Thespian Nation

Just finished the theater equivalent of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride (don’t extend the metaphor too far, please) that’s taken me from one end of the county to the other. It started on Wednesday – not with a play, actually, but a theatrical event. Dmae Roberts read from her work-in-progress memoir, Lady Buddha and the Temple of Ma. The poised Ms. Roberts delivered a funny, self-deprecating and touching performance that left me looking very forward to the publication of her book. Not to steal her thunder, but ask her to tell you what her mother taught her about how to kill chickens. No, it’s not grisly – quite the contrary.

The next night I was back at Lewis & Clark, but at the Theater Department, for Beckett(s), an evening of Sam’s short pieces that director and curatorial mastermind Stephen Weeks described as “somewhere between a museum tour, a haunted house, and installation art.” The experience took me into crannies and nooks I didn’t know existed in the building. A favorite performance included a filmed version of What Where in which the constant blurring and refocusing of the images gave me the sense of being drugged under interrogation. Also I loved Not I, which could be watched from two vantages: a catwalk, where you looked straight across at the frantically confessional mouth jabbering away while a well yawned at your feet that had an ornate sofa at its bottom; or downstairs, peeping through a set of eyeholes. From above you could see that whoever’s peepers peered through the eyeholes were projected into the well, just below the mouth. Eerie.

Most unintentionally theatrical moment of the evening: during a performance of Play, in which the audience was seated onstage and the three actors were seated at the top of the auditorium, a few spectators drifted in and sat directly below the actors. These spectators seemed to take for granted that they were facing a crowd staring back at them while a disjointed dialogue played out over their heads. C’est Beckett!!

Alas, the Beckettfest is history, but I also made it to Hand2Mouth’s current opus, Everyone Who Looks Like You, which has one more week at the Theater!Theatre! space. Make sure you see this one. As one of Portland’s most consistently genre-busting ensembles, Hand2Mouth never fails to surprise, but this piece…this piece alternates between being hilarious, harrowingly recognizable and – dare we acknowledge it – moving.

Just in time for Thanksgiving, H2M has created a piece all about family – the parental units, of course, but just as importantly, the siblings. Those other people hanging around the house while you were growing up that you had to cope with. The title refers to this, of course, but also to something so startling I guarantee you won’t see it coming. And the whole evening is like that.

Everyone Who Looks Like You - Trailer from Hand2Mouth Theatre on Vimeo.

Several times during the show, I caught myself wishing my brother was seeing it with me. Not for sentimental reasons (though the play is often poignant, it is not sappy for even a moment), but because Everyone Who Looks Like You celebrates that sense of childhood sometimes being about kids vs. adults – when the kids aren’t squabbling among themselves, of course. I came away feeling like parents will come and go, but your sibs are the only people who will know all about you all your life.

Also this weekend, I saw Charlie and the Chocoloate Factory, produced by Oregon Children’s Theatre over at the Newmark. Got to tell you: it is something to sit in a 900-seat theater that’s totally packed with kids who are cheering for a show in which brat after brat gets undone by his/her own greed. And it’s adding performances! Amazing! Love seeing theaters make money. You have one more week to see this show, if it’s not already sold out, and to marvel at Sarah Gahagan’s eye-popping costumes.

Finally, I concluded my theater blitz at the closing performance of a new company now resident at Portland Actors Conservatory, The Montgomery Streeet Players, which presented three new one-acts written by Scott Rogers. It was called Stay for the Cake, and indeed a particolored gateau took center stage in the final playlet, which was fed to the audience at the conclusion. Nice. Can we have more plays in which the actors applaud the audience for showing up and even feed us after the curtain call?

At last: a No Exit I can live with

Plays I refuse to sit through again in this lifetime:

All My Sons
Feydeau’s idiotic so-called sex farces
Spring Awakening
Pretty much all Roman “comedies”
Mother Courage
Butterflies Are Free

Although I must admit. There’s a passel of plays that always struck me as thunderously boring in their original forms that have received truly astonishing makeovers from gifted renovators – face-lifts so total as to make those plays entirely fresh experiences. The Wooster Group’s version of The Hairy Ape. Neal Bell’s transmogrification of that shabby little shocker, Thérèse Raquin. Steven Cosson’s uproarious revision of The Children’s Hour, retitled Fingered! (true, this was an out-and-out spoof, but still). And now, right here in Cascadia, Jerry Mouawad and Imago Theatre have actually made me enjoy my most abhorred script of all time, a threadbare little play I swore I would never attend again under any circumstances: No Exit.

