCS, to showcase the play as a Sloan Commission. The story is a surprising cat-and-mouse game between two scientist, one of whom has several different identities at his disposal—and equally complex reason for creating them.

Also exploring questions of identity is Made in Oregon’s fourth offering, by Portlander Brian Kettler. Personal is a thriller that investigates how personality and especially celebrity can be created as well as dissolved by our society’s avid love of hero workshop. Inspired by a James Tiptree story (though pretty much using the story as a point of departure), Brian’s play is disturbingly funny and thoughtful and, ultimately, like Patrick’s play, a mystery at heart.

Made in Oregon runs during the week of July 11, probably later in the week. You can check specific show times once they’re posted on the JAW website; meanwhile you can read more about these writers here.

Mixed Blood wants YOU

2011-05-28T18:38:00.000-07:00

Let's just admit it: it’s not very often that I weigh in on the major theater conundrums of our time, thank you for noticing. It’s not that I’m totally thoughtless, it’s just that there are others who do this more consistently, more deeply, and, well—generally more better. Parabasis and Theatre Ideas, to name only two.

Anyway.

The recent news from Mixed Blood cheers me, so I want to acknowledge it today. To wit: the venerable Minneapolis company, known for adventurous programming under its founder since 1976 (yes, that’s right), announced this past week that at least for the 2011/12 season, it will not charge admission.

Here’s how Mixed Blood describes this bold move:

What is Radical Hospitality?
Radical Hospitality provides no-cost access to all mainstage productions for all audience members beginning with the 2011–12 season. An expansion of Mixed Blood’s egalitarian mission, Radical Hospitality erases economic barriers in pursuit of building a truly inclusive, global audience. Whether a patron is a long-time Mixed Blood attendee, a new immigrant living in Mixed Blood’s Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, a person with low income or disabilities, a college student, or someone who has never been to theater, he or she will be welcomed, free of charge—with radical hospitality.

Why is Mixed Blood doing it?
Revolutionizing access is a core part of Mixed Blood’s vision. In pursuit of that goal, Radical Hospitality aims to: 1) Build relationships with those who have been traditionally underserved by the arts; 2) Eliminate real or perceived barriers to participation; and 3) Increase the number of Minnesotans participating in the arts.

For me, what’s phenomenal about this decision is that solves a major problem by transcending the question. The issue, of course, is how to sustain an art form like theater, which is both culturally marginalized and incredibly expensive to produce. Now Mixed Blood has come up with the most interesting answer I’ve ever heard, which is to not expect theater to pay for itself. It has to be supported in ways that create no financial barriers — ways that people are welcome in the theater not just for their money or their demographics, but because something about that theater’s offerings interest them.

First question, naturally enough, is how is this possible. Here’s what MBT has to say:

By revolutionizing access, Mixed Blood believes audiences will grow to be truly inclusive and reflective of the entire community. With that growth, Mixed Blood believes that audiences and supporters will embrace the egalitarian core value of the company, providing support in return. Simply put, instead of charging for tickets, audiences will be asked, subsequent to attendance, to voluntarily become supporters of a vision that ensures access for all. Funding from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund will support the launch of Radical Hospitality in 2011-12, with individual, corporate and philanthropic sponsorships sustaining no-cost admission beyond next season.

It’s been a bit disturbing, this past week, to see how angry Mixed Blood’s generosity of spirit has made certain people. And I mean certain theater folk—insiders whose reactionary statements have startled me. Some think that “free” will be interpreted by public as “without value.” But you have to wonder: if someone’s world view is that culture improves the more you pay for it, isn’t that exactly the kind of patron you’re better off without? Now that you don’t depend on them to pony up, over and over again?

An aside here. Years ago, while working for a regional theater, I was working yet another late night in the office when I realized someone else was toiling away in a nearby cubicle. To my surprise, it was a prominent board member, performing some sort of clerical task. “M___,” I said, “what are you doing here so late?”

She didn’t even look up as she snapped at me. “I’m here getting out gala invitations so that you people can have jobs,” she said, nasty as a badger.

I was so shocked that I couldn't formulate anything to say. Did she really think that’s what her donations of money, time and contacts were supposed to achieve? Was there no sense of joy in helping to sustain an ancient art form or at least a community institution? Finally I moved away from that board member’s work area without saying anything—a move that inadvertently spoke for itself, I guess, because she never looked me in the eye again. After all, I had seen her for what she really was.

So yeah. I’m all for an approach to theater-making that doesn’t look at the art form and its practitioners as infantilized beggars.

Okay. To a degree, I understand the naysayers’ concerns. There are other arguments that hold a little more water for me. What if there’s a dry patch with the funding, for one. And there are similar detractions. There will always be similar detractions, so what. I for one am excited to see what happens, to see how Minneapolis and other cities respond to Radical Hospitality. Smaller theaters have embraced this ethic before, but never before (to my knowledge) one of Mixed Blood’s size.

There will still be work to be done — I doubt patrons will flood Mixed Blood’s gates just because the plays are free, so there will still be two tons of outreach necessary to attract audiences — but the simple notion that all people are welcome is inherently radical. And you can bet that next time I’m in Minneapolis, Mixed Blood will be at the top of my theatergoing itinerary. I want to be among the number who are genuinely wanted in that building.

Variations long after a theme

2011-05-24T13:07:00.000-07:00

Photo by the fab Gary Norman.

I would have preferred to inherit Grandpappy's talent, instead of his penchant for fatty snacks, but oh well.

RadioLab: Desperately Seeking Symmetry

2011-05-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Cousin Tabitha, for sharing this wondrous and affecting video by the endlessly inventive people at Radiolab with the music of Sufjan Stevens. Don't blink when you watch it!

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

What are you doing on Shakespeare’s birthday?

2011-04-20T14:02:00.000-07:00

His putative birthday, anyway, which is this coming Saturday, April 23. I’m inviting you herewith to spend part of this high holiday talking about a subject central to the Bard’s life: playwriting.

In honor of the upcoming Oregon Book Awards, the good people at Literary Arts, the Dramatists Guild, Portland Center Stage and Portland Theatre Works are hosting a panel discussion with the nominees for the Angus L. Bowmer Award — that’s the drama prize, mais oui. And guess who’s moderating? Moi-même. But it’s not all about us. We’ll discuss both the plight and the promise of being a contemporary playwright. Can you be one without living in New York? Or sans MFA? How do you get known outside of Portland, which is fast becoming known as the nation’s favorite “tryout town”?

These are a few things we might discuss, but how much we cover is really up to you and your most incisive questions. Our panelists will share their thoughts, and with any luck, so will YOU.

Details in the press release below. Please come!

...........................

PANEL ON OREGON PLAYWRITING RAMPS UP TO LITERARY ARTS’ OREGON BOOK AWARDS

Panel includes nominees for Angus L. Bowmer Award

This year on Shakespeare’s birthday — Saturday, April 23 — the Dramatists Guild offers Northwest members an opportunity to meet some of Oregon’s finest playwrights, ask questions about their work, and hear what they have to say about the dramatist’s life. The panel discussion includes Wayne Harrel,* Susan Mach, George Taylor,* and Cynthia Whitcomb, the Oregon Book Award finalists for the coveted Angus L. Bowmer Award for Drama.

Marc Acito and Molly Best Tinsley* are also finalists for the Bowmer Award. The winner of Angus L. Bowmer Award for Drama, as well as the Oregon Book Awards winners in seven other categories, will be announced at the Oregon Book Awards ceremony on Monday, April 25, at 7:00 pm at the Gerding Theater. To learn more about the awards ceremony and view a complete list of finalists and nominees in all genres, please visit http://www.literary-arts.org/awards/.

The OBA drama panel on April 23 will be held at Portland Center Stage’s Julie S. Vigeland Rehearsal Hall, on the theater’s third floor, 5:30-6:30 pm, and moderated by nationally known dramaturg Mead Hunter. Admission is free. In addition to the Dramatists Guild, event co-sponsors include Literary Arts, Portland Center Stage, and Portland Theatre Works. The Guild’s Oregon representatives, playwrights Andrea Stolowitz and Steve Patterson, will also be on hand to answer questions about Dramatists Guild news and the playwriting trade. Immediately following the panel, members are invited to a wine and cheese reception from 6:30-7:30 on the mezzanine level of Portland Center Stage’s Armory Building.

If you haven’t yet had your fill of culture, PCS also presents a 7:30 pm performance of Opus that evening, and you can receive $5.00 off your ticket price when you mention the promotional code “STRINGS” over the phone or when ordering tickets online. This offer is good for any Tuesday through Sunday performance from April 15 to May 8.

For more information, contact your Oregon Guild reps, Andrea and Steve, or contact Sarah Mitchell, Education & Community Programs Coordinator for Portland Center Stage, 503.445.3795 or sarahm@pcs.org.

*Dramatists Guild member

Andrea Stolowitz and Steve Patterson
DG Portland, OR co-Regional Reps

Dance, Billy, Dance!

2011-04-08T22:57:00.000-07:00

Contrarian that I am, I’m probably the only person you know who wasn’t bowled over by Billy Elliot the movie. Sure, there was plenty to like about the Stephen Daldry vehicle, and I enjoyed it well enough; but instinctively I resisted its multiple attempts to wheedle more and more saltwater from my overworked tear ducts.

Imagine my bemusement, then, when the musical version (also directed by Daldry, with music by Elton John), now playing at the Keller as part of the Broadway Across America tour, was fun and impactful. Big surprise for me: while the musical version has its occasional lapses into Broadway hokum, it actually carries a great of political punch. More about that in a minute.

The play’s narrative strategy involves a lot of plot gapping; it’s clear its devisers decided that since nobody but nobody was showing up who hadn’t seen the movie, they could just drop the pretense of cogent storytelling and hit the high points without further fuss. Hence, for instance, Billy’s love of dance is a big secret in Act 1, and then suddenly whole town knows about it in Act 2. How’d they find out? Who cares! We just want to be there when Billy triumphs.

But this is not to say the book is weak — far from it. As adapted by Lee Hall from his own screenplay, the ongoing struggle of the striking miners is no mere backdrop to Billy’s individuation; the two go hand in hand. The boy’s immediate victory coincides with the strike’s collapse and Thatcher’s successful gutting of a whole way of life — along with the livelihoods and communities that relied upon it.

The musical’s actually at its best when it portrays those struggles through all the resources at its disposal. Of special note is the muscular choreography by Peter Darling, which often interweaves constables and miners to taut effect. During the lighter scenes, this sense of worlds in collision is even joyous, as when a chorus of police backs up a class of young ballet students in a way that makes us laugh yet which also honor the athleticism of dance.

My favorite scene, though, involves a village holiday party and pageant, where the company sings “Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher” and brings down the house with a colossal Maggie puppet whose grasping, gnarled hands reach out to the audience like she’s coming after them. That gives you an idea of where the script’s sympathies ultimately lie. And in that sense, the story cuts even closer to the mark then it did when the movie was released 11 years ago.

(A quick aside here: Lee Hall, who wrote book and lyrics, is a terrific British playwright whose hilarious and affecting play Cooking with Elvis will make a fortune for the first Portland theater that dares to embrace the script’s uproarious, scabrous and racy sense of humor.)

Usually you have to be quick to catch the Broadway tours as they sprint through Portland, but Billy Elliot the Musical plays here through April 17. Go see it if you can; it’s worth it. Try for mid-orchestra seats, where you’re close enough to see faces but far enough back to take in the whole stage at once. There’s a lot to see in this show, and you’ll want to see it all.

Fan mail from some flounder?

2011-04-04T21:49:00.000-07:00

Not from a flounder at all, actually — whatever that even means — but one of my most devoted blog-readers. Still I couldn’t resist tarting up this post by using the phrase. Know where it comes from? Here’s a clue.

Anyway. Today I did get fan mail of a sort, clearly intended to be sung to the tune of "Norwegian Wood." I suppose it’s more epitaph than epigram, but I’m taking a compliment where I can find it, okay? Here’s what I got:

Onnnnce
you had a blog
or should I say, once it had you.

Yoooooour
friends from the bog
often stopped by,
commented too.

I think you were coping with bosses you wished you could roast.
You work for yourself now and never have time left to post.

Now nobody reads
new posts from Mead
this bird is freed.

la,
la la la la
la la la la
la la la la.

In case you’d like to sing along, here’s something Fabulicious for your edification…

…along with my promise (yet again and not for the last time) to post more soon.

Coming attractions: Charise Castro Smith

2011-03-24T12:46:00.000-07:00

Charise Castro Smith’s amazing new play BoomCrackleFly opens tomorrow at Miracle Theater Group — and what an opening it will be. Ms. Smith’s here in town for occasion, and she was able to answer a few questions between rehearsals.

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SO. First off: I love your script, and I love the wild, reckless sensibility that informs it. It’s going to be amazing to see how Miracle manages to stage it – people bobbing in a world covered with water, for instance. Would you say you believe your first responsibility, as a writer, is to your poetic vision, without regard to staging concerns? And that it’s up to the director to figure out how to realize that vision?

This is one of the first questions people usually ask after reading this play — how do you think they will stage the magical huge stuff? I think one of the great things about theater is the fact that if an actor stands on stage and says something is true, then at that moment it's true. It's the huge imaginative possibility of theater to call all sorts of things into being with language. If you think about some of the things that happen in Shakespeare's plays: forests moving from one place to another, ghosts, battles, tempests...I just try to listen to the characters as I'm writing and trust that the actor's and director will make it happen. And I think that Olga and the actors at Milagro are doing a really amazing job of just that.

Your work holds all kinds of contradictions in suspension; it’s hallucinatory, yet also tremendously vivid. Who would you say are your literary influences?

I've been a lifelong serious reader of just about anything I could get my hands on. One first aha moments with a play was sitting on the floor of the public library when I was thirteen or so and reading Jose Rivera's Marisol and just watching this whole new world open up in front of me. Then about a year later I read Angels in America and was totally blown away too. With Boomcracklefly I sort of had Thornton Wilder's The Skin of our Teeth bouncing around in my mind. It's one of my favorite plays.

Hemingway appears in this play – is he an influence? Why does he appear in the play to the two sisters? Why Hemingway, I mean, and not Dante or Kushner or Sappho?

I grew up in Miami, and my family and I would sometimes drive down to Key West for the weekend. There's a whole culture of street performers there -- jugglers and clowns and people who get together and put on little shows by the water at sunset every night. So I think that's were the acrobat sisters came from. And then Hemingway is also such a huge figure in Key West. The house he lived in there is a museum now- and there's this little studio in the back where he had his office and wrote. He's sort of a local celebrity there. He's also interesting to me because he's such a big historical macho man and yet he writes some of his female characters with such tenderness. Catherine in A Farewell to Arms just breaks my heart.

What are you working on now?

I'm working on a couple of different plays right now. One is about the life and adventures of a little girl spy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Another is about the last couple months of Queen Isabella's life. And also writing a couple of other shorter plays and some cool projects as an actor in New York.

Thanks for the memories

2011-03-23T13:05:00.000-07:00

Slouching toward spring in Portlandia

2011-03-19T15:59:00.000-07:00

Just 28 hours to go till the equinox, at this writing — but hey, who’s counting. It's been spring here for weeks, as evidenced by the number of trees in my neighborhood that are now completely swathed in neon green moss.

By way of celebrating the changing tides of the seasons, here is a poem by Portland icon Susan Denning — she of the tremendously useful resource for writers called Paper Fort, as well as the online literary magazine, Caffeine Destiny.

For more of Susan’s work, visit her page at Inknode. And celebrate the return of light with us.

