Hilarity and Disparity at Portland Playhouse

Currently playing at Portland Playhouse: one of my favorite plays of all time, Telethon, by Kristin Newbom. This play focuses on three people with various forms of disability, and their two underpaid, undervalued caretakers, who are only minimally more functional, all within the context of a “treat” for the disabled charges, as all five as adjourn from an unspecified fundraising event to a Dunkin’ Donuts. Most of the play is laugh-out-loud funny, but watch out -- you're being set up.

SPOILER ALERT! If you don’t want to know what happens in the play, read no further.

All five characters are put through a process defined by American holidays that call for or allow dressing up in costume. Over the course of Halloween, Christmas and Easter, the Dunkin’ Donuts bears witness to the changes — subtle, blatant or nonexistent — in their lives.

Telethon’s climax comes, aptly enough, at Easter, a time that celebrates renewal; the two caretakers are about to undergo major reversals of fortune. They're so caught up in their own news that they hardly notice the turmoil they’re causing their charges: one of them seems stunned, another cries quietly, and the third goes to a pay phone and attempts to call 911.

The uproar ends the scene and we segue to the Fourth of July, but now the Dunkin’ Donuts is quiet. And as we take this in the empty stage, we realize those five people will never visit the place together again. The phone is still dangling off the hook and, weirdly, we hear one side of a conversation coming out of it.


Now: when we first presented this play in reading form during JAW, and again now in Portland Playhouse’s excellent production, people have been baffled by this final scene. Some have gone so far as to say the coda has no relation to the play! But you know … it’s always worth our while to assume the playwright had something in mind. Such as an imaginative leap. Or to jump a synapse from one epiphany to the next, and ask you to forge the connection yourself.

In the wake of love lost, of abandoned relationships and the sheer heedlessness of life’s relentless momentum, the emptiness of the stage in this final scene devastates me. The sense of revelation hovering on the fringes, yet always just barely beyond our grasp, reminds me of Beckett’s most moving works.

I therefore want to share the text of this final scene with you (I have Kristin’s blessing and that of the show’s director, Rose Riordan), in the hopes that when you see the play, viewing the footage of the parade described below and hearing half of a conversation that’s like a lifeline to another time, the scene will have the impact for you that it does for me.

Telethon continues through this weekend, closing where the script begins — on Halloween.

.................................................

4. FOURTH OF JULY

THE STAGE IS DARK AND EMPTY.

A FILM IS PROJECTED ON THE BLANK MENU SCREEN. SHAKY HOME
FOOTAGE OF A 4TH OF JULY PARADE IN A SMALL TOWN... PEOPLE ON
FLOATS. COSTUMES. WAVING. KIDS ON BIKES. DOGS. CLOWNS. A
MARCHING BAND. STARS AND STRIPES. THE WHOLE DEAL.

A WOMAN’S VOICE IS HEARD,
THROUGH THE DANGLING PAY PHONE RECEIVER:

Yeah, I know.
It’s strange how things happen.

Uh huh.

Remember that night out on the driveway?

No.
September.

Because the sunflowers had stopped blooming.
I picked the last three and brought them in.
They were a little mangled, but they looked okay.

Yeah.

No.
We had just come back from dinner.
You took us to that little restaurant in your old neighborhood.
What was it?

Yeah, Sam’s Wiener House.
That’s right.

Uh huh.

Nine wieners with everything on them,
six orders of fries,
four milkshakes,
a diet coke
and a sprite.
God.
The kids sat at the counter.
Spun around and around on the stools while we talked.

The first house you bought.
The dog you had before the kids were born.
That tattoo you got in the army.
Your job.
Those guys you had to fire.
Your brothers and sisters.
The town where you grew up.
The Sunday morning flea market.
Your grandmother’s farm.
The stack of Penthouses and bag of weed you had hid in her shed.
How your parents died.
Your first girlfriend.
What was her name?

Oh yeah.

You knew just when to leave.
Before the kids threw up from too much spinning.

I offered to pay.
You said it was your treat.

On the way back you showed us the best trick or treat house.
The one where the guy dressed up in stilts as Uncle Sam?
Remember?

Yeah.

When we got back we stood there in the driveway.
The kids rode their bikes around and around
And the sky turned from blue to orange.
You only had a few minutes before you had to go.

You looked so sad that night.

We want to make sense of it all.
Want to grasp onto some kind of reason for the hurt.

It all goes by so quickly doesn’t it?

They are ripped from us.
All of them.

