Quickie semi sort of JAW 2009 recap

First, a confession. Following a fairly good attendance record at Made in Oregon last week, I saw only one third of the Big Weekend. Made it to Day One, but had a migraine the next day and a family thing the day after that. So I was MIA for most of the Festival, which included missing my beloved site-specific pieces, curated by the debonair Tim DuRoche.

But oh that first day! Arrived at 3:45 on a hot Friday afternoon to find a large crowd swelling on the Eleventh Ave, outside the Armory doors. Clearly it was a smart move to launch the weekend with the latest opus of A-Gay Extraordinaire Marc Acito. Minutes later the theater was jammed with theatergoers all a-titter and no doubt a-twitter to be in on the fun escapade.

And the play, Birds of a Feather, delivered big time. Marc can pack more laughs into a square centimeter of time than any writer I know. The audience shrieked, chortled, guffawed and otherwise cachinnated throughout the play, and many of them, including myself, where surprisingly touched by the ending.

Marc has work to do, of course (hello, that’s the whole idea of the Festival), but there’s a good commercial play in there that some smart theater is going to make a killing on.

The evening showing proved the record attendance of the afternoon was no fluke. Surely it was a record-buster for JAW, with most of the floor filled and the balcony open as well. The attraction? Naomi Iizuka’s fascinating new mystery, Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West, a mind-bending puzzler rich in language and imagery both. What I love about Naomi’s writing is that her visual sense is wholly integrated into her storytelling; they are inseparable. All of which makes her work theater in the purest sense of the word – unlike a film or other finished medium, her work is evanescent, and can only exist in the performed moment. When this play is produced at Berkeley Rep next season and directed by Les Waters (who also did the reading here), it’s going to be eye-popping. I plan to make the trek down to see it for sure.

Also I want to mention that the two Promising Playwright curtain raisers I saw – Freefall by Daniel Felder and Open the Box by Robyn Pritzker – were outstanding. Breathtaking, really. Enough to convince you that the next generation has plenty to say to us.

Judging from Friday’s start to the Big Weekend, JAW 2009 was well on its way to being a high watermark for the 11-year-old event. Here’s what I can tell you about the rest of the offerings:

Jordan Harrison, author of Act a Lady, brought his new play about a book-free dystopic society entitled Futura. Of course I’m partial to a play that begins with a lecture about typefaces! Jordan is one of the nation’s most dazzling writers, and someone will be snapping up this play soon.

Will Eno’s work has been striking a resonant chord in Portland for years now, but this new piece – Middletown – just might be his masterpiece. Imagine a fractured, funny, disturbing update of Our Town for this unsettled era we’re living through. Somehow Mr. Eno has written a play that manages to be a cry of existential dread and yet somehow remind you how lucky you are to be here.

You may know Stephanie Timm from the body of exciting work she’s already written for Seattle’s stages; now she’s a graduate playwriting student at UCSD, where she works with – guess who – Naomi. According to one source, her play On the Nature of Dust was “the hit of the festival” – but I must tell you that someone or other told me that about each of the six plays! Kimberly Rosenstock’s remarkable play 99 Ways To Fuck a Swan closed the Festival; Kimberly’s currently at Yale studying with Paula Vogel, who recommended her to JAW. From all accounts expect to hear much more about Mlle. Rosenstock in the near future. Along with this play of hers.

If you have comments to add about these scripts or any other aspect of the Festival – such as the star-studded panel on commissioning, and the site-specific pieces – please add them here. I’d love to hear what you thought.

Signs of the Times

Saw a calligraphed, hand-painted sign that read EXIT on the top of a trash heap near Broadway and all my existential dread leached out through my skin.

Spotted a young lady in the Pearl holding a cardboard sign that read "Will design for food." But that must've just been a goof, don't you think?

Heard a rap song on the radio with the refrain "Stop jackin my style, bitch."

Noticed that whereas when I first arrived in Oregon in 2002 (that was the previous recession, if you still remember that relative walk in the park) the Sunday Oregonian's employment listings ran to 8 pages, last Sunday they only spanned TWO. Sure, a lot of ad revenue's been lost to the Internets, but still.

On a lighter note, fabulist and bon vivant Marc Acito just wrote an article for WalletPop about the economy that I actually got something out of and laughed while I was at it.

Just in case anyone's still checking this blog, after my posting only two entries in two weeks, a lot's been going on with me, and one of those things has been a quiet desperation. Which puzzled me, because materially things are going pretty well. But spiritually....

Attended most of last week's Made in Oregon readings, and had a great time, too. But of course it was also strange. Strange to look at work I had programmed but no longer had any connection to. Megan asked me: "wasn't it sad to be there? to not be part of it anymore?" And I said, truthfully enough for the moment, "Oh NO, it was great, like being at a party you didn't have to host!"

But the next day another friend, a natural empath, asked me how I was doing these days and I sort of ... caved in. She touched the hidden spring and all this sorrow welled up. And realized I'd been depressed for weeks.

Partly it's not getting to work on the festival I helped plan, but it's also the sense of dislocation. Like that moment in Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland, where the path she walked in on is swept away behind h er, and then the path ahead is swept away. She's come from nowhere and there's nowhere to go.

Coming up is JAW's big weekend -- which I highly recommend to you, but I'm not sure I'll go myself. I want to go, and bear witness to the work of everyone involved and to enjoy new writing by some of my favorite playwrights. I hope I'll go. But I might not. I can only take so much vertigo.

News flash: 1980 was kind to no one

Back to the blog after several days of computer meltdown agonies. It seems I have to post rapidly now, before the system implodes on me. Wish me luck.