NO ONE KNOWS HER

Tell her wait, little interrupter. Why bother
she is slow. She is field hungry, moving
to the edge of the garden, where she wants
to stay and stay. Spring on its way, why listen.
She is solidly hers. Ducks overhead and the sky
a speckled target. A suggestion of owls in the trees.
The trees repeat her name. How the trees insist.
The birdbath unfreezes, the ground sprouts
and shifts. Tell her back to the house with its curtains
and floors. Tell her dress the paper dolls in leaves,
give them paper knives and forks. Stand them on the counter.
Tell her lovely, little negotiator. She would rather gather
mice. She has had it with the roses. How the bugs persist.
Tell her she can wish for goats eating up the weeds—
she can hope for rabbits. Deer lingering by the fence.
She wants her animals near. She wants the only sound
to be their movements. Call her steady. Tell her resist.

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig

2011-03-17T18:36:00.001-07:00

Not to worry, I will have new posts (real ones) soon. Meanwhile, in honor of St Patrick's Day, I offer what is probably the very worst "Irish" song of all time.

Just to be clear, by the way, these jokers are not actually The Irish Rovers.

Cheers!

Epistolary romances: a pre-Valentine’s story

2011-02-10T16:22:00.000-08:00

James and I have been together over 20 years now. And during those decades, many minor but ongoing disagreements have come to the fore. The most frequently repeated is probably about career. James will be able to retire one day – a concept all but unheard of in the theater profession. When I bemoan my fate, he says, “But you’ve spent your life doing work you love.” To which I can only say: “Yes, but YOU have the option of retiring from your work when you feel like it!”

Other oft-iterated arguments: whether you should dust before you vacuum or after (I maintain it’s the latter), and whether hotel tips should be delivered at the end of a stay or doled out in miniature every day (the former, according to me).

But here at the Colorado New Play Summit, come to find out James was right all along about the tipping. This came to the fore because on my first day, I left a note in my hotel room alerting housekeeping that the TV wasn’t working, along with a small tip for the trouble. When I returned to my room that evening, the TV worked perfectly and on top of it was the note at right. Sweet!

The next day I left a thank you note with another tip, and came “home” – after trudging through 10 blocks of fallen snow while the white stuff continued to sift down from the heavens -- to a note that read: “Something for a cold day!” It sat atop a packet of instant hot chocolate mix. And then yesterday, another note expressing the hope that my stay in Denver was going well.

Today, I was just a little disappointed to get no note. But then I noticed a brown envelope on my desk, which turned out to contain a chocolate chip cookie. And in the fridge: two small cartons of milk, probably pilfered from the hotel larder. Sweet and sweeter.

Do you think I should try gradually increasing the size of the tips to see what happens? I think I should we (my interlocutor and I) should go for the gold, don’t you?

New play fever at one mile high

2011-02-09T22:14:00.000-08:00

“Beautiful people of Denver,” as the Unsinkable Molly Brown (whose Queen Anne mansion is within walking distance of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts) once warbled. Loving it here! The sharply arctic air (a blizzard dumped snow all over the place on Monday night), the gleaming modernist buildings cheek by jowl with sandstone structures dating back to the 19th century – and yes, the theater. I’m in town all week to work at the Colorado New Play Summit, as dramaturg on The Whale, a new play by Samuel D. Hunter, directed by Chay Yew.

It’s a dazzling stellium of new work: two world premieres productions, by Michelle Lowe and Ken Weitzman, and five readings (by Octavio Solis, Lisa Loomer and Lloyd Suh in addition to Sam, plus a devised piece by Buntport. And coterminous activities, and an upcoming industry weekend of theater luminaries from across the country.

More about that on another day. Meanwhile, today was Day 3 of our rehearsal process with The Whale – a real breakthrough, too, that left me too moved to speak for a few minutes afterward. Here I am in a more pacific moment, allegedly explaining what dramaturgy’s all about:

I don’t think I’ve ever answered that question the same way twice.

More cogently, here is Sam explaining how The Whale made it way to Denver:

Stay tuned for excessive name-dropping, gossip and insider information.

Jordan Harrison: true to type in Portlandia

2011-02-04T11:09:00.000-08:00

Being a brief interview with the mercurial playwright Jordan Harrison.

Does Portland love you or what? You’ve been in JAW twice, and now both those plays moved into full production at Portland Center Stage. Futura opens there tonight, and CoHo Productions opens Kid-Simple on February 18. Our own Jordan Harrison Festival! Why do you think we’re so drawn to your work here?

I suspect that it’s less to do with me and more to do with Portland. It seems like a theater town that's uncommonly focused on new work. I just went to 99 Ways at Theatre Vertigo, and the posters in the lobby were like a who’s who of the most exciting playwrights I know: Jenny Schwartz, Rinne Groff, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Carson Kreitzer… At any rate, I feel very lucky to be batting a thousand at JAW. And it’s fun that my first play, Kid-Simple, will be running concurrently with my most recent play; they could hardly be more different. I hope CoHo gets some of PCS’s audience, and vice versa.

This is a very literate town, full of bookstores large and small, teeming with readers, with great literary organizations like Wordstock and Literary Arts. And of course Futura gives us a time when the printed word is all but extinct. Do you foresee a time when actual books are as exotic as sextants and sackbuts?

I don’t think that time is far off! The prognosis isn’t as rosy for printed matter outside of Portland. It seems like a giant Barnes & Noble closes every couple of months in New York. And Amazon has been campaigning long and hard to make e-books outsell printed books. I finished the first draft of Futura in Spring 2008, and the world has already changed so much since then – I see people regarding the play less as a paranoid piece of science fiction and more as a play about current events!

Why don’t you just move to Portlandia?

I hear the dream of the ‘90s is alive here. And you guys have very wide supermarket aisles, which is a very tempting thing to a New Yorker.

You go from Portland to Louisville, to premiere a new play at the celebrated Humana Festival. As you’re no doubt aware. What is that play about?

The play is called Maple and Vine – it’s a commission for Actors Theatre of Louisville, and I’ve been working on it closely with the director Anne Kauffman. It’s about an urban couple who retreat from life in 2011 and move to a community of 1950s reenactors. And the relative difficulty of life in the 50s – gender roles, racial prejudice, no Internet – perversely ends up making them whole. And of course the clothes are dreamy. Maple and Vine sort of feels like the 2nd part of a trilogy, started with Futura, about humanity and technology. I just haven’t written the third play yet.

This freaks me out on acid.

2011-01-21T23:43:00.000-08:00

Ya, Fertile Ground's in full swing, but it's not too soon to plan your post-Fest escapades. Exhibit A, as Rod Serling used to say: this video for Third Rail's upcoming extravaganza. If this doesn't get you into the theater, nothing can.

Fertile Ground 2011 opens….any minute now!

2011-01-20T19:05:00.000-08:00

Portland’s scrappy, anything goes, DIY theater fest opens tonight, launching 10 crazy days and night of marathon theatergoing. Since at this point I’m officially the last person in town to handicap the Festival, I’m going to be quick.

TONIGHT I’m attending Nick Zagone’s The Missing Pieces at the Portland Playhouse, a play about a boy's self-initiation into a big, big world. The play is dear to my heart, since it started out in PlayGroup the now-defunct PCS writing group that morphed into the fabulous Playwrights West), and was presented in JAW 2009. And now the full production, which runs through January 30 -- unless, that is, it becomes a huge hit like the Playhouse’s Festival offering of last year, Hunt Holman’s Willow Jade, which went on to win a Drammy Award for Outstanding Playwriting. Break many legs this year, Nick.

Just a few more highlights before I head out. Kim Rosenstock’s aleatory 99 Ways to [interfere with] a Swan continues its wildly popular run at Theatre Vertigo; and the always absorbing and startling Hand2Mouth company presents a new piece by Erin Leddy entitled My Mind Is Like an Open Meadow. And a young audiences piece that adults will enjoy as much as their kids is a wild new Monty Pythonesque version of Robin Hood, penned by James Moore (yes, that James Moore, he formerly of defunkt fame) at Northwest Children’s Theatre. (Okay, so I’m the dramaturg — I can still say it’s hilarious, right??)

Several staged readings of note also grace the Festival, including Andrea Stolowitz’s mindbending new play Antarktikos (on which I served as dramaturg and Gemma Whelan directed) at ART, and Steve Patterson has an eerie new play entitled Immaterial Matters, presented at CoHo Productions. Also Claire Willett has a new play, That Was the River, This is the Sea, co-written with Gilberto del Campo, which has a whole run at a new venue, The Art Department.

AND I can’t wait for Futura, Jordan Harrison’s bracing dystopian view of the future of literature. Though the official opening is February 4, Portland Center Stage is opening its invited dress rehearsal to Festival passholders, and discounted tickets during the regular. Do not miss this one.

There’s a ton more, but now I must shift from gush to rush -- so see you at the Festival.

When Irish guys are stylin’

2011-01-16T21:00:00.000-08:00

Across the country but especially here in Portlandia, I’m famous for evaporating like morning mist. Whether it’s a theater event, an art opening or Storm Large’s surprise party, take your eyes off me for a minute and I’m gone for the night. No. I'm not going through that awkward stage. It’s just hate the long goodbyes that are the fallout of social occasions.

My technique, honed by years of disappearing acts, involves scoping out all available exits upon arrival. Ideal targets? Egresses located just past bathrooms; back doors; secret passageways (oh yes — for some reason these abound in Portland). A quick scrutiny of “alarmed” doors, by way of checking whether their wires are attached or not, often yields handy exits where angels fear to tread. And catered affairs are a bonus; the servers will gladly clue you in about any hidden corridors or tunnels.

Imagine my surprise when “Cousin Tabitha” recently informed me that there's a term of art for the disappearing act: the Irish Goodbye. There’s even a Facebook page dedicated to the practice. So apparently I come from a long line of escape artists; it’s actually my genetic heritage.

Recently, though, that changed for me when I donating my aging Jetta to AllClassical. Now I get around by walking (a subversive act for this former Angeleno), busing, cycling, renting the occasional ZipCar. And also the kindness of acquaintances.

Whereas at first the inconvenience of all this seemed colossal — I mean, the ability to take off on impulse is very nearly the definition of American, is it not? — it’s turning to be a kind of blessing. Last week, for ex, Olga Sanchez and I got lost in the fogbound northwest hills and had a fun adventure together. My bus rides around town have resulted in a great increase of reading (and when you do that for a living, you know that can’t be bad). In attending Superior Donuts last week with my Drammy colleague Barbara, I found much about her storied career that I’d never suspected (since I’d never had the time to ask before). From the bicycling, I’ve discovered that oxygenation is entertaining. And last night, instead of being the first guy out the door at Vertigo, I headed over to The Blue Monk — ostensibly to wait for my ride home, then going on to have a rollicking conversation with playwright Kim Rosenstock and director Megan Kate Ward.

As recently as a few weeks ago, none of this would have happened. Had I still my own car, in each of these cases I would have appeared and vanished suddenly. Like Count Dracula, but without the starched shirt, cape and pomade.

So for now, anyway, it’s farewell to the Irish Goodbye and hello to a more earthbound MrMead than perhaps you’ve spotted fleetingly in the past.

Slán go fóill.

Belarus and Hungary and what you can do

2010-12-29T18:50:00.000-08:00

Yeah, it's about time I came out of retirement, right? Well, here's a good reason. Never mind what you think of the Ho-Hum Theater's latest Arthur Miller revival, there are places in the world where theater really matters because it provides a hard-to-govern forum for social ferment. Which has attracted some serious attempts to repress it.

Probably you've heard about what's going on in Hungary these days, but matters in Belarus are no less dire. To bring attention to the plight of the Belarus Free Theater, cities nationally and internationally are co-presenting the event described in the press release below.

Portland's edition is this coming Monday, January 3. Please come if you can to show your support for freedom of expression everywhere and to hear this amazing Pinter piece read. The reading lasts about an hour, and if you like, you'll have the opportunity to sign an online petition. See you there.

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CONTACT:
Tim DuRoche: (503) 720-6171
Tracy Cameron Francis: (503) 318-4330
e-mail: timd@worldoregon.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“FREE BELARUS – PORTLAND”: LOCAL THEATER ARTISTS COME TOGETHER IN SHOW OF SOLIDARITY
FOR INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS AND ARTISTIC FREEDOM

December 29, 2010- Portland, OR. In an act of support and solidarity for artistic freedom and international human rights, Portland theater artists will present Free Belarus–Portland, featuring a reading of Being Harold Pinter, a work by The Belarus Free Theater — a group that has been in hiding, following massive government crackdowns on democratic dissent and free expression in the republic of Belarus.

The reading will take place at on the Mezzanine of Portland Center Stage, 128 NW Eleventh Avenue, on Monday, January 3, from 6-7:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Being Harold Pinter is a piece that mixes transcribed statements by Belarusian political prisoners with writings by the award-winning playwright Pinter, who also was a friend and supporter of the troupe. The play blurs the boundaries between art and reality, delivering a poignant contemporary commentary on violence, oppression, freedom and human dignity.
The Portland installment of Free Belarus will feature local acting talents of Bobby Bermea, Chris Harder, Hannah Treuhaft, Dustin Rush, Haley Talbot and Noah Dunham.

The event is part of Global Artistic Campaign in Solidarity "Free Belarus," a coordinated effort by theaters and human rights activists around the country (in Portland, Washington DC, Minneapolis, and New York) and in the UK (including the passionate support of theater luminaries like Ian McKellen, Tom Stoppard, and Jude Law) to bring attention to the plight of artists and citizens in the former Soviet republic. Global Artistic Campaign in Solidarity "Free Belarus" is the U.S. extension of a campaign begun in the UK five years ago by Tom Stoppard and others.

Also that evening at Portland Center Stage, attendees will have the opportunity to hear a statement from co-artistic director Natalya Kolyada and to sign an online petition in support of BFT: http://humanrights.change.org/petitions/view/free_political_prisoners_in_belarus.

Aaron Landsman, a New York-based theater artist and one of the event’s national organizers, said: “Just keeping their cause visible can make a difference. Because while the Belarusian government is brutal they aren’t dumb. The more attention that is focused on specific individuals there, the less likely they are, frankly, to kill those individuals, and the more likely the country itself will advance . . . I was lucky enough to work with Free Theater in Minsk. I cannot quite describe to you what it feels like to see theater in a safe house in which are crammed 60 of the most eager, desperate people, who are all there to have their sanity restored, their country’s lies undone, their friends remembered.”

BACKGROUND ON BELARUS FREE THEATER
The Belarus Free Theater was scheduled to perform at New York’s Public Theater for the Under the Radar Festival, which begins early in January. But that appearance is now threatened, as both founders of the troupe are in hiding, and another member is in jail, as the result of a government crackdown on protests against a presidential election that human rights groups have described as rigged.

The arrests of the theater company members are part of a larger campaign of repression directed by the government of Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, who claims to have won 79 percent of the vote in the recent election. Since 1994 Mr. Lukashenko has run this former republic of the Soviet Union, leading what former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once called “the last true remaining dictatorship in the heart of Europe.” Last week, Mr. Lukashenko announced that hundreds of “bandits and saboteurs,” including several of his opponents, had been arrested. Among those arrested and detained were members of the Belarus Free Theater including artistic directors Natalya Kolyada and Nikolai Khalezin. Both Kolyada and Khalezin have been released and have gone underground. Their manager Artsiom Zheleznyak is still detained. Over 600 people are still behind bars.