They come into our lives.
The people we care for
Or who take care of us.
The ones we love and look after.
The ones who love us back
Despite it all.
And then they go.
Sometimes in a flash
Without any warning.
Other times in a long and lingering dance.

Yet the wars continue.
One grows into the next.
Kings and queens are killed and born again.
Discoveries, great works of art and riches are made, displayed
and forgotten.
We learn to spell.
We memorize the vocabulary words and dutifully we take the tests.
Our tiny world builds upon itself.
Accumulates.
Like soap bubbles in the bath.
We gaze at ourselves, naked
And we wonder-
This world we are creating,
is it -

What?

Oh, that’s okay
I should go too.
Yeah.
Okay.

I will.

Take care.


DIALTONE.
THE FILM WINDS OUT.


END OF PLAY.

I could go on and on....

Why do Portlandians refer to Portland as Portlandia? Damned if I know, but I’ve always loved it that our sardonic affection for the soggy city has come up with this moniker — comparable, perhaps, to San Franciscans invariably referring to their home as The City, or even the more ubiquitous SoCal sobriquet of Ellay.

And now you know there’s this new TV series about to air, Portlandia, which may do for Stumptown what The Drew Carey Show did for Cleveland. Whatever that was. Or was it Cincinnati?

That’s another post. I’m just showing up now to note that there’s been an awesome amount of boundary-busting theatrical activity here lately, and there’s about to be a lot more. I hope you caught Chris Harder’s superb solo piece Fishing for My Father recently, where Chris portrayed a kind of po-mo scary clown (of the machismo sort, not the Krusty variety) and turned it into a meditation on what it means to be male and, ultimately, human.

Just as palpably and inexplicably touching is the current production of Will Eno’s Oh, the Humanity, which has one more weekend over at The Church. As deftly navigated by Our Shoes Are Red/The Performance Lab, this is a sweetly tart collection of short Eno pieces that proves what we already knew: he’s the bastard love child of Samuel Beckett and Jon Stewart. Definitely catch this show.

Actually, autumn’s shaping up pretty fabulously. Theatre Vertigo graces us with Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone starting October 15, plus Third Rail opens soon (well, October 8) with Chris Chibnall’s Kiss Me Like You Mean It.

And ever since I found out Portland Playhouse was going to produce Kirsten Newbom’s astonishing play Telethon -- directed by Rose Riordan, no less -- I’ve been itching for it to get here, but we have to wait till October 7 for that hilarious and disturbing sucker punch. But hey, Hand2Mouth’s Uncanny Valley is about to open at Reed, and is likely to be one of the fall’s most exuberant offerings.

That’s saying something, considering that PICA’s internationally lauded festival TBA:10 opens this Thursday. As always, it opens with a bang; Rufus Wainwright headlines an evening of crooning at the Shnitz that is rumored to includes pieces from his opera, Prima Donna. And which will feature some beloved local figures, including Carlos Kalamar, Thomas Lauderdale and Storm Large.

EFF why eye, I’m one of TBA’s blogging fools this year, so visit Urban Honking daily to see how the opening went, as well as all what’s funny, scary and other provocative for those 10 crazy days and nights.

"The choir has a lot to think about."

You remember ground-breaking play The Laramie Project. The original production, as created and performed by the Tectonic Theater Project, was a high watermark of my life in the theater. In the hands of less sterling artists, a play dealing with the brutal and inhuman murder of Matthew Shepard could have been a lachrymose screed. But this company, under the direction of Moisés Kaufman, was astounding. By interviewing people of all stripes in the Wyoming town about the aftermath of the murders, the company’s composite portrait ultimately affirmed my faith in humanity, when it could easily have ratified a more misanthropic view.

The play’s presentational style was thrilling, too, since it proved that a documentary style of performance could also be great theater.

How could it already be a full decade since the murder that sparked the project? Eleven, actually. Somehow it is, and Tectonic has created an epilogue: The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later. It will be read tonight at Lincoln Center and simultaneously all over the country in all kinds of venues and communities -- over 150 in all.

Portland, I’m proud to say that is participating in multiple locations, with at least five different readings going on that I know of. I’m going to the downtown hearing, presented by the New Century Players at downtown’s Newmark Theatre (at PCPA) with a team that represents a spectrum of local theater, including Stan Foote, Rose Riordan and Scott Yarbrough in the large cast.

Many of tonight’s readings are free; the one I’m attending is a benefit, with proceeds being donated to community action groups. Of course I want to support that, but beyond that, I want to be in the midst of other theater folk when I revisit an event that is so emotional for me.

