Ticket to ride

What’s more fun than seeing someone you know and like on the cover of American Theatre magazine? Seeing the show that inspired the cover, of course. Ya, that’s Liam Kaas-Lentz’s handsome mug to the right, gracing the April issue of said publication. And that's Hannah Treuhaft below, photographed with Liam. Both are company members of Sojourn Theatre — one of the jewels in the crown of national theater, let alone Stumptown’s. And guess what, next week Sojourn opens a new show it’s been working on for years.

On the Table is ambitious even by Sojourn’s standards. Reflecting the company’s commitment to site-specific and journey-based theater, every performance starts in two different locations simultaneously: Portland, and the rural town of Molalla (population 7,500). You start in one location, or you start in the other, where you bear witness to a community event and meet a host of fictional characters. Following that, you all board a bus and travel to an intermediate third location, where you meet the audience — and the characters — of another play altogether.

It turns out, you see, what you saw back in Molalla or Portland was just part of a bigger story. That bus ride is a journey through time as well as space, because now you are 20 miles and 30 years from where we started. All 90 of us wind up at one big communal dinner, where two people are about to make the biggest decision of their lives. From the Sojourn press release:

They’ll turn to their neighbors (you), and ask a question of life-altering and state-defining significance. Join us as we revisit the truth of a conversation that never occurred, and that happens every day, in an effort to help two families and an urban/rural citizenry decide – once and for all – who needs whom, and why?

Intrigued? I am. Usually theater happens in a cocoon of darkness. We’re safe; almost by definition, nothing is going to happen to us there. And while that shared experience of sitting in the dark while being told a story may imply a community forum, it’s rarely really the case. Sojourn’s presentations are remarkable because they actually need you to see them in order to complete the play — not just so you’ll buy a ticket, not to justify some grant, but because the play is actually about your presence in that room. Or in this case, at that table, breaking bread with 89 other people.

Rarely has “going along for the ride” been this specific. You are invited to come along, and you are needed. But if you want to be part of it, get your tickets soon. The nature of Sojourn’s work means it usually has short runs in small venues. And typically the company will have light houses for its first weekend, then word gets out, then suddenly it can’t accommodate all the people who want to have the experience. And people like me are throwing tantrums and dropping names like Oprah and Obama just to wrangle single tickets.

So don’t say I didn’t warn you. Get your tickets now. Then you’ll know what American Theatre is talking about.

SPECIFICS:

What: World Premiere of Sojourn Theatre’s On The Table

Where: In Portland: The Church, 602 NE Prescott
In Molalla: Rosse Posse Acres, 32690 S Mathias Road

When: July 15 - August 1 (Wed - Sun 8:00pm), previews July 15 & 16

Tickets:
$15 General Admission
Pay-What-You-Can Preview on July 15
$25 Sojourn SupporTix (help keep prices low by choosing this premium rate)
$12 Students & Seniors (limited availability; advance purchase & show ID at door)

Tickets on sale at right here.

Note:
Advance purchase is strongly recommended. Only 90 tickets are available for each performance: 45 in Molalla, 45 in Portland. Wear comfortable shoes as the audience will stand and move throughout the event. Please call 971.544.0464 prior to purchasing tickets if you have questions or special needs regarding accessibility/mobility.

Hot time in the old town tonight

Okay, I’m back. After an 11-day hiatus. After seeing this blog's site meter dwindle from nearly 300 at the previous entry to 31 yesterday. Ouch.

Sorry! I wasn’t being a slugabed – quite the contrary. To my ongoing surprise and delight, SuperScript continues to attract clients – who knew it would take off so fast? But now I’m semi-back in the saddle – or back in the Aeron chair, anyway. And I was saying around the corner in The Editing Room, it’s easier just now to repeat other people’s news, so here goes.

Tonight only, head over to Portland Playhouse for a reading an hilarious Adam Rapp play that is scabrous even by his standards: Bingo with the Indians, all about a down-in-the-mouth theater troupe that decides to finance its next production by knocking over a bingo parlor. The dialogue is gut-bustingly snarky, but look out – this is the same Mr. Rapp who was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, a few years ago, for the bleak and devastating Red Light Winter. In other words . . . expect reversals of fortune.