Organized and coordinated by Tracy Cameron Francis (Theatre Without Borders, Hybrid Theatre Works) and Aaron Landsman (Elevator Repair Service), in conjunction with Mark Russell, Artistic Director of Under the Radar Festival, and with the support of Michael Rohd, Sojourn Theater, Mead Hunter, and Tim DuRoche of the World Affairs Council of Oregon—with generous in-kind support from Portland Center Stage.

Xtra, Xtra

2010-12-04T14:53:00.000-08:00

“If you can type, you can make movies” -- so goes the tagline for one of the hottest websites in the stratosphere these days, Xtranormal. This outfit provides free software that allows you to put your own dialogue into the mouths of prepared animated characters and then watch their conversation play out.

As such, it’s launched a veritable gold rush of snarky cartoons, sometimes giving voice to wish fulfillment conversations we’d like to have, others time reporting outrageous (and often recurrent) dialogue verbatim.

The first one I saw came to me from the my Cousin Tabitha (nhrn), who I have no doubt has had countless conversations very close to this one. (Warning: this piece contains some “language,” so don’t play it full blast whilst at work o whereva.)

Here’s another fave, created by one of Portland’s best actors, Tim True. If you’re a performer, I’ll bet you’ve had much the same conversation with somebody at some time.

And finally, one I especially love because it has been my lot in life, as a writer, editor and dramaturg, to perform the sort of work that many people believe they could do very well at any time if only they were ever in a mood someday to feel like it. If you’ve encountered analogous attitudes in your profession, whatever it may be, you’ll appreciate “So You Want To Write a Novel”:

I got your new music right here.

2010-11-26T13:22:00.001-08:00

Blame it on the holydays, or blame it on my favorite scapegoat — le media social. I do, and frequently -- not merely for convenience, but because it’s demonstrable (accent on demon) that the siphoning off of communicative impulses into Facebook and Twitter makes blogging seem downright long-form (aka antique).

Culpabilities aside, I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to return to ye olde confessional mode soon. Meanwhile, here’s a fun bagatelle for you. One of my favorite composers in the aggressively moderne style is György Ligeti. Like many, my first exposure to this artist was via Stanley Kubrick, who used Mr. Ligeti’s often disturbing music to great effect in The Shining in particular.

Ligeti doesn’t make for pleasant background music; it’s full of quirks, such as flatulent squeaks and whispered words. Many’s the time I’ve been asked to eject his CDs or, more passive-aggressively, just asked “How can you listen to that?” And my response is that I don’t invariably hear scary movie music. Instead I hear whimsical, playful, even mischievous music.

Q.E.D.: this performance of Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre, as performed by the fabulous Oregon-based new music ensemble Beta Collide, in a video produced by Yachats company BlueDot Productions. Consider this proof positive that new music doesn’t have to be a solemn affair.

Mysteries of the Macabre from BlueDot Productions on Vimeo.

Theater High

2010-11-13T18:51:00.001-08:00

A highlight of my recent trip to see my sainted mother in St Louis was a visit to the Rep to see a new play by Matthew Lombardo, High. As rolling premieres go, this production is something of a stampede; it had runs at Hartford Theater Works and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park before moving on to St Louis Rep, and the plan all along was to wind up Nueva York — Broadway.

When my mother picked up the tickets, the box office took one look at her and decided to do some pre-emptive deprogramming. “You do realize it’s……gritty?”

This spurred me to go online and find out just how nitty this gritty could get. Apparently the fuss is about the main character — a potty-mouthed nun sans wimple (but avec rosary) who works in a Church rehab service. Enter the challenge of her life in the form of an equally battle-scarred addict, and a shady priest with a mysterious agenda, and the games begin.

How does a lurid three-hander get Broadway legs? By dint of its star, Kathleen Turner. The very idea of sexy Ms. Turner married to Christ yet speaking fluent gutter punk is too delicious to resist. The gambit worked for the Rep; we were there on closing night, and the place was packed.

We got to sit within spitting distance of Ms. Turner, whose legendary smoky voice has deepened to a near-baritone. The woman has gravity; she commands a stage presence you don’t always get from movie stars in live performances. Fortunately for the production, her costars (Evan Jonigkeit and Michael Berresse) are both excellent — as they had better be, to stand up to Ms. Turner’s incandescence. In fact all the production elements are superb; there seems to be nothing else for this show to do but open on Broadway.

It’s interesting to me that St Louis was part of this gradual slouch toward New York. Leafing through the Rep’s program, I was impressed to see ads for about a dozen more theaters than I knew existed in that town. Seth Gordon is now at the Rep, as its Associate AD, where he’ll be kick-starting a new play development wing; he was out of town while I was there, but I was privileged to have lunch with two other noted theater artists, dramaturg Megan Monaghan and director Tlaloc Rivas, both teaching now at U of Missouri. And Carter Lewis has been catalyzing Wash U’s playwriting program for several years now. Looks like I have to revise my assumptions about St Louis being a theater backwater.

Oh, about the box office’s warnings? The putative grittiness came down to occasional blue language, a brief but convincing display of violence, and a smidge of nudity. My sainted mother’s assessment? “I’ve seen worse than that on TV.”

All Hallows Eve

2010-10-31T18:42:00.000-07:00

No doubt you’ve gathered that I love all things Hallowe’en. The cheesy cinematic frightfests, the symphonic renditions of the Dies Irae, the kids’ costumes, the scary cocktails and appetizers, the whole silly business.

Yet on the actual night of the 31st, you won’t catch me out partying. For me it’s a high holiday — a spiritual tide I want to hitch a ride on — and thus a time for meditation.

Though the usual concept of the holiday’s antecedents is that it was about frightening about away unwanted spirits, there’s more to it than that. The basic idea, for the ancient Celts, was that at this time of year, the membrane between the seen and the unseen was thinnest. Sure, you might want to take precautions about unwelcome spooks, but what about those you would want? Your ancestors, in other words, or the recently departed.

I have a few of both I’d like to hear from again. So later tonight, when the street noise has died down and the kids are back at home sorting through their plunder, I’ll be listening closely for a word from some people I very much miss.

Toward that end, here’s a little music, courtesy of Harold Budd and Brian Eno (from their album The Pearl) for all you October people.

Dark Shadows rises from the vaults

2010-10-30T22:14:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow I'll blog about what All Hallows Eve really means to me. But lest you think I don't appreciate the creepy/kooky/mysterious/ooky part of the occasion, here's "one from the vaults," as Dr. Frankenfurter sez.

When I was a boy, a new soap opera appeared on daytime TV: Dark Shadows. Because it came on right around the time I got from home school, my brother and I used to watch it while we had our afternoon snack. It was supposed to be a gothic romance, like Wuthering Heights or Rebecca. Only this was set on the spooky Maine coast -- the very area Stephen King would later mine so much from -- and though the show got the moody, claustrophobia-inducing atmosphere down pat, it was (pardon the expression) deadly dull.

And not just to kids, apparently. Ratings plummeted. Finally, in a desperate move, the show's creators took the show in a radical new direction ... and the rest is television history. Feast your eyes on that episode of the no-budget, semi-unintentionally camp horrorfest, Dark Shadows, where you were guaranteed a live blooper in nearly every airing.

Hilarity and Disparity at Portland Playhouse

2010-10-27T16:55:00.000-07:00

Currently playing at Portland Playhouse: one of my favorite plays of all time, Telethon, by Kristin Newbom. This play focuses on three people with various forms of disability, and their two underpaid, undervalued caretakers, who are only minimally more functional, all within the context of a “treat” for the disabled charges, as all five as adjourn from an unspecified fundraising event to a Dunkin’ Donuts. Most of the play is laugh-out-loud funny, but watch out -- you're being set up.

SPOILER ALERT! If you don’t want to know what happens in the play, read no further.

All five characters are put through a process defined by American holidays that call for or allow dressing up in costume. Over the course of Halloween, Christmas and Easter, the Dunkin’ Donuts bears witness to the changes — subtle, blatant or nonexistent — in their lives.

Telethon’s climax comes, aptly enough, at Easter, a time that celebrates renewal; the two caretakers are about to undergo major reversals of fortune. They're so caught up in their own news that they hardly notice the turmoil they’re causing their charges: one of them seems stunned, another cries quietly, and the third goes to a pay phone and attempts to call 911.

The uproar ends the scene and we segue to the Fourth of July, but now the Dunkin’ Donuts is quiet. And as we take this in the empty stage, we realize those five people will never visit the place together again. The phone is still dangling off the hook and, weirdly, we hear one side of a conversation coming out of it.

Now: when we first presented this play in reading form during JAW, and again now in Portland Playhouse’s excellent production, people have been baffled by this final scene. Some have gone so far as to say the coda has no relation to the play! But you know … it’s always worth our while to assume the playwright had something in mind. Such as an imaginative leap. Or to jump a synapse from one epiphany to the next, and ask you to forge the connection yourself.

In the wake of love lost, of abandoned relationships and the sheer heedlessness of life’s relentless momentum, the emptiness of the stage in this final scene devastates me. The sense of revelation hovering on the fringes, yet always just barely beyond our grasp, reminds me of Beckett’s most moving works.

I therefore want to share the text of this final scene with you (I have Kristin’s blessing and that of the show’s director, Rose Riordan), in the hopes that when you see the play, viewing the footage of the parade described below and hearing half of a conversation that’s like a lifeline to another time, the scene will have the impact for you that it does for me.

Telethon continues through this weekend, closing where the script begins — on Halloween.

.................................................

4. FOURTH OF JULY

THE STAGE IS DARK AND EMPTY.

A FILM IS PROJECTED ON THE BLANK MENU SCREEN. SHAKY HOME
FOOTAGE OF A 4TH OF JULY PARADE IN A SMALL TOWN... PEOPLE ON
FLOATS. COSTUMES. WAVING. KIDS ON BIKES. DOGS. CLOWNS. A
MARCHING BAND. STARS AND STRIPES. THE WHOLE DEAL.

A WOMAN’S VOICE IS HEARD,
THROUGH THE DANGLING PAY PHONE RECEIVER:

Yeah, I know.
It’s strange how things happen.

Uh huh.

Remember that night out on the driveway?

No.
September.

Because the sunflowers had stopped blooming.
I picked the last three and brought them in.
They were a little mangled, but they looked okay.

Yeah.

No.
We had just come back from dinner.
You took us to that little restaurant in your old neighborhood.
What was it?

Yeah, Sam’s Wiener House.
That’s right.

Uh huh.

Nine wieners with everything on them,
six orders of fries,
four milkshakes,
a diet coke
and a sprite.
God.
The kids sat at the counter.
Spun around and around on the stools while we talked.

The first house you bought.
The dog you had before the kids were born.
That tattoo you got in the army.
Your job.
Those guys you had to fire.
Your brothers and sisters.
The town where you grew up.
The Sunday morning flea market.
Your grandmother’s farm.
The stack of Penthouses and bag of weed you had hid in her shed.
How your parents died.
Your first girlfriend.
What was her name?

Oh yeah.

You knew just when to leave.
Before the kids threw up from too much spinning.

I offered to pay.
You said it was your treat.

On the way back you showed us the best trick or treat house.
The one where the guy dressed up in stilts as Uncle Sam?
Remember?

Yeah.

When we got back we stood there in the driveway.
The kids rode their bikes around and around
And the sky turned from blue to orange.
You only had a few minutes before you had to go.

You looked so sad that night.

We want to make sense of it all.
Want to grasp onto some kind of reason for the hurt.

It all goes by so quickly doesn’t it?

They are ripped from us.
All of them.

They come into our lives.
The people we care for
Or who take care of us.
The ones we love and look after.
The ones who love us back
Despite it all.
And then they go.
Sometimes in a flash
Without any warning.
Other times in a long and lingering dance.

Yet the wars continue.
One grows into the next.
Kings and queens are killed and born again.
Discoveries, great works of art and riches are made, displayed
and forgotten.
We learn to spell.
We memorize the vocabulary words and dutifully we take the tests.
Our tiny world builds upon itself.
Accumulates.
Like soap bubbles in the bath.
We gaze at ourselves, naked
And we wonder-
This world we are creating,
is it -

What?

Oh, that’s okay
I should go too.
Yeah.
Okay.

I will.

Take care.

DIALTONE.
THE FILM WINDS OUT.

END OF PLAY.

Confessions of a defector

2010-10-23T22:02:00.000-07:00

For the second year in a row, I celebrated my 75th birthday at the Wordstock Festival. If you have to work on your solar return, Wordstock’s a grand place to do it: a swirling, teeming whirl of book lovers, exhibitors, publishers, book purveyors and of course authors.
Ironic indeed, therefore, that I came home on Sunday evening, exhausted but proud, to gifts that included a brand new ….. wait for it ……………. Kindle.

Yeah, a Kindle. You know, Amazon’s “wireless reading device,” the one whose advent of recent years was widely heralded as the death knell for books and bookstores both. And I got not just any Kindle, but the new improved model: smaller, lighter, faster and greyer than its ancestors, with free wifi and 3G built into it, making it reputedly of use where in the wide world.

With all the zealotry of a convert, immediately I popped for a sleek black leather cover for the device that actually has a night light built into its spine — an ingenious, marriage-saving innovation.

First downloads: Atwood’s latest, The Year of the Flood; Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs; and Between the Acts, Woolf’s brilliant and underrated novel that it’s time I revisited.

But the irony is not lost on me: I came straight from a festival where a constant topic of conversation concerned what happens to hardcover books in the digital age, and I gleefully launched into downloading virtual books.

The issues surrounding Kindles and their kin are legion. Most obviously: if you can already get many books steeply discounted by shopping at Amazon, and then the Kindle download costs close to half of that, who is making money anymore? If you guess it’s not the authors, you would be correct. One commentator has called digitalization of extant texts “the greatest act of piracy since Francis Drake sailed the Spanish Main.” But old or new, everyone takes a hit, from publisher to vendor.

One apparent winner in the digital death match (apart from the makers of e-book readers) is the consumer, who gets more for less. And therein lies the hope of the whole endeavor. If people can instantly gratify their impulses to get and read a certain book or newspaper or magazine, perhaps they will do it more often, and ultimately spend more money.

Sounds good. But then what happens to bookstores, which need to hold onto a vast inventory to be of any use? For that matter, what happens to festivals like Wordstock or the Brooklyn Book Festival, events that lure noteworthy authors with the promise of selling a lot of books?

Naturally enough, the answer is that they will have to gradually reinvent themselves and create new or augmented reasons for being. For instance, it’s great that I can start reading The Year of the Flood this instant. But nothing compares to trotting down to the Schnitz, as I did last month, to hear her and Ursula K. Le Guin chat about writing. And I will certainly have read Armistead Maupin’s new book Mary Ann in Autumn by the time he arrives at Powell’s (on November 12) -- only if I read on the Kindle, what will I give him to sign?

Anyway. There is a groundswell of thinking about the rights of everybody involved (see this, for example) — so much so that I’m tempted to go to law school (not really) just so I can part of hashing it all out. But as my own behavior attests, the genie is out of the bottle; one day books in print may be yet another artifact we refer to nostalgically as “sooooooo 20th century.”

Actually there are downsides for readers in this as well as upsides for writers -- but that’s another post. To be continued...

Talk about leading by example....

2010-10-21T22:18:00.001-07:00

Zeitgeist in the Heights

2010-10-20T14:22:00.000-07:00

Hate musicals? Especially hate the canned, prefab Broadway spectacles with music styling that’s 20 years out of date?

