Tonight’s the night

Fertile Ground the sequel takes the stage tonight at venues all over Portland, and this time the buzz is really, really audible. The inaugural outing last year was amazing, but let’s face it -- part of our exhausted appreciation stemmed from our astonishment that it happened at all. And that so much of the area’s theater community pulled it together to participate in it.

The difference this year? A broadened sense that Fertile Ground is a civic event -- a welcome and important addition to the public arena in a city already replete with great festivals for music, film and the fine arts and even “time-based” art.

Also, if last year made an invisible sector visible, this year ups the ante by happening all over town and beyond it. Playing with a full deck of 52 different theatrical events, Fertile Ground’s a great excuse to discover some fun venues you might not have visited before: the Curious Comedy Theater on MLK, Portland Playhouse’s converted church space, the World Forestry Center…even, for the dauntlessly peripatetic, the mysterious space in Milwaukee know as The Woods.

Night #1 of festival-hopping for me includes the workshop production of Fighter Girl, written by Catherine Garvin and Arlie Connor, directed by Diane Englert, in Brunish Hall; then over to the Hothouse (the Gerding’s mezzanine) for It Takes All Shorts, which includes short pieces by Claire Willett, Brian Kettler and Marguerite Scott, among others; after which I’ll dash across the river for the opening night party. Madness!

Because I don’t dare provide you with a top picks list that excludes any one of the 52 possibilities, instead I refer you to Marty Hughley’s faves, published in today’s A&E. Yes, that’s me on the cover, below, at Garden Fever, no less (my favorite nursery), surrounded by some outstanding Portland artists drawn from both theater and dance.


You know what a photo like means for me: starvation diet. Just as soon as the Festival ends on February 2.

Almost Famous, 3rd Edition

Bob Hicks of Art Scatter has bestowed an honor upon us: the Premios Dardo Award, a peer distinction given by one blog to another as a way of acknowledging those who have delighted, instructed, enlightened and/or amused us.

My virtual research has failed to find out who started the Award or when it began, but I notice blogs with this distinction hail from as far away as Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. And I’m ticked to be among their number.

A full year ago, Technorati claimed to be tracking over 112.8 million blogs, and the number has surely grown exponentially since then. If you’ve ever clicked the “next blog” button on Blogger or WordPress, you’ve seen for yourself that there’s a lot of dreck out there. But there’s also much that's smart, personal, even affecting. Perhaps the Premios Dardo can help us distinguish (to borrow a phrase from Bob himself) the gold from the pyrite.

Here are the rules for receiving and sharing the Award:

1) Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person that has granted the award and his or her blog link.

2) Pass the award to another 15 blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment.

3) Remember to contact each of them to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

So I’m passing it on herewith. Several blogs I haunt, such as Culture Shock and Splattworks, just received the distinction and so can’t be re-warded, but I still had no trouble finding my full complement of 15. I hope you’ll take the time to visit each of them.

Parabasis

Bamboo Nation

Marissabidilla

Studio Z

ghost light

The Fortress of Jason Grote

Notes on Acting

i wanna be sedated

The Mesmer Project

Sheila Callaghan.Playwright.Blog

what cannot be won, might be coaxed

Crowcrastination

Wonkette

Portland Center Stage

the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks

And this is only a partial list of blogs I love. Feast!

Almost Famous, Chapter 2

Dear Reader,

Yet again I ax you to forgive me for my neglect. It’s been blustery and flustery at stately Wayne Manor recently, with How To Disappear and Never Be Found rehearsing (and thus Rose is MIA), Apollo in previews and Fertile Ground already on the simmer. Yikes! By the way, for a handy blog item that manages to encompass all the above, check out The Mighty Cannon’s recent musings at Culture Shock. The mystery man is really on a roll, a tear, a wild, wild ride........

In the midst of all that the excitement (and let’s face it, stress = stress, even if you are having fun whilst undergoing it), an ongoing oasis for me is always PlayGroup, PCS's writers' unit. Yeah, that’s the gang at right. Our bimonthly meetings are elemental for me – touchstones where I’m reminded that it’s great playwriting that makes all the rest of the madness worthwhile.

As you know, because you never miss a post here, a week ago Monday we hosted a public reading of Patrick Wohlmut’s new play Continuum, the group’s Sloan commission. The omnipresent Barry Johnson, of Oregonian and Art Scatter fame, spoke to Patrick and I in advance of the reading – a conversation I wish could have gone on for much longer. But now Barry’s recorded his impressions of that conversation as one of the inaugural entries on his new column, Portland Arts Watch. You now have to scroll down to January 11, that’s how remiss I’ve been as of late, but if you do you will be rewarded with finding out all about us.

And now for a preview of coming PlayGroup exploits, plucked from the official Fertile Ground calendar:

The Orchard by Althea Hukari
Directed by Olga Sanchez

A Portland Center Stage Playgroup event

Festival Date: Jan. 26 at 7:30pm

Chekhov comes to Hood River in this large-cast, ensemble comedy-drama, with echoes of The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters, about a Finnish-American family in transition. Ms. Hukari is a founding member of PlayGroup, Portland Center Stage's celebrated playwriting unit.

Venue: Main Stage, Gerding Theater at the Armory (128 NW 11th Ave)

Open City
by Althea Hukari, Shelly Lipkin, Ellen Margolis, Steve Patterson, Andrea Stolowitz, Patrick Wohlmut, Nick Zagone, and Matthew B. Zrebski

A Portland Center Stage Playgroup event

Festival Dates: Feb 2 at 7:30 pm

For this group show created by PlayGroup (whose previous escapades include The Clearing, Frenching the Bones and Ten Tiny Playlets) and directed by Matt Zrebski, each playwright pulled a Portland location and a cast size out of hat, then went to work on a short play inspired by those circumstances. The result, presented in rehearsed concert form, is a kaleidoscopic vision of the Rose City that adds up to a town we all recognize.

Venue: Main Stage, Gerding Theater at the Armory (128 NW 11th Ave)

PLUS
A Fully Staged World Premiere

Vitriol and Violets
Music and lyrics by Dave Frishberg, book by Shelly Lipkin, Louanne Moldovan and Sherry Lamoreaux

[ Not a PlayGroup event, but Shelly is a beloved PlayGroup member]

Festival Dates: Jan 23 at 8:00 pm, Jan. 24 at 2:00 and 8:00 pm, Jan 25 at 2:00 pm, Jan 30 at 8:00 pm, Jan. 31 at 2:00 and 8:00 pm, Feb 1 at 2:00 pm.

Full extended run: Jan 16 to Feb 1, 2009

New York, 1920. The Great War is over, and people are hungry to live and laugh again. Nobody laughed more than the "Algonquin Round Table", a group of writers and their friends who gathered at the Algonquin Hotel. During the course of their "ten-year lunch," Table associates Alexander Wolcott, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Heywood Broun, Harold Ross, Harpo Marx and Jane Grant gained fame and fortune as much for their widely quoted bon mots as for their significant achievements. This stage play, which premiered at Lakewood Theater Company and won an Oregon Book Award, has been completely rewritten as a musical in collaboration with Dave Frishberg, one of the nation's foremost Jazz composers (and a Portland Native).

Venue: The Blue Room at the Scottish Rite Center (709 SW 15th)