Did I mention that Adam’s brother, Anthony, he of Rent fame, he of the above photo, headlines a superb cast? And that the cast of the touring production of Rent is rumored to heading up a celebrity audience? Don’t miss it:

When: Fri., June 26, 11 pm; Phone: 503.488.5822; Price: $10
602 NE Prescott St. :: 503.488.5822 :: portlandplayhouse.org

Doors open at NINE with a live band and other hijinks. Go tonight and someday you’ll be to able to tell your grandkids about it.

But wait, there’s more. Sojourn Theatre, one of the nation’s most innovative companies, is having an event on July 1 that will benefit their next piece, On the Table, which they’re calling their most ambitious endeavor yet. Here’s how artistic director Michael Rohd describes the work in progress:

As this really ambitious project, On The Table, picks up pace (the show will happen Summer 2010 simultaneously in PDX and a small town 50 miles from PDX, and explores the urban/rural conversation in OR, culminating with a bus trip for both audiences and a final Act at an in-between site), we're taking a moment to connect specifically around the support we need to continue making ambitious, local work.

That support is the event pictured below – come if you can, and if you can’t come, consider sending Sojourn a donation. We are so lucky to have this national treasure working right here in Portland OR; I’d love to keep it that way. Details here.

Portlandia’s wild weekends

Bad Blogger, badbadblogger, badbadbrain, as The Ramones used to sing. I’ve been neglecting all my blogglings, and I’m probably about to keep doing that, because my sainted mother and her equally sainted sister are about to arrive. For a week. So forgive me my neglect. It is benign.

As for my excuse prior to my guests’ advent…let’s just say that against all expectations, (given this economy), SuperScript is actually attracting clients! I know, who knew!

So how about I just quickly list a few blogworthy happenings before I return to my deadline-driven projects? Let’s see…


Friday the 8th, Fabuloso opened at Third Rail Rep – a fabulous night indeed, with an all-celeb audience that included Sharonlee McClean, Ross McKeen (was Robin there too, sitting in the money seats?), Rose Riordan, Marty Hughley, Craig Wright, Ebbe Roe Smith, Barry Johnson, Michael Weaver and many more. But what of the play, you ax? The title says it all. A great night of wild theater.

That same evening, Tracy Letts’ new adaptation of The Three Sisters opened over at Artists Rep; CoHo Productions opened The Uneasy Chair, directed by the ultra-urbane Shelly Lipkin; Into the Woods opened at Lakewood, featuring the always awesome Isaac Lamb; and over at Miracle Theatre, an early Luis Valdez play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, debuted as well! Add those to the ambitious and audacious plays already running, including Gary Winter’s Cooler at defunkt and Freakshow (an early Carson Kreitzer play) at Theatre Vertigo, and you got yourself an embarrassment of riches.

The following afternoon, I got to preside over a Playwrights’ Roundtable that included the aforementioned Craig Wright and Ebbe Roe Smith as well as the author of Fabuloso, John Kolvenbach. Fortunately for me, Barry Johnson has covered the occasion so well that I don’t have to (c/o the link above), so let’s jump to this week, which was partly devoted to Sojourn.

How’s this for differnt, as Tom Spanbauer would say: Portland State University hosted a conference this week entitled Understanding Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities. Which hired Sojourn to create an event called “Re-Casting Expertise: A Game of Public Inquiry.” In essence, we asked two experts to start off four different conversations, each prompted by a question related to the Conference. E.g.: “What do we want to sustain and why?” As a facilitator, my job was to encourage people who wanted to get in on the conversation to replace one of the experts and continue talking. Listeners could also disrupt the conversation by tossing in a question card or an “opposing view” card.

The big question mark for us as facilitators was: will people play along, or will they sit there like docile parochial school students? No problems! Conferencees were engaged and razor sharp and dauntless about leaping into the fray. The event turned out to be a rollicking time, as was working the incredibly giving Sojourners.

And now, you ax? & tu?

Just flew in from Tilburg, and boy....