Running right now at the Keller is the antidote to all that: In the Heights, the Tony-winning upset (which snagged Best Musical of 2008, among other distinctions) that gleefully thumbs its nose at all the musical theater “rules” and gets away with it.

Indeed, if you’re a devotee of more typical Broadway fare, In the Heights may confuse you at first. Its Latin/rap-inflected musical idioms aside, it’s almost closer to opera than to musicals per se; it’s all but through-composed, with only a handful of spoken sections. Also, since the first rule of theater stagin in general is to control the eye of the spectator, it’s astonishing (and liberating) to find the show's staging does not always demand you stare at predetermined locations. In the dance numbers — and there are many — so much is going on in every corner of the stage, and it is so individuated (i.e.: not always patterned or synchronized), that you could watch this show several times before you saw it all. The photo at left gives you an idea. (It’s of the original Broadway cast, but I assure you the touring company now here in town is outstanding.)

And what dance it is. The dazzling spectrum of moves is largely free of the shopworn Vegas-style vocabulary that makes many musicals so dull; instead you’re treated to a frenetic, more free-form approach (or at least the illusion therefore) that looks like it’s right off the streets.

Another thing I appreciated about this show: since it’s about a neighborhood (specifically a corner in Washington Heights), it reflects all its residents, to be interracial and intergenerational. Sure there’s plenty of young love going on, but there are middle-aged and elderly residents, too, who get their time onstage. And their experience is beautifully reflected in the songs they sing: survivors favor anthems, older characters go for a lyrical style, and the youngsters sport more muscular, jangly motifs.

This truly is a musical for our time. In short: Starlight Express it ain’t.

The remarkable music and lyrics are by the man who conceived the show, Lin-Manuel Miranda. You can check out his Tony acceptance speech below, which may be the most stirring one ever delivered at the ceremony, and is here courtesy of the legendary Cousin Tabitha, who accompanied me to the Keller last night and loved it. By the way, the book is by Quiara Hudes, the playwright whose Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue got a beautiful, haunting production at Miracle Theatre Group a few years ago.

Autumn does this to me.

2010-10-17T10:08:00.000-07:00

Whatever you think about Jonathan Larson's RENT (and let's face, the split over its artistic merits tends to be generational), the whole show is worth it for this one anthem. It's been said about literature that its only real subject is death. But the soul-shaking thing about theater is that it can testify to that inevitability -- that "our little life is rounded by a sleep" -- while simultaneously celebrating our joy that we got to be part of it.

Also, just for overkill, here's Idina Menzel's sweetly plaintive rendition of the same song:

Wordstock takes off!

2010-10-07T23:15:00.001-07:00

Since many people have asked what I recommend for this year’s edition of the Pacific Northwest’s largest literary and book fest, here’s a few very subjective offerings that I’m seeing for sure. Mind you, these are in addition to the big names I mentioned here last month: Meloy + Lethem + Chang + Egan + Bender. Plus my helpful hints at The Editing Room. But hey, why not take them all in? For ten minibucks you can stay all day both days, October 9-10 — and celebrate my 82nd birthday with me on Sunday in high style.

So. First off: if you make theater in Portland, you know Gemma Whelan, the Irish director. But did you know she’s a novelist? Well, special for you: her brand new novel, Fiona: Stolen Child has just been released. Gemma will read from the book on Sunday, and also participate in a panel discussion entitled “First Book, First Person.”

You may also be interested to know (or forewarned) that this year dueling film crews will be trawling the halls of the Oregon Convention Center. Monica Drake is behind a fictional film set at “a literary festival much like Wordstock” — I hear the role of an infant was just cast the other day — and the irrepressible Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book, will have a team all the way from Germany trailing her as she wends her way through the bustling weekend. Will the two crews bump into one another, a là Stanley & Livingstone, and start filming each other? That would be very po-mo.

A new gambit this year is what we’re calling “conversations” — not panels, just two or three people conversing around an allied topic, like when Jon Raymond and Jim Lynch discuss “place-based writing” on Sunday.

As for panels, hot ones abound this year. Among my faves: “Ghosts with the Most,” in which four successful ghostwriters talk about the perils and the pinnacles of the biz. That’s on Saturday. That same day, members of San Francisco’s The Grotto (including Stephen Elliot of Rumpus fame) and Portland’s Periscope cover how creating within a community of writers can jump start your work.

What else. Rumors abound of rogue journalists going the way of literary paparazzi this year; will the VIP Room be stormed? We find out Friday night at the aptly named authors’ reception.

Hair Today, Hair Tomorrow: The Musical and Society

2010-10-02T23:09:00.000-07:00

Guest post by Joy Paley

Hair, the ’60s counterculture musical, is coming to Portland Center for the Performing Arts in December. The classic rock musical, which celebrates radical political and social ideas that emerged during the Vietnam War era, has been running in various forms for the last 40 years, and you’ve felt its reverberations in popular culture whether you know it or not.

Groundbreaking for its time
When Hair debuted on Broadway in 1968, it sloughed off all notions of what was “appropriate” for a musical. James Rado and Gerome Ragni, the two men who conceived the musical, wanted to make theater that reflected the rising discontent and cultural change they felt in their neighborhood of the East Village. Rado and Ragni had friends who were dodging the draft; people were growing their hair long to protest mainstream society. Drugs, especially marijuana and LSD, were becoming widely used. Commenting on their idea for Hair, Rado said: “It was very important historically, and if we hadn’t written it, there’d not be any examples. We thought, ‘This is happening in the streets,’ and we wanted to bring it to the stage.”

Not just sensational
Hair wouldn’t be running for 40 years if the musical only had shock value to offer. Although the musical did offer the first totally nude actors on Broadway, as well as what many perceived to be a desecration of the American flag, the musical went beyond upsetting the older generation’s notions of propriety. It was more about questioning everything that was mindlessly accepted as a norm, whether it be from government or from society.

Hair was one of the first musicals to have a fully integrated cast; 1/3 of the cast members were African American. Songs in the musical openly mock racial stereotypes, such as “Colored Spade” where the militant black man Hud satirically reads off a list of racial slurs. In another song, a groups of white and black women sing about their love for the opposite race. Indeed, the subtitle for the musical is “The American Tribal Love Rock Musical,” and the idea of a tribe — a united group of diverse people — is an important theme.

Before and After Hair
Although Hair was groundbreaking as a musical that addressed issues of social unrest, it wasn’t without precedent. While in college, Rado was inspired by Rodgers and Hammerstein plays; while the playwrights are often remembered as writing uplifting musicals like Oklahoma! and The King and I, their works also explored issues of race, sex, and class. South Pacific explored racist feelings of whites toward Pacific Islanders, and Carousel depicted domestic violence. Porgy and Bess, by Gershwin, also had a fully integrated cast.

Hair did invent the idea of the concept musical, a play where the theme or statement is more important than the plot. Other concept musicals sprung up after Hair, including Company, Follies and Pacific Overtures by Hal Prince in the’70s. After Hair, other musicals also went on to use rock music scores, including Two Gentleman of Verona, Jesus Christ Superstar, Grease and Dreamgirls. Hair set the precedent for using theater as a venue of social change that can be seen in later successful musicals like Rent.

Where to see Hair
Hair is running at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts from Tuesday, December 28 to Sunday, January 2. On weekdays shows start at 7:30 pm, Saturday at 2 and 7:30, and Sunday at 1 and 6:30. Information on purchasing tickets can be found at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts’ website.

Joy Paley is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on online schools for Guide to Online Schools.

Lee + Me

2010-09-27T17:15:00.001-07:00

Guess what, one week from this evening — aka October 4 — a singular sensation for you. Playwright Lee Blessing will be here in town, performing his one-man play Chesapeake himself.

Just in case you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Lee yet, he has written more than 30 plays, many of them radically different from one another in terms of style and content, including A Walk in the Woods, Cobb, Two Rooms and Eleemosynary. That’s Lee in the photo, on the left, along with partner Melanie Marnich (whose play Tallgrass Gothic you may remember from JAW a few years ago) and Jim Houghton, AD of Signature Theatre Company.

Lee’s in town kicking of Profile Theatre Project’s new season of all Lee, all the time, which starts previews this Wednesday with Great Falls. The Chesapeake presentation will happen on Reed’s campus, where Lee spent his undergrad years. The event’s a partnership between Reed, Profile and the Wordstock Festival, whose multifarious happenings will already be underway as of this Friday.

Now Chesapeake is not an autobiographical account; it takes serious acting chops to pull it off. So you can bet I’m taking advantage of this chance to hear the author read his own work. Full disclosure, though: I’m not just attending for a lark. I’m conducting the Q&A with Lee following his reading. Not to worry, I’ll be a softball prince and avoid questions such as: Is it weird to be married to someone as gorgeous as Melanie?

Mystery author found

2010-09-25T23:14:00.000-07:00

Remember I recently asked for help identifying the author of a poem I came across? Well, she’s turned up — in my own neighborhood, in fact. Whereas I had suspected the poem came from a grant proposal I had reviewed last year (whose author has no Internet presence and therefore could not be tracked down without bloodhounds), I was fortunate to have the poet herself recognize her work and contact me.

So. The poem I published here turns out to be an experiment penned by the redoubtable writer, editor and writing coach Suzanne LaGrande. But the piece was not created to express Suzanne qua Suzanne (as we used to say in grad school lit crit), but rather that of a young character in the novel she’s currently working on. Just FYI.

After having published Ms. LaGrande without attribution, I feel the least I can do is plug her upcoming writing critique group, which starts just two weeks from now. Check it out.

And how did I come across that mystery poem in the first place, you ax? I keep telling you, I am so in with the in crowd.

Autumn on the astral plane

2010-09-22T22:45:00.000-07:00

Top secret meeting last night in RACC’s conference room, where I was beguiled by the photography on exhibit there. David Emmite’s revisionist portraits of woodland creatures are wryly amusing -- the coyote, for example, baying at the night sky with the aid of a megaphone, or the raccoon on the prowl with the help of an ingeniously constructed nightlight.

The artist’s website is a funhouse of high-concept drolleries. One of my favorite is below. Warning: you can easily lose one or two evenings poring over the animations alone.

USS Concept from David Emmite on Vimeo.

Back to norbal.

2010-09-19T15:18:00.000-07:00

Tonight TBA:10 comes to an end, and I get my life back. Sort of. Because now it's three weeks to Wordstock!

It's been an awesome Time-Based Art Festival, though, with many more palpable hits than misses, and I'm already looking forward to TBA:11. Meanwhile, here's a little something to send everybody off with a little primitive time-based art from le ancien regime.

TBA10 comes to frothy climax

2010-09-18T12:02:00.000-07:00

PICA’s internationally well-regarded Time-Based Art Festival comes to a crescendo this weekend, so even while the madness continues, I want to share what I’ve seen thus far. My posts about TBA:10 have all been posted on the Urban Honking site, so here for your convenience (I GIVE and I GIVE and…) are the links:

Rufus Wainwright and friends

The Wooster Group

Gare St. Lazare Players

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, by Mike Daisey

Most importantly, tonight is your last chance to see national treasure Nature Theater of Oklahoma performing its madcap recap of what people remember about Romeo and Juliet. And yes, you guessed it, the photo at right is from this performance. That should give you an idea.

Upcoming fast, at 2:30 TODAY, is an exploratory discourse/performance with Mike Daisey, who will talk about his mammoth new work in progress, All the Hours in the Day, which will ultimately be a 24-hour monologue. This scares me more for Mike himself than it does for his spectators. But we had coffee at the clean and well-lighted Public Domain on Wednesday, where I heard a lot about this new gesamtkunstwerk, which sounds awesome — literally.

Also, Emily Johnson’s The Thank-You Bar continues today and tomorrow and the buzz about it is deafening. Six more performances but only 40 are admitted to each showing, so plan ahead.

MIA@TBA:10

2010-09-10T21:59:00.000-07:00

Yeah, it may be a semi-quiet here for awhile, while I'm vacationing over at PICA's 8th Time-Based Art Festival -- TBA:10, to cognoscenti like us.

I'm the Festival's blogging fool this year -- one of many, actually, part of a crack team, as it were, that includes Lisa Radon, Tim DuRoche, Emily Katz, Tall Matt Haynes, Julie Hammond and many more numinous beings. But all our posts appear at Urban Honking -- how convenient! But Blogorrhea's first-ever guest blogger is in store for next week, just to keep things prolix.

And just in case someone's already plastered over my first piece for TBA:10, you can read my response to Rufus Wainwright's kick-off event last night at the Schnitz, featuring Thomas Lauderdale, Storm Large and Janis Kelly, right here.

Other top picks for TBA:10: Gare St Lazare Players; The Wooster Group; Nature Theater of Oklahoma; Emily Johnson, if you can even still get a ticket; and Mike Daisey's new piece, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, opened last night and is already rumored to be the Festival's absolute must-see.

By the way, this photo is from a new Charles Atlas piece, “Institute for Turbulence Research (V2),” a 3-channel video installation, video mirror unit, transparent screen, & 6 minute loop. Which I also can't wait to see. FYI.

Signs of the Times, cont'd.

2010-09-08T16:44:00.000-07:00

Thanks to playwright Robert Patrick
for sharing this photo by and of
Andrew Adam Caldwell.

I could go on and on....

2010-09-07T18:17:00.001-07:00

Why do Portlandians refer to Portland as Portlandia? Damned if I know, but I’ve always loved it that our sardonic affection for the soggy city has come up with this moniker — comparable, perhaps, to San Franciscans invariably referring to their home as The City, or even the more ubiquitous SoCal sobriquet of Ellay.

And now you know there’s this new TV series about to air, Portlandia, which may do for Stumptown what The Drew Carey Show did for Cleveland. Whatever that was. Or was it Cincinnati?

That’s another post. I’m just showing up now to note that there’s been an awesome amount of boundary-busting theatrical activity here lately, and there’s about to be a lot more. I hope you caught Chris Harder’s superb solo piece Fishing for My Father recently, where Chris portrayed a kind of po-mo scary clown (of the machismo sort, not the Krusty variety) and turned it into a meditation on what it means to be male and, ultimately, human.

Just as palpably and inexplicably touching is the current production of Will Eno’s Oh, the Humanity, which has one more weekend over at The Church. As deftly navigated by Our Shoes Are Red/The Performance Lab, this is a sweetly tart collection of short Eno pieces that proves what we already knew: he’s the bastard love child of Samuel Beckett and Jon Stewart. Definitely catch this show.

Actually, autumn’s shaping up pretty fabulously. Theatre Vertigo graces us with Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone starting October 15, plus Third Rail opens soon (well, October 8) with Chris Chibnall’s Kiss Me Like You Mean It.

And ever since I found out Portland Playhouse was going to produce Kirsten Newbom’s astonishing play Telethon -- directed by Rose Riordan, no less -- I’ve been itching for it to get here, but we have to wait till October 7 for that hilarious and disturbing sucker punch. But hey, Hand2Mouth’s Uncanny Valley is about to open at Reed, and is likely to be one of the fall’s most exuberant offerings.

That’s saying something, considering that PICA’s internationally lauded festival TBA:10 opens this Thursday. As always, it opens with a bang; Rufus Wainwright headlines an evening of crooning at the Shnitz that is rumored to includes pieces from his opera, Prima Donna. And which will feature some beloved local figures, including Carlos Kalamar, Thomas Lauderdale and Storm Large.

EFF why eye, I’m one of TBA’s blogging fools this year, so visit Urban Honking daily to see how the opening went, as well as all what’s funny, scary and other provocative for those 10 crazy days and nights.