And you know what about that? So what if this is preaching to the choir. I’m tired of people using that expression as an excuse for not participating. Anyway, as Tony Kushner has said, the choir has a lot to think about.

So come on down and be part of something. I’ll see you there.

My Big Trip

You’ve noticed it, haven’t you. The spotty posting. The distracted tone. The slack facial muscles, the drooling. Okay, not that so much. But the rest. Just admit it, it’s okay.

The photo below at right might lead you to believe I’ve been working out quite a lot. And meditating big time! Actually, true to tell, some of both has indeed been going on (and let me tell you, meditation is all it’s cracked up to be – I highly recommend it -- not the huffing and puffing), but the startling image you see before you is – but of course – the handiwork of Rose Riordan, Photostop terrorist par excellence. Some people take up crocheting, or raising ferrets, or Adam Lambert, but Rose, well…there was a time when she had quite the moonlighting thing going on with morphing my mug into all manner of amusing contexts.

This was all very affectionate, mind you, but invariably such things fall into the wrong hands sooner or later. Apparently the image resurfaced recently at a former place of employment, with a sarcastic caption appended to it: “the angel of the community.”

Ouch.

I’ll spare you my theories about reverse Stockholm Syndrome and just move on. Because things have been so busy lately as to make me think of my previous gig as a kind of vacation. Two major endeavors are taking up a lot of psychic energy these days, one for Willamette Writers, the other for the fabled Wordstock Festival , two organizations I’ve admired for a long time, but the all day/all night life of the theater obviated doing much with them.

WW has its mega-conference coming – August 6-9, thanks for asking – and I’m organizing the volunteers for the workshop side of the event. And I’ll be spending my birthday this year at Wordstock (October 8-11); presently I’m helping to make contact with the authors who are participating this year and inveigling them into allied activities such as panels and interviews. Activities we’re currently inventing – fun!

Neither of these are paying gigs, but they’re both open doors into communities I only glimpsed through barred windows in the past – communities that will form the predicate for an expanded sense of participation in the infinite universe of scribblers like me.

Wish me luck. I’m going in.

There’s more, too, but I can’t post about it, for reasons you might be able to guess. In the fullness of time, however, all will be revealed…

Fast fade

We've all thought about it. How easy it would be. To just step away. To go out to fetch some Chunky Monkey and just never go home again. Or to head off for work on a Monday morning like any other, but never actually arrive at the office. Or to go out with friends for a Friday night drink, and at some point go to the restroom, never to be seen again.

Naturally everyone's first thought will be that you've come to foul play. But more often than not, says playwright and Londoner Fin Kennedy, a lot of careful planning goes into a disappearing act. If you'd like to know you might go about it yourself -- hypothetically, of course -- of course! -- there's a dramatized primer available to you right now at PCS.

You've got a couple more weeks to see one of my favorite plays produced at PCS during my brief tenure there (i.e., since 9/02): How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, by the ultracool Mr. K, directed by the equally cool Rose Riordan, where you'll learn the fast fade is both harder and easier than you'd suspect.

To further whet your appetite, Patrick Weishampel has just aired an interview with Fin in which the playwright talks about the unsettling experience of researching the modi operandi of the ultimate self-effacers.


Interview with Fin Kennedy from Portland Center Stage on Vimeo.

Yes We Can-Can

At last night's season announcement at the Armory, the event was kicked off, as always, by a video created by the fiercely talented Rose Riordan to commemorate the current season. This leads into Chris Coleman revealing what the upcoming season's going to be, you see, complete with scenes and/or songs from each show. Clever, yes?

In case you missed it or if you'd just like to relive it, here's what Rose gave us this year.

My Big Fat Theatergoing Weekend

Friday night Bucky opened – well, its real and more descriptive title is R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe. And though I saw the show in rehearsal and in previews (and was captivated by it), I had to sit out the actual opening because the evening was totally sold out.

And you know that can’t be bad.


So I was cross-town in another quadrant of Oz, at Coho Productions, getting to see the West Coast premiere of The Receptionist, by comely Canadian Adam Bock. It was a gripping experience in many ways. Full of signature Bockage, the dialogue is a hyperreal crazy quilt of sentence fragments, scavenged language and slips of speech that render the action so immediate you find yourself wondering if the actors are improvising. This linguistic legerdemain lends itself so well to comedy that you forget the clever Mr. Bock is probably setting you up. Sure enough and soon enough, a sinister element creeps in – so casually you hardly notice it at first. And that’s very much to the playwright’s point.