Made in Oregon kicked off Monday evening with the Sue Mach opus described in the previous post – and after all my bruiting the event about, I’m missed it, because of a lucrative but last-minute rush edit. POOP. If you went, let me know what happened, k?

Right now, though, here’s another peek behind the curtain regarding Wednesday’s outing (July 15 at 6:00pm): The Missing Pieces, by Nick Zagone, which takes place in Portland in 1980 just after the Mt. St Helen's blew. Music plays an important part in this play, I’m glad to say, because it was an era when music converged in a veritable gang bang of clashing styles: punk, pop, New Wave, even disco-inflected versions of all these.

The playwright promises that the partial playlist below will appear either in the play itself or during the pre-show, and it’s an orgy of cheesy one-hit wonders and some classics sans fromage -- the perfect play list for ashy Portland Oregon May 1980. Feast your ears:

The Clash: Train in Vain
Talking Heads: Once in a Lifetime
Blondie: Call Me
M: Pop Music
X: Los Angeles
Joy Division: Love Will Tear Us Apart.
Ramones: Let's Go and (but of course) Rock and Roll High School
Blondie: Call Me
The Knack: My Sharona
Michael Jackson: Off the Wall
Pretenders: Brass in Pocket
The Cars: Let's Go



And what of tonight? Be there by six for chills and spills in Brian Kettler’s tense new drama, In School Suspension. It’s about Danny and Angela, two high school students locked away in an abandoned Spanish classroom during a disaster drill, beleaguered by a teacher wants to make sure his students experience authentic feelings of fear and terror. What could possibly go wrong, right?

See you tonight.

Prepare for impact

So brace yourself already, will you, and clear your evenings from this coming Monday on. JAW gets going on July 13 with the first Made in Oregon reading: Sue Mach’s new full-length, The Lost Boy.

Sue read scenes from this intriguing work in progress in the very first JAW Playwrights’ Slam back in 2005, and now you have the chance to hear the story in full. With real live actors and everything – Sue doesn’t have to play all the parts this time round.

By the way, Ms. Mach had a play in the very first JAW ever, way back in the 20th century. It’s lovely to see things come full circle, isn’t it?

I’m counting the hours till Monday, and contenting myself in the meantime to play this groovy teaser over and over again like a rat down the proverbially cheeseless tunnel. Only with the sound turned up really, really high.

This just in!

Funnily enough, when I lived in Nueva York (this was way back in the 20th Century, before you were born), there was such a wealth of thrilling stuff to do all the time that I missed out on the majority of it. I just took it for granted; another raft of groovy events would be happening the following evening, after all.

That ain't necessarily so in lovely, verdant but sometimes quiescent Portland, Ore. When something big comes along, you get there FIRST. So if you're going to be here during the JAW Festival, put this item on your calendar right this minute. Because events like this don't come along every year.

Special panel open and free to the public!
Saturday, July 25, 11am to 1pm in the Ellyn Bye Studio Theater

PLAYS: The Art of Commissioning, Developing and Producing New Plays

Four east coast-based theater professionals discuss the process of giving playwrights money to write new plays; what goes into developing a new work; and planning and choosing a season.

Rose Riordan, Associate Artistic Director of Portland Center Stage, moderates a panel of experts including Paige Evans, Director, LCT3, New York(Stunning; Clay); Sarah Stern, Assoc. Artistic Director, Vineyard Theatre, New York (Avenue Q, God’s Ear); Jennifer Kiger, Assoc. Artistic Director, Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven (Eurydice, Passion Play); and Mark Subias, SUBIAS, New York, Theatrical Agent (Will Eno, Itamar Moses, Sarah Treem).

Presumably, as with other JAW events, first come is first seated, so be there by 10:30 or forget it (the Ellen Bye Studio seats fewer than 200). You heard it here first!

By the way, the scintillating illustration above, by Matt the Samuraiis entitled "Twin Fire Fountains." The original, visible at DeviantART, is an animation. Just like you. Happy Fourth, toots!

Slouching toward summertime

I hope you're happy, all you sun worshippers. Summer has come to Oregon -- yes, even here -- and now it will be hothothot all the live-long day. Nice for some, but we creatures of the night wither when the UV rays come out.

One good thing about July, though: JAW takes over the Armory, and original playwriting -- highly original playwriting, mind you -- comes at you from every cranny.

More about the full slate later, but as a teaser, let me tantalize you with the Made in Oregon reading pictured here. MIO, by the by, is a series of readings that focuses on the burgeoning playwriting scene happening in Portland and elsewhere in Cascadia. These readings are rehearsed but not workshopped as fully as the plays presented in the JAW Weekend, so they have a rough-and-ready feel to them that suits the reading format muy bien, thank you so much.

Andrea Stolowitz' new play Bad Family, which debuts on Thursday, July 16 at 6:00pm, is the last of the four plays in the 2009 edition of Made in Oregon, but Andrea since is the first writer to send me a postcard, I share it with you first.

And can I just say: look at that cast. These actors could animate The Faerie Queene, but fortunately they have much livelier material to work with here. Andrea's play gives us a fabulously fury of a teenager named Alexandra who is prone to using her neighbor's lawn to cast spells that she hopes will dissolve the marriage of her and stepfather. When she hijacks the car and the neighbor for a road trip into the desert, well....let's just say the road to revelation is paved with bad intentions.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll try to profile each of the 2009 JAW playwrights to find out what their big trips are.

Meanwhile, I'll comfort myself with the knowledge that ever since the summer solstice, the days are getting imperceptibly shorter and shorter....