Poem for a perfect autumn day

2010-09-05T16:50:00.001-07:00

For make no mistake about it, it is indeed autumn here in the somnolent Pacific Northwest. And in accordance with the usual signs -- the softer slant of light, the scents of the earth cooling down, the return of morning mists -- I came across this poem in a notebook. It has no attribution and I cannot find its author via Web dowsing or through any other source. If you recognize the writer's work, will you please let me know?

I post this in particular for the participants of last spring's Delve course on August Wilson, for whom this poem will remind them of Joe Turner's Come and Gone and especially of Gem of the Ocean.

BONES OF THE EARTH

Some persons are possessed
With the power to tell
Perfect strangers
what is most evident in the air
They pull the past
like rays of light
Into the present

There are people who see the hidden things
Below the earth's surface:
Veins of metals
bones of the dead
subterranean waters
rise up to
greet their feet
their hands vibrate
in the pulsing shapes
of the earth's underground arteries

Light impressed upon an object
Retains its influence for centuries
Radiant forces proceeding from the dark
Form pictures

Why not waves of sound?
In perpetual existence
a panorama
Passing into unending symphony?

The great picture gallery of eternity
Mountains elevated, degraded lakes formed, drained, life
flourishes Passes away
New constellations reveal secrets
We have never been able to discover

Why not read the history of the planets
In the heavenly bodies beneath our feet?

The faintest whisper
Of every generation carried
In unyielding
remembrance.

Guilty pleasures and other recent manias

2010-09-01T23:24:00.000-07:00

Sorry there hasn't been time for coffee lately. Or blogging or generally gadding about. I've been ... reading. Yes, that's right. One of my favorite things about working with Wordstock -- the literary and book fest that starts in just 36 days -- is that I get to indulge my mania for reading to the max and still feel like I’m working. Here are just a very few of the books I’ve recently read as “research” for October, when I meet their authors in person.

All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, by Lan Samantha Chang. This somber, affecting novel by the director of the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop starts like it’s going to be a scathing satire of grad school writing programs, and then goes on to span decades in the lives of several poets to show what they sacrifice and what they gain back from their lives as scribblers. Wonderful.

The Big Burn, by Timothy Egan. Ordinarily I’m not a big nonfiction guy, but this book -- about the nation's largest forest fire, which burned more than three million acres in 1910 and has affected conservation policy to this day -- had me spellbound in the introduction, well before it gets to its actual subject. Suffice it to say that Mr. Egan can write.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender. Don’t be put off by the title. This book’s intriguing premise -- about a girl who discovers she can taste the feelings cooked into food by their emotive preparers -- beguiles you with humor and then takes you to disturbing places.

Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem. This is my first foray into the notoriously genre-busting work of Mr. Lethem, and let me tell you, it’s heady stuff. Clearly the heir apparent to territories blazed by Thomas Pynchon, this novel envisions a dystopian Manhattan so deliriously colorful that I want to move there this minute.

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy. Awesome. Majestic. The sheer austerity of this writer’s prose provides a series of canvases you get to project yourself into. Many of these stories are haunting in their spare portraits of people on the horns or moral dilemmas. You want to judge them, then realize that would be an act of self-criticism. I now want to read every word this writer’s ever written. Oh, and Portland connection: how endearing is it that she’s Colin’s big sister?

More to come. Moremoremore.

Summer 2010 -- that's a wrap!

2010-08-31T14:51:00.000-07:00

Though it’s not (quite) September yet, I’m going to go ahead and exult. It’s a dank, dark and wuthering day here in Portland, Oregon; the drizzle is sifting down through pines; and word has it that it’s snowing on Mt. Bachelor right now. Leaves of dogwood trees and shrubs have already begun changing color! So although there’s still plenty of time left in the season for a heat snap, I’m proceeding to herald autumn’s arrival, which never fails to cheer my gothic soul.

What is it about the fall that summons nostalgia and reminiscence? Maybe because summer already seems like a memory? I think of Lewis Carroll’s introduction to Alice in Wonderland:

A tale begun in other days,
When summer suns were glowing—
A simple chime, that served in time
The rhythm of our rowing—
Whose echoes live in memory yet,
Though envious years would say “forget.”

Autumn’s onset always prompts me to haul out all my ancient Incredible String Band’s albums, whose music reeks of autumn. Here’s a taste:

Some say autumn saddens them because it represents a corridor to winter, which they associate with death and negation. But I think of both seasons as just doors into other incarnations, ones where we occupy the same space as our ancestors and the veil between us is thinner.

However we regard it, we wouldn’t be human beings if we didn’t simultaneously resist and revel in these annual changes. That’s how contrary we are. Which reminds me that Carroll’s poem continues with this poignant couplet:

We are but older children, dear,
Who fret to find our bedtime near.

Happy Autumn.

The play everyone’s afraid of

2010-08-10T22:01:00.000-07:00

Sydney Theatre Company’s coming to town, and that’s a big deal. As a world-class company that has shared its stage with the likes of Complicite, Cheek by Jowl, Out-of-Joint and the National, STC itself has toured to prominent American venues including BAM and the Kennedy Center. Plus its co-artistic director is Cate Blanchett, whose early career was fostered by this theater. So forgive me if I’m just a wee bit IMPRESSED that Cate and STC are coming to Portland for a co-pro with our very own Artists Repertory Theatre.

And that ain’t all. The play in question is a towering classic of American drama: none other than O’Neill’s masterpiece, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Long Day’s Journey into Night. This is a play that is rarely performed, and for good reason. It is a horror show; it starts out with a sense of grim foreboding and gets more and more harrowing as it progresses.

When I saw the Broadway revival many years ago, starring Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards as the fractious parents (Mr. Robards originated the role of the elder son in the play’s premiere production in 1956) and Jamey Sheridan and Campbell Scott as the sons, I was also struck by the way the script produced its meaning through its very setting. The story starts at 8:30 in the morning, and concludes at midnight of the same day. As the ghosts of the past press in on the characters, so too does the house fill with literal gloom, as first shadows and eventually total darkness engulf the family.

So why would you submit yourself to an evening with four people going from bad to worse? Because not only is the script excellent, it’s also a tour de force for every actor in it. Taking on the role of patriarch James Tyrone, a magnificent ruin of a man, is akin to playing an American King Lear; it’s that devastating. In this production, ART perennial favorite William Hurt assays the role, repeating the performance that garnered him great reviews in Australia.

All the other actors can be no less superb; a weak link in this quadrille would cause the whole thing to collapse. This cast includes one of Portland’s finest actors, Todd Van Voris, playing elder son Jamie; from all accounts, he’s been holding his own admirably.

Long Day’s Journey into Night begins this Friday the 13th at the mammoth Newmark Theatre (tip: do not purchase seats closer than the sixth row unless you enjoy exercising your neck’s flexor muscles). Gawker alert: Saturday is the opening night, and Cate is rumored to be attending! You have until September 5 to see the show, but I wouldn’t wait; this is a production everyone will be talking about.

That most wonderful time of the year

2010-08-06T23:36:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Madame Z for sharing this image with me!

Shall we dance?

2010-08-05T23:04:00.000-07:00

Going to the fab Willamette Writers Conference, by any chance? If so, please look me up. For the next three days, from 8:30 am till noon, I’ll be holding down the Manuscript ER there — a fun gig where you can simply show up, writing sample in hand, and get my refreshing and perhaps even bracingly frank response to it.

Bring your actual prose, or one of its exponents, such as query letter or a book proposal. Or simply bring your questions. Wondering why anyone would want to read your new memoir about your family, Lives of the Obscure? I'll be honest) Is the supernatural thriller past its prime? Depends. What exactly is a writer’s platform? E-Z! All will be revealed.

Plus -- special for you! -- it’s free free free, as a perk of being a conferencee. Though if you brought me a latte, I wouldn’t hold it against you. No sugar, but a sprinkle of nutmeg on the top if you have it.

Corny as Kansas in August? NOT.

2010-08-04T22:08:00.001-07:00

So last night I showed up at South Pacific’s opening at the Keller with interest and trepidation. It’s kind of where I came in, as musicals go — with the movie version, anyway, I’m not that old. I was too little to appreciate the story at the time, which I remember as being long and slow. But I grew up hearing the Broadway cast album and knew all the songs by heart, even if I couldn’t quite puzzle out the story. What was going on over on Bali Ha’i, I asked? My parent claimed they didn’t know either.

Come to find out: it’s a terrific story. That’s right, South Pacific actually works as theater, which is amazingly rare with musicals. Debuting in the middle of Rogers and Hammerstein’s incredibly fecund collaboration, it must have been bracing stuff in 1949; it starts out as a love story, and beguiles you into assuming things will develop along certain lines. But just about when you’ve gotten totally comfortable, it has a reversal just before the close of Act I that drew audible gasps throughout the audience last night — from a Portland audience of 2010.

The clip I have here is from the 2008 Tony Awards, with the original Lincoln Center cast, but the touring company I saw last night was top-notch, especially Carmen Cusack as Nellie Forbush, the “high as the Fourth of July” heroine with feet of clay. The voices, the dancing, the production values — particularly Michael Yeargan’s clever set, with its bamboo blinds that morph into sun-dappled water and even manage to suggest time passing — are all superb. (The photo above, by Peter Coombs, is from the tour I saw last night.)

This is the first offering in Broadway Across America’s new season, which has some genuinely thrilling shows in store, most notably In the Heights. But South Pacific, as a perfect extension of Bart Sher’s celebrated production, is the absolute must-see. And you only have through this Sunday, August 8, to catch it, so hurry up. This is one show where it's worth popping for the expensive seats.

Sam Gregory is coming soon to a theater near YOU

2010-07-20T13:42:00.000-07:00

Beloved Portland playwriting icon William S. Gregory’s latest play, Necessity, is in the midst of a week’s rehearsal at Portland Center Stage — a workshop that culminates this Saturday with a public reading, as part of JAW: A Playwrights Festival. Here’s what the playwright has to say about the upcoming event.

Sam, a lot of people here associate your writing with elegance, crackling wit, smart badinage. Not necessarily the visceral. Would you say that Necessity is a departure from what you usually explore in writing?

Thank you for asking this, Mead. Necessity is set in the rural American South in 1919. This is an aural culture that places a premium on skill in what we might call linguistic performance: the sermon, the storyteller, the gossip. A good performance in any of these was judged on elegance in delivery, elements of wit and humor, and a passionate need to communicate. The visceral, passionate language found in Necessity, salted with humor, is a natural outgrowth of my body of work.

What was the play’s impetus?

I was inspired to write Necessity by my desire to create theater of tremendous power that has a visceral effect on the audience. Theater today must be astounding: hit the heights of human experience, plumb the depths of our souls and situations. I looked to the Greeks and to the glorious and terrible experience of Americans in the First World War as fertile ground for stories and situations of extreme passion that can move and touch the audience.

Contemporary political correctness dictates that white people don’t get to write about people of color. And unwritten guidelines for producibility suggest that writers craft small-cast scripts. Did you have qualms about flying in the face of both these notions?

I thought on these very things for quite a while. Eventually I realized I had no choice. This play was in my head begging to come out and for my own sanity I needed to put secondary considerations aside and write it. There are times when the muse speaks and the artist must create or risk losing his connection to art.

……………………………

William S. Gregory’s Necessity will be read this coming Saturday, July 24, at 4pm, at the Gerding Theater in the Portland Armory, with an outstanding cast including Crystal Fox, Vin Shambry, Heather Simms, Wendell Wright, Kevin Jones, Gary Yates, Gavin Gregory and Rachael Ferrera, directed by Chris Coleman.

Stick around afterward for the Theater Fair and for Famished, a site-specific piece written by Eugenia Woods and directed by Megan Ward, presented with the considerable talents of Jessica Wallenfels, Steve Brian, Courtney Freed, Isaac Lamb, Lori Ferraro, Sharonlee McLean, Michael Fisher Welsh, Tanner Ward and Tim Stapleton.

Quelle hommage!

2010-07-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

Long, long ago, in a century far, far away, I happened to be visiting the Pompidou Centre when it was showing a remarkable special exhibition. I think it was called “After Manet,” though I can find so sign of the show on the Beaubourg’s labyrinthine website, so maybe I dreamed the whole thing. But the show consisted entirely of pastiches of Manet’s groundbreaking Olympe, the painting that shocked delicate sensibilities in its own time and that still has the power to provoke today.

It’s the look on Olympe’s face that does the provoking: frank, perhaps daring, ultimately as unreadable as the Mona Lisa. But as for originality, Manet himself was composing a variation on a popular Orientalist theme already popularized by artist such as Ingres and Benouville. E.g.:

What started me on this search was that I recalled one painting in the Beaubourg show (there were over 30, if memory serves) in which the reclining odalisque had sprouted fangs, and her equally unreadable servant held a jack-o-lantern in lieu of fleurs. Never did find this online (please let me know if you do), but I was astounded by the breadth and sheer quantity of homages this painting has inspired. Here’s a mere smattering.

There are countless abstractions of Manet's quasi-original, like this one by Bob Kessel:

and numerous reversals of gender, race, class, what have you, such as this fun one of Ken Smith's:

and 3D versions, such as this marvelous one by Paul Spooner.

There are even commercial covers (thank you, Yves Saint Laurent):

And ones that combine the softly erotic with an implicit political hint of something slyly feminist or patently recidivist, depending on how you want to interpret it. This is by Bartlomiej Dabrowski.

But my faves tend toward the overtly political, like Kayti Didrikesen's Man of Leisure, King George:

If you have favorites of your own, please share. Especially if you come across the Jack O'lympe, my holy grail of pastiches.

Let’s go, BooseyCo

2010-07-11T11:17:00.000-07:00

Conventional wisdom in English-language literature has long dictated that certain “canonical” works are must-read classics for all(Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, e.g.) while others, though arguably brilliant, are GSO — for grad students only (e.g., The Mill on the Floss).

The canonistas dump Dion Boucicault (above-captioned phonetically for your convenience) into the latter category, and unjustly. His shamelessly commercial plays, dating back to the mid- and late 19th century, were immensely popular in English-speaking theaters of their day. In due course their hegemony (!)(sorry, grad school jargon dies hard) got dethroned by none other than our old friend Oscar, whose megahit The Importance of Being Earnest managed to have it every which way with these comedies — he lampooned them, yet honored their methods at the same time.

Dion’s very first hit in a long and storied career was London Assurance (1841), and it’s been enjoying a renaissance in recent years thanks to such theater visionaries as Sam Mendes and, currently, Nicholas Hytner. We can see Mr. Hytner’s National Theatre production this coming, on July 17, thanks to Third Rail Rep’s NT Live presentation. I’m going to the matinee performance (2pm), so please come to that showing so I won’t be all alone. If you can do without my company, however, there’s also a 7pm showing.

If you haven’t been to an NT Live showing before, you’re in for a real treat. These are broadcasts of live National performances -- notable productions that allow you to see excellent London theater without the bother of a transatlantic flight.

And what of London Assurance itself? The character names give you a clue; there are servants named Pert and Cool and a lawyer called Meddle. There’s also an aging fop named Sir Harcourt Courtly (which I think should be my new nom du guerre) and a “horse-riding virago” known as Lady Gay Spanker, who refers to her submissive husband as Dolly (which actually IS one of my many monikers). There are attempts by the older characters to lech off the younger ones, but you may suspect from the start that young lust will prevail in the end — even it takes some saucy gender-bending along the way. Throw in the acting talents of Fiona Shaw and Simon Russell Beale, among other luminaries, and you’ve got yourself a classic — the kind you actually enjoy.

