Jordan Harrison: true to type in Portlandia

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.

Lee + Me

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?

Wordstock Loves You

Oregon playwriting gets a boost of well-deserved recognition this Sunday when the five finalists for the 2008 Oregon Book Awards find out who gets the Angus L. Bowmer Award for Drama.

Literary Arts presents the drama award every other year, and each time it’s adjudged by a prominent literary figure from out of state, in order to avoid even the appearance of cronyism. (Isn’t that cute? I think Literary Arts is unaware of how teeny tiny the theater universe actually is….) Now that the name of the lucky winner is in the can, we can learn the judge’s erstwhile secret identity: the fab and glam Sherry Kramer, who is not only a fiercely original writer but also one of the best playwriting teachers in the nation. So it will be interesting indeed to see who Sherry selected for top honors.



The competition is fierce: Dori Appel of Ashland, for Hat Tricks; Jacklyn Maddux of Portland, for Strange Sightings in the Great Southwest; Steve Patterson of Portland, for Lost Wavelengths; Francesca Sanders of Portland, for I Become a Guitar; and George Taylor of Beaverton, for Renaissance.

Confession: I’m partisan here. Francesca is an alumna of PlayGroup, the playwriting group that I host at PCS; and Steve is a current PlayGroup member. The play for which he’s nominated got a workshop in JAW 2006. Good thing the choice of ultimate winner is not up to me.

BUT! Here's what is up to me. Prior to the announcement Sunday evening, all five playwrights will be appear at Wordstock, speaking on a panel moderated by moi-meme. I’ll ask each writer to read a brief excerpt from his/her nominated work, then I’ll ask some questions, then you’ll ask some questions.

Date: November 9, at the climax of the 3-day festival
Time: 2pm sharp
Place: Oregon Convention Center, Wieden + Kennedy Stage, Room D-136

Wordstock, by the way, is Portland’s “annual festival of the book.” It's a big deal, a real celebration of writing of all kinds, from poetry to graphic novels. Click here to see its whimsical (and oddly touching) welcome video with a great bonus: images of gorgeous autumnal Portland.

Local Heroes

Heavens to Murgatroyd and all right already, I swear to Archangel Michael and all the saints that we will have the full JAW copy on the PCS website before this Monday’s out. To tide you over, though, I’d like to announce the three plays of the “Made in Oregon” series, which form a mini-fest of plays in advance of the Festival proper. Feast your eyes on this fab line-up:

JAW: Made in Oregon
Script-in-hand readings by three of Oregon’s own. All MIO readings begin promptly at 7:30pm in the Ellyn Bye Studio Theater.

The Cloud-Bangers
by Matthew B. Zrebski
July 8
All the clouds are cumulonimbus in this heady mix of meteorology, migraines and steamy romance. Only an air-clearing storm will reveal who’s zoomin’ whom.

Starvation Heights
by Ginny Foster
July 9
In this adaptation of the true-crime novel by New York Times best-selling author Gregg Olsen, lady doctor Linda Hazzard opens a sanitarium with some unorthodox treatments. When her clients start leaving her care feet first, a mysterious figure known as Nanny appears, determined to save two patients in particular.

Willow Jade
by Hunt Holman
July 10
Nowheresville, Southwest Washingon. Meet four aging chums with a good idea: stave off middle age by reviving their high school rock band. Bad idea: coming to terms with their past during a disastrous game of D&D – in costume.

Vertigo

Shame! Shame! Shame!

Thus did Virginia Woolf once abjure herself, for going months without a diary entry. The imprecation comes to mind now because I see I’ve gone eleven days without making a blog entry, the longest stretch of silence ever. But never mind the self-flagellation – PCS has been dizzy and bizzy. Three openings in three weeks! It’s been a delirious kaleidoscope of vertigo-inducing fun.

It came to a climax this past weekend, which started with the opening of Sarah Treem’s funny and affecting new play A Feminine Ending. This play is especially dear to my heart because it started in JAW, when Sarah was a shy youngster just starting out in the theater universe. Granted, she was a youngster very fast out of the gate, having only recently graduated from trade school (the Yale School of Drama, I mean) and already with invitations to Pacific Playwrights Festival as well as JAW, and a South Coast Rep play commission in the works. Recently too she started writing for HBO’s intriguing new experiment in programming, In Treatment.



So flash forward to 2008, it was a profoundly moving event to open the show in our new building, with a phalanx of SCR royalty in the back row (the production is a co-pro with them), and the audience leaping to their feet at the curtain call.

Not only that, but Sarah returned to PCS’s rehearsal hall the following afternoon to teach a Community Artists Lab. (These are continuing ed occasions we offer from time to time on various topics; they’re free of charge to participants, but of course we pay the sessions leaders, and this year the support for the teachers has come from the brilliant people at Oregon Cultural Trust.) Sarah was a bracing teacher – direct, clear-eyed, supportive yet incisive, a veritable Tiresias of playwriting.

Not only that, but the fabulous Amy Freed was on had this weekend, seeing what we did with her play The Beard of Avon (she graciously said she loved it) as well as seeing Twelfth Night, directed by her friend Jane Jones.
AND Amy did her only Community Artists Lab on Sunday, before dining with Chris Coleman and winging her way back to the Bay Area.

Amy’s style as a teacher was fascinating: quiet, confiding. She assumed all participants was her peers, and spoke to them as such. Considering she’s been a Pulitzer finalist (for Freedomland) and that she received both the Kesselring Prize and a McArthur (the “genius grant”), hers was a generous assumption, but all the playwrights there that day blossomed from her attention.

So. Today, Monday, is my “day off” – meaning I get to read JAW scripts at home today and avoid the hurly-burly of my office at PCS. Tomorrow, of course, it’s “welcome back” and “all right, so today….”