As directed by Rose Riordan (who also directed Adam’s The Thugs for PCS), this is a thrilling production, rendered all the creepier by the way the comedy inveigles you into laughing at something that isn’t ultimately funny at all. Of course it didn’t hurt this production that Rose is one of the best directors in Portland, or that among her talents is razor-sharp casting sensibility. With a cast including Sharonlee McLean, Laura Faye Smith (that's her character in the photograh,desperately trying taffy therapy) Chris Murray and Gary Norman, she got to work with some of Portland’s most outstanding actors. Go see this show.

Saturday evening I stayed home to baby-sit Mac, and watched The History Boys on HBO -- a film offering proof positive that not every stage success should be churned into a screenplay.

Oh, but then today. Saw Third Rail’s latest: Terry Johnson’s excoriating comedy Dead Funny. It was a wild afternoon, with most of PCS’s Guys and Dolls cast taking advantage of a free afternoon to indulge in the busman’s holiday of seeing someone else’s matinee. So it was a great audience from the very top.


As Hollyanna McCollum put it in PDXmagazine, “Dead Funny isn’t just a title. It’s a promise.” Personally I was puzzled, through the first act, anyway, at why people were even laughing. Sure there were jokes galore, but much of the humor was pure botulism – watching not one but two marriages fall apart in front of you meant you laughed through your teeth at how painful it all was.

But in Act 2 things get down to their depths. Maureen Porter’s character Ellie, so indomitable in the first half, eventually lets her vulnerability come to fore. And the surprise character of the story, who seems like a mere comic foil at first, turns out to be the most achingly, endearingly human of them all. This is John Steinkamp’s portrayal of Brian, a bachelor poofster so benighted he assumes no one knows he’s gay. He alone, in the end, sees that losing your illusions can be the best thing that ever happens to you.

It was inspiring, too, to see Mr. Steinkamp in a role that really allows him to use his considerable talents. Let’s hope we start seeing him more often.

Not a bad tally, eh? Three terrific plays (including Bucky) and awesome performances throughout – not something I’m able to say every weekend. Portlandia, you have a wealth of outstanding theater to see right now. Take advantage while you can.

Rose goes boom.

I swear I didn't do it.

DOUBT

Tonight Doubt opens at PCS, and I can't wait for magic time, as Moss Hart described it -- you know, that moment when the lights go down and you know the play is about to begin. I've seen the play several times now, between run-throughs and previews, and I still eagerly anticipate tonight's performance. Yes, the cast is that good, for one thing, and Rose Riordan's direction is taut, yet surprisingly wry. This is John Patrick Shanley's masterpiece.

There's also the tart, pointed wit of the central character, Sister Aloysius, played by Jayne Taini, who has morphed her lovely features into an apple doll of a figure. But she is an apple doll with teeth. Don't miss this suspenseful drama. You don't have to be Catholic to appreciate the play, but if you are or ever were, you'll be treated to an extra dash of schadenfreude just watching the clergy square off.

I see Paris, I see France

Bumptious bloggers have reminded me that I posted a photo of Russell Parkman's set model for The Underpants weeks ago without ever making good on my promise to explain why. Well. Above is a photo of Russell's model; for a close-in peek of a more refined version, please check out my post of 9/25.

This is a play with a plot that turns on a series of maneuvers set in motion when young wife Louise’s lingerie slips down around her ankles at a very public event. Man after man starts showing up at Louise’s home, hoping to rent a room there under the oblivious eye of Theo, the stuffed shirt of a husband. And all the while the wacky upstairs neighbor eggs Louise on toward infidelity, encouraging her to revenge herself on her husband’s indifference by engaging in dalliances with the tenants. Hence, since feminine machinations drive the play forward, Rose (Rose Riordan, the play’s fearless directrix)wanted a living room in which men felt uncomfortable – out of their element, like visitors to a foreign country.

Look at that model; everything about it is sinuous, curvaceous. I don’t think there’s a right angle in Russell’s design. The confectionery colors suggest flounce and bounce. Even the wallpaper, dappled as it is with queen-sized cherries, suggests – or rather announces -- a comic longing for love or at least romantic adventure. (You have to click on the 9/25 image to see this.) Freud would be pleased; not only is he referenced within the first minutes of Steve Martin’s free adaptation of this play, he gets a set worthy of a libido run amok.

Here’s a little historical tie-in for you betwixt The Underpants and Cabaret. When the Nazis came to power (and Chris Coleman’s Cabaret ends with the ratification of Hitler’s government), one of their first official actions was to ban any artists perceived as “degenerate” or otherwise counter to the new order. This play’s original author, celebrated playwright Carl Sternheim, was certainly on the list.