Think of it as grad school, but without the tears and caffeine-laden overnighters, and with all the romantic hijinks. See you there.

Ticket to ride

2010-07-06T22:07:00.000-07:00

What’s more fun than seeing someone you know and like on the cover of American Theatre magazine? Seeing the show that inspired the cover, of course. Ya, that’s Liam Kaas-Lentz’s handsome mug to the right, gracing the April issue of said publication. And that's Hannah Treuhaft below, photographed with Liam. Both are company members of Sojourn Theatre — one of the jewels in the crown of national theater, let alone Stumptown’s. And guess what, next week Sojourn opens a new show it’s been working on for years.

On the Table is ambitious even by Sojourn’s standards. Reflecting the company’s commitment to site-specific and journey-based theater, every performance starts in two different locations simultaneously: Portland, and the rural town of Molalla (population 7,500). You start in one location, or you start in the other, where you bear witness to a community event and meet a host of fictional characters. Following that, you all board a bus and travel to an intermediate third location, where you meet the audience — and the characters — of another play altogether.

It turns out, you see, what you saw back in Molalla or Portland was just part of a bigger story. That bus ride is a journey through time as well as space, because now you are 20 miles and 30 years from where we started. All 90 of us wind up at one big communal dinner, where two people are about to make the biggest decision of their lives. From the Sojourn press release:

They’ll turn to their neighbors (you), and ask a question of life-altering and state-defining significance. Join us as we revisit the truth of a conversation that never occurred, and that happens every day, in an effort to help two families and an urban/rural citizenry decide – once and for all – who needs whom, and why?

Intrigued? I am. Usually theater happens in a cocoon of darkness. We’re safe; almost by definition, nothing is going to happen to us there. And while that shared experience of sitting in the dark while being told a story may imply a community forum, it’s rarely really the case. Sojourn’s presentations are remarkable because they actually need you to see them in order to complete the play — not just so you’ll buy a ticket, not to justify some grant, but because the play is actually about your presence in that room. Or in this case, at that table, breaking bread with 89 other people.

Rarely has “going along for the ride” been this specific. You are invited to come along, and you are needed. But if you want to be part of it, get your tickets soon. The nature of Sojourn’s work means it usually has short runs in small venues. And typically the company will have light houses for its first weekend, then word gets out, then suddenly it can’t accommodate all the people who want to have the experience. And people like me are throwing tantrums and dropping names like Oprah and Obama just to wrangle single tickets.

So don’t say I didn’t warn you. Get your tickets now. Then you’ll know what American Theatre is talking about.

SPECIFICS:

What: World Premiere of Sojourn Theatre’s On The Table

Where: In Portland: The Church, 602 NE Prescott
In Molalla: Rosse Posse Acres, 32690 S Mathias Road

When: July 15 - August 1 (Wed - Sun 8:00pm), previews July 15 & 16

Tickets:
$15 General Admission
Pay-What-You-Can Preview on July 15
$25 Sojourn SupporTix (help keep prices low by choosing this premium rate)
$12 Students & Seniors (limited availability; advance purchase & show ID at door)

Tickets on sale at right here.

Note:
Advance purchase is strongly recommended. Only 90 tickets are available for each performance: 45 in Molalla, 45 in Portland. Wear comfortable shoes as the audience will stand and move throughout the event. Please call 971.544.0464 prior to purchasing tickets if you have questions or special needs regarding accessibility/mobility.

Doldrums/Shmoldrums

2010-07-02T23:45:00.000-07:00

First thing when I showed up in Portland eight years ago, I was informed that I would need to reverse my vacation habits. Plan on going somewhere dry during the winter months,” they advised me. “You’ll want to spend every minute of the summer right here in town.”

Fine, except for one thing. Every summer Portland coasts through a period of disquieting calm, starting just after the Drammy Awards and last till September, when there’s just not a lot to see. Blame it on the climate, everybody says; western Oregon enjoys about three months when it’s pleasant to be outside, and by god people want to be outdoors all the damn time. Traditionally there are a few moments of excitement, such as the annual JAW Festival, but basically…let's just say it’s pretty easy to stay current with everything that’s on.

So for years some of us having saying: what if we tested those assumptions, and put together something inside some nice cool venues to see what happens? Apparently the 100th theater monkey got wind of this idea, because suddenly the entire town is bucking the conventional weather wisdom.

Witness, for example the fabulous Wet Ink Festival of new plays, presented by Playwrights West. This is a wild reading series of plays that didn’t exist at all until a few weeks ago, which have been receiving their first public airings now at CoHo Theatre. Something about the sheer recklessness of the endeavor has paid off handsomely; all the plays have been fantastic. BTW, the concluding entry happens tomorrow, the third of July: Nick Zagone’s latest escapade, Lee Marvin Be Thine Name. I definitely plan to be there.

Nor does CoHo’s fun end there; the progressive, outside-the-black-box venue has a whole slate of summerfare in store for intrepid theatergoers. PCS is likewise making good use of what was once known (in the kinder, gentler 20th century) as “down time.” In addition to the annual ferment of JAW, the Ellen Bye Studio downstairs will cook with a summer cabaret created and performed by vocal powerhouses Susannah Mars and Gavin Gregory that is going to be hothothot.

Miracle Theatre Group simmers all summer long, too, and it’s off to a very good start with its current production, Songs for a New World, a veritable revelation of vocal fireworks written by Jason Robert Brown and co-produced by Staged!, the endlessly inventive musical theater company. TAKE NOTE: this powerful song cycle also concludes its run tomorrow night (Saturday, July 3), so if you prefer music theater to Wet Ink’s verbal hijinks, get your tickets right this minute. And if you’re missing out, not to worry; Staged! is mounting a virtual Jason Robert Brown festival, having presented a concert version of The Last Five Years just last night, continuing with its theater camp’s mounting Brown’s Parade, and concluding in August with a cabaret entitled JRB Songbook.

Upcoming too is an ambitious and literally far-reaching new exploration by Sojourn Theatre/ called On the Table — which needs its own blog entry, so stay tuned — and a great opportunity over at Third Rail to see the NT Live presentation of London Assurance, starring the legendary Fiona Shaw. And let us not forget what is fast becoming a summer tradition here, Third Eye’s latest installment of bloody, disgusting short plays in the tradition of Théâtre du Grand Guignol.

I haven’t mentioned the various Shakespeare assays (including a colorful Pericles), and even then this isn’t everything. But it’s a lot, when you’re used to pretty much…..nothing. For those of us who do fear the heat of the sun, it’s a summer we can suffer.

Drammys, baby, Drammys

2010-06-13T13:27:00.000-07:00

For purposes of the Drammy Awards, known informally as "Portland's largest cast party," the 2009-10 theater season came to a close on May 30, Memorial Day's Eve. And now this Monday evening, June 14, we gather to find which artists, theaters and productions are distinguished with acknowledgments of outstanding work. It's a fun, often moving and always uproarious evening of theater folk acting up. And this should be especially so this year, as hosted by Portland's answer to Cary Grant, Mike O'Connell of Third Rail fame. Or, well....think of Cary Grant's enduring good looks paired with the insouiance of Dennis the Menace and you'll have the right idea.

In fact the actual event looks something like this:

All year I look forward to the event, yet with mixed feelings; every single year it winds up that I'm thrilled about some awards, but also tied in knots for the nominations that didn't ultimately stick. Actually it's fairly hard to get a nomination to blossom into an actual award; 80% of those who saw the nomination in question need to vote "yes" to make it a reality. While this often frustrates the few who are passionate about that nomination, the good thing is that it keeps the ceremony from being diluted by awards that were strong-armed into being.

Kay Vega will receive the distinction of Lifetime Achievement Award for all she's accomplished at Lakewood Theatre Company. Beyond that I can only say: expect to be surprised.

……………………………………………………………

FYI:

When: June 14, 2010, 7pm (with pre-show social hours starting at 6pm)
Where: The Crystal Ballroom, 1332 West Burnside Street
Why: Because we love you

JAW announces 2010 line-up

2010-06-09T10:23:00.000-07:00

Isn’t “line-up” the same term they use on those crime shows when they’ve rounded up the usual suspects? Perhaps the parallel’s fitting, since JAWhas assembled an impressive rogue’s gallery for us again this year.

The festivities kick off with two Made in Oregon readings. One is by Sarah Jean Accuardi, an extremely talented Portlander who’s been studying at Northwestern in recent years(she just got her MFA there), where she was mentored by the brilliant Rebecca Gilman. Now she’s bringing it all back home. And guess what? She started out in JAW back in high school, as a Promising Playwright -- the first one! This writer is fiercely talented -- even if she doesn’t know how to spell dramaturg (kidding!).

And then we get a new play by Ebbe Roe Smith, Night Terrors. In a recent conversation with one of the nation’s finest playwrights (whom I won’t name because she’s pathologically private), she told me: “Ebbe is a genius. He really is. Nobody can write like he does.” So there you have it. No pressure, ERS.

By the way, Ebbe’s been in JAW before; his play Number Three was workshopped several years ago in the Festival and subsequently received its premiere right here in Cascadia, thanks to the far-reaching vision of Third Rail Rep. Ya, that’s an Owen Carey photo of the production above, with Tim True in the title role.

Made in Oregon presents on July 17 & 18, and is followed by the “Festival Weekend Playwrights” on July 24-25. Conspicuous among the guest writers is theater trailblazer Will Eno, whose play Middletown moved us and startled us during JAW 2009. His new play, Gnit, is based on Ibsen's bizarre epic poem Peer Gynt. Which means we can expect revelation, despair, hilarity, horror and existential self-actualization. This will be a must-see.

I’m equally excited about hearing Sam Gregory’s play Necessity. As one of Portland’s most respected theater figures (and, ironically, one of its best-kept secrets), Sam has been quietly crafting elegant, language-is-a-virus plays for many years now; a new Sam play is always an event. Color me partial -- Sam’s a former member of my much-missed playwriting cabal, PlayGroup -- but I believe Necessity is one of his best works ever.

Jason Wells I don’t know, but his impressive background has certainly got me curious. And Rob Handel is an exciting, innovative wordsmith who is helping shake up not just playwriting itself but the very environment that produces it; he’s a founding member of the writing collective 13P.

As always, no need for tickets at JAW (it’s free) and you can leave the tux at home -- it’s an informal, script-in-hand process that gives you a peek into where playwriting’s headed nationally and how dramatists are responding to the “interesting times” we’re living in. See you there.

Breaking news: it's raining in Oregon

2010-06-06T10:50:00.000-07:00

Clearly it’s a 40 days/40 nights plus scenario here in tropical Portland OR, and people are freaking out. Though it’s traditional for the heavens to pour down on the annual Starlight Parade, for once the rain actually gave us a brief intermission, especially for the occasion, apparently, before returning to business as usual overnight.

It’s been raining now for months, and while everyone else gripes about it, I exult. My garden is growing itself! The entire city is shades of emerald, viridian -- it’s viridifloral, how about that -- and I’m not just referring to the moss. Okay, so my basil plants are drowning and the tomatoes are outraged. Everything else says THANK YOU.

“Rain-grey town….known for its sound…” Though the song wasn’t talking about San Francisco at the time, it fits Portland in both its sentiments and its scene-painting. This wuthering, brooding, tempest-toss’d mess is what I moved here for eight years ago, eschewing the unvarying desert of L.A. for good. So I’m astonished every single year when real-live Portlanders say: OMG, the rain! As Ken Kesey wrote in Sometimes a Great Notion, “It ain’t no secret it’s gonna rain in Oregon.”

But-but-but, you point out, he was talking about the winter. Whereas we’re supposed to be well into summer by now here. Well, console yourself with the study of historical climatology, which posits that the endless warm, wet summers of the Elizabethan era may have contributed to a creative “climate” producing the likes o’Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dowland and Inigo Jones. Not to mention Queen Bess herself.

Yes, one wet summer is not an historical epoch. Just saying. Gather ye mushrooms while ye may.

Dramaturg vs. dramaturge

2010-05-22T21:29:00.001-07:00

Last week I had the opportunity to address a large group of avid theatergoers. Granted they were all of a certain age, but still I was surprised when they informed me I had rushed through a reference to dramaturgy without defining what it was.

Those of us who spend a lot of time inside theater production tend to take much for granted, true, but it still surprises me that nearly 50 years after the introduction of dramaturgs into American theater, the job description is all but invisible.
Within the island universe of professional dramaturgs, nothing can be taken for granted, including the spelling of the title. Oh, yes. You’ve been going around living your life blissfully unaware that there are annual brouhahas in certain circles about whether there should be an “e” on the end of dramaturg. (The Urban Dictionary even hyphenates the word — drama-turg. Ow.)

We can trace the term back to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the justly celebrated Age of Enlightenment playwright and theorist, who developed a spectrum of dramaturgical duties still in effect today. That’s Gotthold at left — talk about an egghead, eh?? Well, German colleagues tell me “dramaturg” roughly translates to “drama worker,” but the term definitely has broader connotations; to this day the French word for playwright is dramaturge (aha) and the Italian is drammaturgo.

Not that you asked, but the correct American word for a dramaturg is … dramaturg. How come? Because in relatively recent American usage, meaning mid-20th century till now, foreign terms have been brought into the language whole and entire. This is very much not the case with British usage, where the habit of imperialism extends even to everyday words. It is the Brits who have historically expressed contempt for the profession of dramaturgy (even while grudgingly admitting that they have the job all right, they just concede it to the purview of the literary manager -- a perfectly good English expression, thank you so much). And it is also the Brits who took it upon themselves to add a superfluous “e” to the end of “dramaturg,” thereby not only recuperating the term as British (or at least as less Teutonic), altering its very pronunciation whilst at it.

Something about theater folk makes them cling to the antiquarian — insisting on spelling theater theatre, for example, and preserving the word “actress” — and I understand that. But I draw the line at anglicizing imported terms. It’s just plain icky. To use a great American neologism.

Radio Golf signs off, Delve signs on

2010-05-14T23:17:00.000-07:00

This Sunday, a celebrated event comes to a close here in Portland -- Portland Playhouse’s production of August Wilson’s Radio Golf, which has enjoyed a mostly sold-out run, in an excellent co-pro with the new BaseRoots Theatre Company. If you’re really, really lucky, you might be able to snag a ticket for this weekend and see what the fuss has been about.

In case you don’t make it, let me fill you in. August’s last play was widely regarded during its premiere runs (2005-2007) as latter-day Wilson. But its original director, Timothy Douglas, once told me that the day would come when it would be extolled as one of the playwright’s best works. Well, that time may be now. In an act of canny self-criticism, Portland Playhouse -- which occupies a former church in a marginalized neighborhood -- decided to mount a play that pits self-interest against deferred gratification and asks us to tally up the costs of progress for its own sake as opposed to preserving or restoring what we’ve already got.

Though like most of the 10 plays in August’s Century Cycle, Radio Golf is set in Pittsburgh -- specifically that city’s Hill District (where the playwright stands in the photo at right) -- attendees at the Portland production’s many talkback sessions have marveled that the play wasn’t written expressly for our own town, where issues of gentrification are rife. Plus this production was serendipitous for me personally because I already had it on my syllabus for the Delve course I started leading just this past Tuesday.

Delve, by the way, is the umbrella term for the reader's seminars offered through Literary Arts. These are devised as group explorations of literature; I’m not a teacher, but rather a “guide”; there are participants, rather than students. An ecumenical conception! When Jen MacGregor approached me about choosing something to delve into from dramatic literature, August -- a man I’d known in my grad school days, when his first plays were being developed and produced at Yale Rep -- was the natural choice.