TBA:08 continues apace. Yesterday I took in a felicitously conceived walkabout conceived by Khris Soden, entitled "The Portland Tour of Tilburg." Huh? From the Festival web site:

Tilburg, in the province of Noord-Brabant, is the sixth largest city in The Netherlands. Like Portland, it is home to bicycle boulevards, punk rock bars, public squares, and a vibrant do-it-yourself arts and music scene. For TBA:08, Khris Soden invites you to join him on a historical and cultural walking tour of the city core of Tilburg, and you won’t even need to purchase a plane ticket. The Portland Tour of Tilburg traces an exact route of Tilburg’s streets from about 9,000 miles away; Powell’s Books becomes Tilburg Central Station, Pioneer Courthouse Square rests on the Old Market, and the Bus Mall becomes the cultural heart of the city. Soden’s tour weaves a narrative of the two cities, bending the ideas of perception of place. After TBA:08, Soden will board a plane to Tilburg in order to conduct The Tilburg Tour of Portland for that city’s ZXZW Festival.

The above image shows the one city superimposed over the other. Nifty!

Part of the fun of this piece was the reaction of puzzled passerby catching Khris’ patter out of context – as, for instance, the moment when we stood amassed together in front of Portland’s most notorious gay bathhouse while Khris explained that in Tilburg this is the site of city’s wildest alternative music scene.

For an excellent account of what the walk was like, I can do no better than Megan Kate Grace, so I refer her to you.

Got your tickets to Built yet?

Built for fun

TBA:08 is getting off to a great start this year with a number of events that simultaneously critique and celebrate Portland as a unique social experiment. I got a jump on the action tonight by catching the preview performance of Sojourn Theatre’s ingenious and fun new piece, Built.

The setting for the play is in South Waterfront, Portland’s glossy new development that reclaimed a blighted marshland -- long assumed uninhabitable thanks to decades of industrial waste dumped there -- and constructed a space age village of riverfront high-rises (many facing Mt Hood) built according to rigorous Green standards.

Built interweaves performed sections with game-playing activities that capture audience statements and use them in the evening’s narrative. Some of these activities are individual; I opened a kitchen drawer, for instance, to find a grid, a box of figurines, and an instruction to place a figurine in whichever quadrant represented my experience (raised in a city, in a rural environment, a small town, etc.). Later I wound up in a group of spectators where we were asked to choose which city services we wanted closer to our residences, and to arrive at a loose consensus with the others in the group.

One of the most breathtaking performances involved a couple literally walking a tightrope (actually two parallel cables) who gradually grow into disaffection as their attempt to buy a home reveals prejudices and fears that had never come to light before. Here, as elsewhere, the inventive choreography kept your eyes engaged and left your ears free to consider a series of overlapping dialogues. I especially remember one person saying a community should develop, not be developed, and then a counterpoint argument challenging that notion as a reactionary bias.

The whole event echoed a civic dialogue that’s been brewing here for years. We’re often reminded that the popular image of Portland, which is ballyhooed these days in everything from The New York Times to Bon Appetit, is the result of meticulous planning that was begun 30 years ago. How is that discussion proceeding today? Who is safeguarding what we’ve gained, and who is making sure it continues to evolve along with its citizenry?

Built is a heady and entertaining launch into these issues, and I hope you can see it. Performances are free, but only 40 can participate at one time, so reserve your space tonight.

Kudos to us

Last night The Drammy Awards reverted to a format I hadn't seen in a few years: semi-controlled chaos, a healthy mix of the outrageous and the emotional, and a delicious sense that anything could happen at any moment.

In other words, it was like Thanksgiving dinner with your entire extended family.

The O'Briens, mother and daughter, were terrific hosts -- genial and easygoing and off-the-cuff, clearing having a ball -- and though no turkey got served, Mother O'Brien did bring her home-baked brownies, which were dispensed to the award winners along with their trophies.

Of course I knew in advance which artists were getting awards, but during the actual ceremony, I felt keenly certain nominations that didn't quite make it to the award stage -- Storm Large's Sally Bowles, for example, and Rick Lewis' extraordinary musical direction for Cabaret. But it happens....a large majority of Committee members (80%) have to ratify each nomination, which sometimes means that worthy nominations just miss the cut. On the other hand, though, this system makes it almost impossible to pass any noms that are quixotic or misguided.

ANYHOW. I don't mean to complain, because PCS did every well, with 11 wins. And I was especially gladdened at the chorus of approval over Sojourn Theatre's win of Outstanding Production for its footloose adaptation of Brecht, entitled Good, which was among the most memorable and affecting plays I've see EVER.

Favorite moment of the evening: Chris Murray's Poem to the Anonymous Followspot Poster. It was en garde and touche all in one fell poop.