Made in Oregon gets up close and....

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

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

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

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?

JAW 2011 preview, part one

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.