Sam Gregory is coming soon to a theater near YOU

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.

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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.

JAW announces 2010 line-up

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.