Each seminar meets only six times, so I had to be selective about which of the 10 plays to exclude. But I knew from the start we had to end with Radio Golf. And thanks to Portland Playhouse, we really begin and end with the play, since virtually the entire class attended this remarkable production.

The seminar is a discovery process for me, too. Back in the day at the New Haven canning factory, some of us took August a little for granted; he was a journeyman artist, we assumed, just as we were. After all, not only did I see some of his early works’ premieres, I actually edited and did the layout for the first published editions of two of them. It has taken me 20+ years to see that just because I caught some typos or smoothed out prefatory material didn't make the plays were less effulgent. Now certain plays in particular -- Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, for one, and Gem of the Ocean, for another -- appear numinous, and all the more startling because their startling spans of human experience seemed housed within conventional dramaturgies. Yet for all that, they still shake your soul.

Now I'm looking forward to Tuesday evenings. Because I can’t wait to hear what my fellow travelers discover each week at Delve.

Farewell, old friend

2010-05-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

Lovely monsters

2010-05-09T07:32:00.000-07:00

Excited as I am to be going home today, I have to admit it was sad leaving the theater for the final time last night. Walking along the banks of the Iowa River, watching the black water flowing languidly by, stopping on the bridge to look at where the river curves out of sight, looking back to the theater lobby still mobbed with thrilled attendees – I’m going to miss all that.

Since I last wrote, I saw Lisa Leaverton’s new piece, One Plum. (Lisa’s play Why Love Doesn’t Recognize Its Name appeared in PCS’s Now Hear This series a couple of years ago.) Plum transformed one of the university’s several theaters into an amazing environment representing – well, the environment. The actors of One Plum created a visual and aural landscape in and around the audience that took us rapidly through season after season, reflecting issues along the way such as climate change and pollution. Nature’s hurly-burly (and humankind’s part in altering it) was treated comically but pointedly, the main spines being a human’s couples attempts to reproduce themselves and the struggles of a colossal plum tree to bear fruit. Incredibly inventive and ever-morphing, the experiential nature of the piece was a delight.

As if in response to One Plum, the next day’s reading of a new Andrew Saito play, The Patron Saint of Monsters, also looked at some of nature’s side trips as manifested in human beings. Its first part chronicled the making of an actual medieval saint; part 2 explored her elevation to cult status. And in the final section we see how she became associated with healing and/or comforting misfits of all stripes – while simultaneously displacing the more pagan “monsters” already around. The photo above shows you a gaggle of schiachpercht, the indigenous folk who don't cotton to the Christian incursions.

Following Andrew was a new play by Tali Ariav, Bloodlines, a harrowing duologue between a hospitalized girl and a soldier who may or may not spring from her fevered imagination. I was so shattered by this play that I left the theater even as the applause was in progress to go outside in the dark and just be with the experience of the play. (And nearly missed that night’s adventure of hanging out at The Sanctuary, a theater speakeasy that was popular back when James was a student at U of I – something reassuring about that.)

Friday night was Joe Luis Cedillo’s new play, Columpio. If you can envision Arthur Miller’s family dramas translocated to a Chicano family living near Newhall in the 1990s, you’ll get a sense of how Joe’s play works. Spanning three generations of increasing assimilation, with all the credits and debits that implies, this was a deeply felt portrait of a family in crisis. I hope this play gets produced soon in Los Angeles, where it could be a watershed piece of theater.

Saturday we were treated to brunch at one of the playwrights’ home – a 14-acre farm with sheep, goats (we got to feed goatlings less than a week old), and disturbingly large hens. Plus bovines. The place sported a gargantuan barn and a gorgeous farmhouse that date back to the mid-19th century. This playwright, Janet Schlapkohl, scrambled eggs for me at one point that she had just taken from the henhouse. Let me tell you: fresh eggs are light year apart from what you get in the supermarket. These eggs were so flavorful that they needed no seasonings. And yellow…

We returned to see Janet’s play Tro Musikk, a warm, big-hearted piece about upper-Midwesterners suffused with Scandinavian culture and inflected with those charming accents and quaint expressions (“you betcha!”) that we associate with cheese country. Not that the play mocked those people or that part of the world; on the contrary, I wanted to move in, to love among them from now on. I loved every minute of this play. Laughed like a macaw throughout, only to be surprised and touched – frequently! – by the sheer humanity of the characterizations. Even though the play is framed by the supernatural (troll-like figures lurk in the moods and grin at human foibles), ultimately the play was about forgiveness and redemption. Yes, the big themes. Powerful stuff. Which is easier to get your arms around when you’re accompanied by an accordion.

The Festival crescendoed last night with the premiere of Achilles, Scourge of Man, an outrageously rock and roll spectacle about the famous warrior that seem to happen now and back then and throughout time. As with One Plum, the theater was transformed for the occasion. Powerful lights beamed down from the top of the theater, filling the cavernous space; searchlights continually scanned cut the audience; the sound of helicopters approached and receded. So once again, to enter the theater was to enter the play. Tricked out with video screens, supertitles and a rock score that shook the risers, this was a balls-out production effort that grabbed me by the throat and demanded (and got) my attention every minute of the story.

As outstanding as the production effort was, however, it would not have mattered had Kevin Artigue’s script been any less provocative. This writer knows how to assault his audience with language, but also how to drop it down to a whisper, and when to provide the palate cleansers that let you savor new sensations. Indeed, “sensation” is the perfect word for this work, which had lots to express about men who treat war like an epic video game. (Kevin has worked with the brilliant Ken Roht, by the way, whose seemingly reckless extravagance informed this play.)

Like I said: a terrific year for the Playwright’s Workshop’s New Play Festival. I got a great glimpse into where theater may be headed. And I’m encouraged.

Hermanas, Piranhas and AutoErotica

2010-05-05T20:23:00.000-07:00

Yep – the above-captioned items are only part of what’s going, right here in Iowa City. At this writing, I’m midway through the Playwrights’ Workshop’s New Play Festival at the University of Iowa. It’s an amazingly broad spectrum of content, style and form, just as you’d expect – and hope.

Festivities kicked off with a reading of a new play by Louisa Hill, called Child’s Pose, that uses competitive track, yoga and ballet as indices of generational difference. And a full production of a new play by Tony Meneses entitled Las Hermanas Padilla. Tony’s play was a rare treat, with a cast of 10 (all female), two directors, and a kaleidoscopic story that was almost always in motion, which of course threw the few quiet moments into sharp relief. Focusing on an extended family made up entirely of sisters-in-law, its repeating premise about the war-time deaths of their husbands – deaths whose advents are delivered one by one through carrier pigeons, who drop death on the sisters like inverse paracletes – was poignant without ever being sentimental. The play was suffused with a magic that seemed native to this (unnamed) land: a pregnancy that goes on indefinitely, a stigmata-like wound that provides the sisters with ink.

Sheela Kangal, whom many of you will remember her from TCG days, debuted a remarkable monologue she calls Norm, which explores one character’s identities past and present and yet to come. And Jen Silverman – a writer already making a name for herself at noted developmental from New Georges to Seven Devils -- premiered a disturbing new piece titled Gilgamesh’s Game, about a death cult whose apotheosis is to achieve “terminus.” In this endgame, players started by facing smaller fears (scorpions, leeches, piranhas) and progress until … well, until game over. But what happens when the cult’s originator becomes its first heretic? This stylish, darkly droll play devolves around three characters who each having very different reasons for playing.

And Jess Foster’s Hard and Fast brings a very special fetish into sweetly comic perspective. Subtitled “a love story,” let’s just say I’ll never look at an Austin-Healy 3000 quite the same way again. Or a Chevrolet Fleetline.

By the way, I share the privilege of seeing all this fun new theater with three other “Festival Guests,” as we’re called: the pulchritudinous Carson Kreitzer (whose indelible play Enchantment will be remembered by JAW devotees); the classy and breathtakingly insightful Megan Monaghan; and the absolutely fabulous Beth Blickers, who is America’s answer to Peggy Ramsay. (And I’m the only man, ya.) Stay tuned.

In my tribe

2010-05-01T23:07:00.001-07:00

Go to most any writers’ conference and a peculiar strain of war stories often surfaces: viz., tales of the writing group from hell. So plentiful and outrageous are these stories (the curmudgeon who never met a phrase he liked, the woman who wrote solely about elves, etcetcetc) that I actually ducked invitations to writing groups for years.

But I began rethinking my anthrophobia this past fall. At Wordstock I got to meet most of the Seattle 7, a group of amazing writers who met for years and wound up all getting published at the same time. And I organized a panel that was ostensibly about playwriting, but which wound up getting populated by several members of Portland’s Big Brain Trust, including Marc Acito, Storm Large and Cynthia Whitcomb. All these writers clearly had tremendous admiration and respect and bonhomie for each other. You could tell from the way they badgered each other mercilessly in public. I knewI wanted that.

Well. Put an idea out there, Madame Blavatsky sez, and a clarion call ripples through the universe. Post-Wordstock, in a chance conversation with a playwright I know, it came out that we have both been writing novels — for years. We knew we needed the support of a group, but my friend was equally leery of them; she had not had great experiences joining extant meetings. So we started collecting people. We discovered a local director whose first book comes out this fall and who was well into her second manuscript; and then another playwright, who had recently realized her latest script was crying out for a long-form treatment.

Voilà — a gang of four. We’ve been meeting weekly for months now. And while this blog may have languished as a consequence, hey! The novel’s coming along great. The simple fact that I’m committed to providing my gangsters with 10 pages a week whether those pages are gibberish or gold, has been near-miraculous for this scribbler. What I was missing from my writing regimen all along is now embodied in these weekly sessions: an audience. A respondent audience, not a vague abstraction.

What’s fun, too, is that we’re all refugees from the theater. Not that any of us have abandoned the form — quite the contrary. But our theater backgrounds inform our writing in surprising ways. The compression of dialogue, for one. And perhaps even more importantly, our instincts for what constitutes a “scene” in a narrative is, well … theatrical. Aristotelian. Beginnings/middles/ends. We understand how images — and not just words — can give a story tremendous unity.

I love my small tribe and our as-yet unnamed cabal. (Suggestions?) Stay tuned for more dispatches from the trenches.

Just drop in to see what condition your condition is in

2010-04-16T20:53:00.000-07:00

How cool is this? TCG is hosting a series of national town hall meetings to take stock of theater and our place in it. Here’s your chance to kvetch with the best of them and contribute to the ongoing national debate about what to do with this glorious anachronism we call the American theater.

Alas, since you need to register the Thursday before each forum, it’s already too late to participate in the actors’ dialogue. But that leaves four more, and fortunately, you wear many, many hats in the theater anyway, right?

Ironically enough, I’ll be missing the dramaturgs’ klatch; I’ll be steeping myself in new playwriting at the Iowa New Plays Festival. Twelve plays in six days! I do love a good marathon.

Anyhow, here are the deets:

.................................

TCG Independent Artists' Forum
Moderated by Board Members of TCG

We want feedback from independent theater artists: How can we strengthen the relationship between individual artists and institutions? What would strengthen the artistic vitality of theatre?

TCG is hosting a series of five teleconferences for independent theatre artists. These focus groups aim to engage individual theatre artists in a far-ranging dialogue to discuss how individual artists are doing in the American theatre field today.

Five teleconferences are scheduled, each for a specific discipline in the theatre: actors, directors, dramaturgs, playwrights and designers. We recognize that many artists play multiple and varied roles within the theatre, and that for some artists, these categories do not fully capture what they do in the field. If you are a multi-disciplinary artist, or you do not see your discipline represented in the calls below, please self select one category that you feel is closest to your area of expertise.

The teleconferences will take place for one hour on the following days:

• April 19, 4pm EDT: Actors
• April 26, 4pm EDT: Directors
• May 3, 3pm EDT: Dramaturgs
• May 3, 4:30pm EDT: Playwrights
• May 10, 4pm EDT: Designers

Artists interested in participating must register below by 5pm EST on the Thursday prior to the teleconference. Our intent is to have as geographically and culturally diverse a group as possible represented on the call. As such, 30 participants will be selected from the registrant pool by lottery. Participants will be notified either way by the end of the day on the Friday prior to the call. For maximum efficiency, a series of questions will be circulated to participants prior to the call. Registrants who are not selected for the call will be given the opportunity to voice their points of view via electronic survey.

Follow the link above to register. And let me know what happens.

Malcolm McLaren's next gig: shaking up Valhalla

2010-04-08T12:09:00.000-07:00

Saddened today to hear of the passing of Malcolm McLaren, a supernova of a music producer who helped changed music forever during the Punk and New Wave movements back in the day. His clients included The Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow, among others. The po-mo mash-ups we take for granted nowadays have their roots in some of his visionary efforts.

This oh-so-80s video may give you pause, but give yourself a treat and just close your eyes, allowing yourself to be enshrouded by Mr. McLaren’s lush re-envisioning of a classic staple. This is from his 1984 album, FANS:

Roomba cat, O roomba cat, where are you going to

2010-04-05T10:17:00.000-07:00

That’s right, I’m breaking a 9-day silence to bring you funny videos from the Internets. But it’s in honor of an event of massive impact. Namely: last week the James came home with a Roomba! We welcomed it into the family immediately and life hasn’t been the same since.

While the Roomba may be a far cry from the Jetson’s beloved Rosie, it doesn’t sass you back when you push its CLEAN button. It sallies forth from its berth at once, with encouraging alacrity, looking for lint, grit, dust bunnies, what have you.

What makes its search oddly lifelike is that it doesn’t go in a straight line, but rather meanders all over the place. It halts in mid-stride and goes off in another direction; it circles around madly as if in doubt of where it’s needed most; it clambers over low barriers such as rugs in a way that’s reminiscent of the Robinson’s old Chariot. Whenever it bangs into insurmountable barriers, it just wheels around goes another way (as we say in casting, using whisker-like feelers that jut out from the undercarriage.

You can place small electronic posts around the house to ward the Roomba away from places you want it to avoid -- like your office, when you’re working in it -- and the thing somehow senses areas where the floor drops away, which saves it from falling down the stairs. Brilliant! You just turn it on and it industriously wanders around; its white noise because an unobtrusive soundtrack to your day.

Best of all, when the Roomba gets tired, it finds its way back to its berth; it backs in, settles down, and as it recharges, it’s “clean” button pulses like beating red heart. Scary!

Admittedly, I had hoped for a video-worthy response to the Roomba from Mac the Kerry Blue. I expected outrage from him at this manic interloper, or at least for his terrier instincts to kick in. But he just looked at the thing, shrugged, and went back to sleep. Hence I’m hoping you’ll be satisfied with this YouTube office fave instead.

Oh: I hope you recognized the important cultural referent in this post’s caption. I know Prince did. Here it is, for your convenience, just in case:

You're welcome!

Opera in the underworld

2010-03-28T10:46:00.001-07:00

Mention “opera” and most people envision what’s now called “grand opera” — mammoth war horses, mostly from the form’s reputed 19th-century heyday. While grand indeed, this is also the era that gave opera a bad name with many of these same people, thanks to preposterous plotting and general obviation of basic acting skills, not to mention extreme length.

You can thank a handful of far-sighted directors, notably including Peter Sellars, for rediscovering baroque operas, where dramatic tensions often arise less from what happens and more from internally divided characters, like Xerxes and Orpheus. But wait! Doesn’t that sound like a modern sensibility?