The siren call that got to me get over myself was the casting: JoAnn Johnson, Maureen Porter and Tim True, three of Portland’s finest actors. Just as expected, they were superb in every way. What I didn’t expect was a set design (created by Jerry Mouawad, who also directed) that opened up the play’s meticulous triangulation in ways I had never imagined.

As conceived by Jerry, the room where the condemned are to spend eternity together is a flat plane in space, surrounded by infinite darkness on all sides. And it tips. The slightest imbalance puts one character radically downstage, another high in the air. Sudden feints cause the room to reel. Only a carefully choreographed suspension of emotional ballast keeps the room in equilibrium – the rueful state where the play comes to a rest.

Of course this is what the play is supposed to be about, but when have you ever seen this realized with No Exit? All the tension and drama I missed through years of seeing this play done badly melted away, and suddenly I saw the taut, thrilling drama Sartre must have originally envisioned.

Oh, I wanted to add that Maureen, Tim and JoAnn are ably aided by Bryce Flint-Somerville, who played the Valet with demonic glee and held his own with his colleagues. Ultimately, to be sure, this is a version of No Exit, but grab this chance to see what’s probably the only good production you’ll ever bear witness to. This weekend’s the last one of the run, and since Saturday was packed to the rafters -- literally -- I suggest you get tickets soon. Otherwise: No Entrance.

Orpheus a là mode

Forget what you believe about Philip Glass. If you’re accustomed to associated his music with numbing repetition and avant-garde antics, his opera Orphée is going to come as a surprise. Oh, it sounds like Glass all right. But yoked into the service of narrative, his music finds depths and nuances you don’t always find in classic operatic warhorses.


Even the avid opening night audience last evening, who clearly showed up ready to have a good time, was caught off guard by the Joplinesque music of the opening scene. From there the music morphs gradually through a series of musical moods, from movingly lambent intimacy to “heroic” set pieces that would please even grand opera enthusiasts.

Likewise, the story leaps through various dramatic styles. That story is not just the ancient Orpheus myth of a man who follows his wife to the underworld, but also Jean Cocteau’s pre-postmodern gloss on it. Now: I haven’t seen that film since my early 20s, which was probably too young to see a film about the power of love over time and about the way foreknowledge of death affects that love. At the time, I thought Cocteau’s effort was a pretentious snooze. Thirty years later, whether it’s thanks to Glass or from sheer dint of personal experience, I found the same story profound.


References to the movie abound – most conspicuously in an ongoing motif involving mirrors that provide both dangerous reflections and passage to unseen worlds -- but I digress. I was going to say that Glass’s unique dramaturgy recalls ancient storytelling more than modern; now we tend to expect a unified tone throughout, where the ancients had no problem mixing comedy and tragedy. The scene in which Orphée tries not to look at Eurydice is treated as out-and-out comedy – close to buffonery, really – yet you know what’s coming, and the permanent loss of Eurydice is all the more poignant because you’ve been tickled into forgetting it for a few minutes.

Most surprisingly of all is the opera’s final scene. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil it for you. Suffice it to say that it’s a marvelous bit of playwriting prestidigitation that makes you recast the entire myth.

Can you tell I was impressed? This is one opera you should catch – never mind if you don’t usually care for the form, and not to worry if you think you don’t care for Glass. It’s all too rare to see an opera that works as theater, so do yourself a favor and go. Just three more performances.

By the way, almost as much fun as the opera itself was the fab celebrity blogging table, which was very much its own event. To catch up on what the opera experience was like as it unfolded, started with Art Scatter’s preliminary account here; Mr. Scatter provides you with links to all the bloggolalia. His cohorts included Cynthia Fuhrman, Storm Large, Byron Beck and even (from backstage) cast member Marc Acito.

My big trip

Though my Halloween Countdown disguised the fact, I was gone for a spell last week, sunning my pasty northwestern legs and otherwise aging my skin cells in the turquoise waters of Napili Bay. Maui.

Sure, it was lovely. But remind me never to leave Portland again when it’s at the height of its autumn glory. There I was basking in tropical temps (overnight lows in the mid-70s!), and all I could think of was the mist sifting down through the lurid light show of all the falling leaves back home. Just like a Brontë novel. Except for the consumption, madness, and festering cisterns.