Bingo. Many astute commentators, including the venerable Mr. Scatter, have noted an operatic curiosity: contemporary opera, written by notable composers such as John Adams, Philip Glass and, yes, the trailblazing Leonard Bernstein, seem to have returned to exquisite miniatures of opera’s earliest composers.

I myself discussed this with Portland Opera’s visionary General Director, Christopher Mattaliano, when we were seated together at a banquet a couple years ago. Which proves that once again, the advance guard of American culture is all thanks to me. Case in point: PO’s current offering is a dazzling triple bill that gives you Bernstein’s unfairly overlooked Trouble in Tahiti along with two Monteverdi gems, Il ballo delle ingrate and Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, all in scarcely more than two spellbinding hours.

Together the two composers comprise nearly the full span of operatic history. Monteverdi is justly immortal for composing opera’s first masterpiece, Orfeo. It’s exciting to see his two neglected chamber pieces presented together. First we see The Dance of the Ungrateful, which is essentially a meditation on a human cynicism that tends to take love for granted, eschewing its ennobling power. As a corrective, Venus bargains with Pluto to allow damned lovers to return to earth and scare the living back to their true purpose.

In a dazzling coup de théâtre, the opera moves seamlessly and without warning into the second piece, The Battle of Tancredi and Clorinda, which we understood is a corrective tale counterbalancing the wuthering ennui deplored by the previous story. This is reinforced through seeing the condemned of hell, who were mute in the first piece, adopt major roles in the second.

Following intermission, Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti seems at first to be … well, centuries away from Monteverdi’s brooding concerns. It’s a bright and sunny day in Suburbia -- in any suburbia, as the libretto makes clear. But we see at once that this is a feint, and underneath the cheery Formica surfaces is the very ennui Venus railed against earlier.

The two lead roles, played by Jose Rubio as Sam and Daryl Freedman as Dinah (pictured at left in the photo by Portland Opera/Cory Weaver, with a blind Cupid upstage) are outstanding as the husband and wife trapped in this Mad Men-like scenario, who feel unable to halt or even slow down their drifting apart. Gradually and inexorably, figures from the Monteverdi pieces populate the stage, sometimes adopting roles and other times simply bearing silent witness to the lives of the two mortals. Toward the end, there is the merest hint that this state of desuetude may be bettered — or will it merely be accepted?

If changes do happen for the better, you feel that it will be partly due to the invisible influence of Pluto’s emissaries, doing their best to provide a cautionary vision for Bernstein’s struggling 1950s couple.

Overall, this is a bracing and moving conception, one that brilliantly combines three very different operas into a single, cohesive vision. It’s also a glimpse into how opera can be so much more than the mere cultural duty to which it’s often relegated. Mr. Mattaliano and his company are to be commended to bringing us work that matters — opera that sticks with you long after the applause has died down. Bravo and bravi.

So take note: The triple bill has just three more performance, inclding today’s matinee, and then April 1 & 3. Make sure you see this extraordinary presentation. Leave your preconceptions about opera at the door, whether they’re pro or con, and treat yourself to a trip to the underworld you’ll not soon forget.

Now and forever

2010-03-24T18:32:00.001-07:00

It’s always fun to go to public events with Megan. In addition to the pleasure of her company, I get all these approving smiles from women of a certain age. No doubt they’re thinking: isn’t that sweet, that nice man is taking his granddaughter out for some very improving culture.

Last night’s event was Cats. Yes, THAT Cats, the Andrew Lloyd Webber juggernaut currently playing at the Keller Auditorium as the Portland stop in a national tour. Though the spectacle premiered in 1981, I never saw it back in the day, because there were no comps whatsoever to be had. (In my student days, I saw only the second acts of Broadway shows anyway, and Cats just didn’t tickle my spider sense.) So I was grateful for the opportunity to see what nearly 30 years of fuss has been about.

Well. Talk about truth in advertising. The play is about cats. Probably you already know this is all based on a book of light verse by T.S. Eliot, of all people: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, from 1939. (Intriguingly, however, the one song you can actually hum, Memory, hails from Tom’s groovier, more avant-garde phase.) None of it makes a lick of sense, really, but it’s all very colorful, and the talented touring cast dances their tails off. (Ahem.)

The video posted above is not of the current national tour, but this is exactly what last night looked like; apparently all the production elements are codified. Never mind that the dance vocabulary and Webber’s hodgepodge of a score are shopworn (the synth-heavy arrangements recall MTV of yore), the thing is an event. The gleeful opening night audience include a startling number of people (and I’m talking adults here) with velvet cat’s ears on their heads and/or sporting puss print outfits. Impressive!

Cats is probably not a show for jaded theater lifers like myself; I can’t help but see through the tricks and even be a tad irked by the staginess of it all. But for those who still thrill at pulsing strobe lights shone in their faces or for whom lots and lots of makeup hold a forbidden fascination, the show may be magic. Certainly last night’s audience enjoyed the play thoroughly.

Know what else I’ve never seen? Les Miz and Miss Saigon. I’m counting on the Keller’s Broadway series to also fill in these lacunae in my theater education, tool. Where was I, anyway, during the waning years of the Broadway musical? It feels like I skipped from Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar straight over to In the Heights and Passing Strange. Feel free to tell me what I missed.

Happy Anniversary

2010-03-21T17:25:00.000-07:00

Thoroughly enjoyed a Mini-marathon at PCS this weeend, catching closing shows — my inadvertent mode de guerre any more with theater, forever showing up at a run’s end. Saturday night I saw The 39 Steps, the fun send-up of Hitchcock’s ancient potboiler. And then today, Adam Bock’s eerie, disturbing The Receptionist, which was an outstanding production.

Somewhere in the middle of the former show, it came to me that yesterday was my “good night and thank you” day at PCS. Because it took me two weeks to dismantle my office, my actual last day was April 4, but the guillotine actually sang a year and a day ago.

In the course of that year, I’ve been back to PCS as a visitor or as an audience member many times, and you know what? It’s fine. Not painful or maddening or discouraging. Fine. But it always feels a little strange to be there as an outsider. I have to resist the urge to use the secret passageways and shortcuts I know are there; I must squelch the impulse to go up to confused patrons and ask if I can help them. But mostly it’s a pleasure, really -- nice to just relax into a good show and feel no responsibility for its artistic merit.

After all this time, I’m still asked whether I’ll return to PCS as a staffer — invariably by people who are not theater folk, of course. Those in the biz know it’s well-nigh impossible to get a department back once it’s been branded as accessory. (Berkeley Rep managed to get back its lit department eventually, but it limped along with a part-time contractor for years.) Usually I respond by saying I’d be willing to discuss a return, but that’s just a way to end the conversation. It’s doubtful that I’d go back, even in the unlikely event the opportunity arose — not because of emotional or psychic barriers, but simply because I’ve done that job already, you know? There would have to be a new reason, such as a dedicated new play development wing or something.

I am a little surprised I’ve not been asked back as an independent contractor, though, to teach a class or something. Not because I’m so gobsmackingly resplendent, but just because it would make business sense. Plus if I were still in management I would reason that the best way to recuperate a publicly embarrassing situation would be to co-opt the former staffer in question — give him a few gigs, keep him on a short leash.

That hasn’t happened. (Sigh. There’s never a good Machiavel when you really need one.) That too is all right; it’s not like I’m wondering what to do with my time. And as time goes by, I just enjoy being in the Armory as a spectator. It’s easier to resist the urge to pull weeds from the Vera Katz Park, to welcome Board members into the space, etc. When I walk into the lobby, it still happens that people I don’t recognize smile at me or else squint, as though they’re trying to recollect where they’ve seen me before…but this too will fade.

“Life is change,” as the Jefferson Airplane used to sing. “How it differs from the rocks.” Color me deinstitutionalized. And loving it.

Merry Ides of March

2010-03-15T18:18:00.000-07:00

In lieu of anything interesting to offer you about ides, Shakespeare and/or Julius Caesar, I’m posting this epiphany of a video that my friend and colleague John J. Flynn recently shared with me. Check it out, you’ll thank us both.

And the RAVEN goes to . . .

2010-03-13T15:59:00.000-08:00

Lucky Susan, promulgator of the very useful blog Paper Fort, among others. Susan, I’ll be asking the good peeps at Terra Communications (the novel's indefatigable publicists) to send you a new copy of Garth Stein’s Raven the Stole the Moon over to your work address toot sweet. Congratulations!

Thank you to all the entrants for playing along with Blogorrhea's first-ever giveaway. If it's any consolation, all entries were placed inside a tall, opaque vase created by iconic American potter Jonathan Adler, and the winning entry was selected at random by a disinterested third party. Thus the gods have spoken!

Special for YOU: Garth Stein's latest opus

2010-03-10T18:04:00.000-08:00

Since -- as recently intimated -- Bamboo Nation has a niche in American cultural consciousness that I can only aspire to, I aim to ape Prince Gomolvilas in all things. Hence I will borrow from one of Prince’s best attention-culling mechanisms: the giveaway!

First, the lure. I hope you recall when I reviewed here Garth Stein’s best-selling novel The Art of Racing in the Rain. Remember? Well now, just in time for St Patrick’s Day, Garth has written a new one for us. I’ve been awaiting his latest novel, whatever it would be, wondering how he could possibly follow up on such a sequel-proof story. No matter what the new book would be, it certainly be a surprise.

And he has not disappointed. Raven Stole the Moon is an out-and-out thriller, and a thriller of the best sort -- the atmosphere-heavy kind that introduces you to places, people and cultures that few come across on their own.

Again, the author’s feel for the Northwest is strong. His story starts in Seattle, but soon defects for a small town in Alaska where the indigenous Tlingit people and their bonds with unseen worlds are still strongly evident. The story’s hero, Jenna, is returning to the town of Wrangell as the scene of a turning point in her life -- it’s where her son was drowned. But she soon comes to realize that warring conspiracies seek both to reveal the truth or to hide it from her.

Warning: don’t read this book in bed at night if you have an early morning the next day! I rushed from chapter to chapter just to find out what would happen next.

And now for the giveaway. I have a brand new, never-before-read copy of Raven Stole the Moon to give you. True, the book was just released yesterday, so you can always bop on over to Powell’s…or you can leave a comment, any comment, on this post by Saturday morning, March 13. That day at noon I’ll randomly select one of the entrants, and someone will get her/his very own copy of Garth's latest. If you want to post anonymously, that’s cool -- just make your post unique enough that I have a way to give you a shout out, and we can go from there.

Buona fortuna!

For when the jig is up

2010-03-07T17:28:00.000-08:00

With St Patrick’s Day around the corner, and potted shamrocks starting to appear in the supermarkets, I’m reminded of something inadvertently shocking my sainted mother told me a while back. Though she was and is in very good health, she mentioned that when she does shed this mortal coil, she’d like her funeral service to conclude with “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” And in scouting around YouTube for a suitable rendition (because death is something I’ve been rehearsing since earliest childhood), I was surprised to find that nearly all the uploaded renditions are conducted as though intended to accompany a parade. Slow the song down, however, and it becomes sweetly sad -- a feature of nearly all Irish music, curiously enough.

Try it and you’ll see. The most frenetic of jigs, when subdued, turn mellow and melancholy. Exhibit A: this Meg Christian song, which includes the traditional dance music of Kemp’s Jig, ordinarily performed with a carefree lilt but here turned thoughtful and soulful.

This got me musing on my own demise -- which I will consider untimely though I be older than Methuselah at the time. I hope someone will sing Bob Dylan’s masterpiece, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” for me. It makes a perfect swan song:

Take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Yet so often the song’s performed like a march -- even, on occasion, by Bob himself:

But like Kemp’s Jig, slow it down and you have this aching, mournful and nevertheless sweet version by Melanie (remember Melanie?):

Mr. Dylan may well have written the most Irish song of them all.

Sitting shiva for yesteryear’s bloggolalia

2010-03-06T10:07:00.000-08:00

By which I mean: last year. Have you noticed that blogging in general (the reading of, as well as the writing thereof) seems to be ebbing? Or, like me, have you been too caught up in the delirium of 21st century life for this to even really register?

Covered with shame though I am -- I mean, it’s been nine days since my last post -- all the above has come to light because I’ve finally showing my virtual face in order to accept an utterly undeserved acknowledgment -- the Prolific Blogger Award, bestowed upon me 33 days ago by my colleague Dot Hearn.

O, the ignominy. Grateful as I am to Dot for this distinction, she deserves it far more than I; she’s logged four posts already for March alone. All the same, I’ll take it, of course -- attention is attention.

The way the game works is that as a new honoree, I’ll name seven more prolific bloggers, each of whom will identify seven more -- thus perpetuating the distinction exponentially. Thus it’s like a chain letter, but with the benefit of immediate gratification. Yet when I went go to some of the old faves (sorry, I won’t name names), I was dismayed to find the virtual ink seems to have run dry. Most of them wheezed to halt several months ago. One former comrade, whose work I read daily, is now a year in arrears! Most damning of all, for me personally, is that I hadn’t really………noticed.

Is this cyclical, part of the ebb and flow of cosmic drift? Or have we, as true blue Americanetskys, just used up the experience and moved on en masse as early adopters of fresher, more supple “social utilities”? Blame Twitter et al. if you want, but strangely, I’m getting more visitors to this blog than ever. Someone’s reading, but where have all the bloggers themselves gone?

So. “Now more than ever,” right? As a salute to the few still writing the good write, here’s a passel some of my most oft-visited blogs:

Marissabidilla. With observations on cultural life in San Francisco and beyond that somehow combine the glee of That Girl! with the solemnity of a probate lawyer, I hungrily await this girl’s next posts.

Bamboo Nation. Still your go-to site for cultural singularities of all varieties. Makes Gawker look like downright tweedy.

The “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks. Still wryly excoriating after all these years.

Regretsy. The name’s a play on Etsy, the site for all things handmade. All Regretsy has to do is cull the most gobsmacking inexplicable craft items up for sale (you mean that’s for sale?? no way) and repost them, often without comment. I can’t describe Regretsy any better that its own tag line does: “Where DIY meet WTF.”

Fertile Ground Festival. Temporarily dormant. Temporarily. It will rise again. Pre-fest and during it, Trish Mead’s street-level blog was a hotbed of ferment, a peek into the crucible of new work for performance. I miss it, and can’t wait for it to crank up again in anticipation of FG 2011.

Art Scatter. Mr. Scatter and his retinue, which include Mrs. Scatter and the Big Smelly Boy, is still my favorite cultural gadabout here in mossy Portland OR.

And finally -- apologies about self-promotion be damned! -- there’s my very own The Editing Room, which posts occasional news and open questions about the writing process. I post this so I that I’ll now go to my own blog and post something there for the first time in weeks. I mean months. But who’s counting anymore, c’est vrai?

First, however, must visit Twitter. How else would anyone know that I actually have a new blog post?

Lullaby of Spring

2010-02-26T16:44:00.001-08:00

February though it is, spring is well underway in the Pacific Northwest. No need to feel envious, thought, if you're still blanketed by winter in the east; when the moutain snows stop this early here, it usually means we pay for it eventually with a summer drought.

Meanwhile, though, THIS is the kind of spring (even if it is months too soon) that makes me love this corner of the world. Water drips from everywhere; the rustle of rain is a constant underscore; the insistent bright green of first leaves is just starting to appear, like they're attempting to gauge the weather. It's a beautiful but somber sort of a spring -- not the delirium of, say, D.C.'s cherry trees or SoCal's wild poppies -- but I prefer this. The triumph of mushrooms, moss, hellebores, particolored lichens, newts and banana slugs.

Cascadia's spring is perfectly captured by this ancient (1967) song by Donovan Leitch.