Seasonal Affective Disorder aside, I had some adventure, as the photos here attest. Yes, I parasailed! A joyous experience. Not only was I exhilarated as I lifted up into the air, I was actually moved emotionally; to be weightless and aloft and 1,200 feet high in the air was like slipping out of time altogether for a while. Just taking the world in from a distance, like it was a story someone once told me. Like I was leaving it behind forever.


We’ve been to Maui several times before, so the purpose of this trip was to be as idle as possible. To spend all day on the beach, eat from the roadside stands as much as possible, go to bed early. Snack on lotuses. But I can’t handle total relaxation, so I read several books while beached. One was by my friend Joan Herrington, about August Wilson, entitled “I Ain’t Sorry for Nothin’ I Done” -- still one of the best books about the playwright’s work, even though it’s 11 years old now.

And I brought a novel with me that could not have been more wrong for a sunny-soaked holiday: Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic nightmare The Road. This book, about a father and young son tramping through a grey world of ash in search of a warmer climate, is so compelling that I rapidly tore through page after page, hopeful and fearful that they would come across other people (they do, mostly for the worse). This book is bleak. I soon found I couldn’t read it in bed at night unless I seeking insomnia.

So I padded on down to the “hotel” clubhouse, a repository of abandoned vacation books. Reluctantly I picked up a copy of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Anne Shaffer Annie Barrows. Everything about the cutesy title and the pastel-colored cover seemed to shriek FOR GIRLS ONLY. But it’s a mega-best seller, so I considered it research, and therefore work, and therefore acceptable reading. And to my surprise, it turned out to be a lark. Starts out as silly as a daffodil, but then goes on to reach surprising depths. I was grateful for its light touch, finally, as a temporary antidote to The Road.

However, it’s the McCarthy novel that will stay with me forever. And which surprised me, finally, with its Beckettian view of a universe in which both the horror and the redemptive force of being alive is….well, other people.

Yeah, I’m glad to be back among them.

Life on the dark side

Okay, so All Souls’ Day is November 2, not today. Today is the far less interesting All Saints’ Day, but we’ll blip over that in order to continuing with the more mysterious and ooky tides of the season.

Here in tropical Portland, gardening is a big ole deal. And while even the most avid of gardeners looks forward to that time of year when their work is done for a few months, there’s still much to do right now. Conventional wisdom sez you plants new shrubs now so that they overwinter and have a head start when spring arrives.

With that in mind, here’s a little inspiration for those special places in your apothecary. I mean garden.

Wicked Plants, a book of “botanical atrocities” by Amy Stewart, is evil fun. From plants that strangle to shrubs that explode, here’s how to have a garden that will turn the Addams Family bilious with envy.





Black Plants, created by Paul Bonine and published by Oregon’s own Timber Press, is a gorgeous compendium of plants whose dusky shades seem to defy all you thought you knew about photosynthesis.








And as if you needed more reason to ban pastels from your yard, Karen Platt’s Black Magic & Purple Passion, now in its 3rd edition, is the book that started the craze for baleful foliage. Karen richly illustrated tome makes me want to turn my entire property into a haunted house. She warns, though, that dark plants are best used as accents; the more they’re surrounded by contrasting plants, the more they pop.

So come over to the dark side and let’s get to work. During what Portlanders optimistically call “cloud breaks,” there’s still much to do.

All Hallows is here

And what better way to pay tribute to it than with this paean to the god and goddess within all of us, composed and performed by a woman who’s immortal herself.



What, you were expecting the Monster Mash? Please! Enjoy your Irish New Year, and give a thought to your ancestors tonight; in Gaelic tradition, the veil between their world and yours is more transparent now than during the whole rest of the year.

Halloween Countdown #2

Terribly late here for getting you my penultimate post for this year's All Hallows soundtrack … look for the last one in just a few hours! I’m tardy because of an exciting meeting this morning, the contents of which are so top secret that I can’t even share them here until November of 2011. Really! Two years off. But I share that much right now just to engender wonderment, annoyance and general pique.

For this post I bring you the amazing Lyke-Wake Dirge, which I first mentioned last All Hallow’s Eve on Mighty Toy Cannon’s fabulous music blog. This is a dirge, all right, but so haunting and with such a gradual build as to become spellbinding – which is, in fact, probably its original function.

In terms of its written history, this song dates back to England’s medieval period, but some believe its origins are much older. The pre-Christian version is reputed to be a culling song – a spell, of sorts, whose addictive power Chuck Palahniuk explores deftly in his novel Lullaby. It’s not hard to see how you could adapt the dirge to your own fell purposes …