Reviews

Review: Mike Daisey and the Theater of Self-Disclosure

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:14:00 -0700

“The theater of public apology is terrible theater. This is not an apology. If you want one, I made that a year ago. This is a performance.”

And so, for two hours on Tuesday, mopping his brow in front of a packed ballroom at the Tiffany Center, controversial monologist Mike Daisey didn't apologize.

Known for the Icarus trajectory of his 2010 theater piece The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, repackaged by This American Life as Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory—an international performance and radio sensation shredded by fact-checkers in 2012—Daisey surprised many with a last-minute announcement that Portland would witness the “world premiere” of a new monologue, entitled JOURNALISM, billed as a “love letter” to gimlet-eyed members of the press.

Yet unless love from Daisey means backhanded compliments a la Neil Strauss's bag-'em-and-tag-'em manual The Game, Tuesday's performance less resembled courtship than a curious offense-as-defense strategy.

Sandwiching plaintive rhetoric on media objectivity between spirited, if disjointed anecdotes—on Portland's fluoridation vote, a childhood footrace with a cranky old gent, even Disneyland—Daisey's aim seemed to be persuading Tuesday's audience that his critics can be tarred with their own brush.

A rocky sell, given that Daisey's main argument—that omitting information to tell a story makes all journalists essentially writers of fiction—is not what Daisey himself is accused of.

Rather than omission, criticism of Agony centers on Daisey's undisclosed use of embellishment and outright invention to condemn working conditions at Foxconn, a Chinese manufacturer of parts for Apple products. Post-Agony coverage has highlighted Daisey's active misdirection of reporters and fact-checkers, and even questioned the veracity of earlier works, such as his 2002 memoir 21 Dog Years, about working as a grunt at Amazon during the dotcom boom.

For a performer who belittles nitpicky factuality in favor of “larger truths”—lack of labor coverage is a pet theme—Daisey is highly attuned to the minutiae in coverage of himself. “I read absolutely everything that was written about [Agony], and it burned. But it was good, because when you've taken in everything, you become larger than it is,” Daisey said.

While denying that JOURNALISM represents an attempt to counter Agony's critics (“I don't want to win back your affection....I don't care if you like me”), on Tuesday Daisey quickly segued into a lengthy analysis of his own pre-show local press coverage—from Portland Monthly (“a Q&A is the lowest form of article”), to The Oregonian (“good”), to lengthy defense of his portrayal in Willamette Week (“fucking terrible”). Notably absent from this rundown: a rancorous Portland Mercury chat thread fueled by Daisey's own participation—for which he later blamed NyQuil.

“Everyone said they knew what the sin was, but they all got it wrong,” he said once he finally dived into his own scandal. “It was the sin of pride. I didn't believe that the story would change anything, so I appropriated the power of witness. And I did it for the journalists, so they would think it was juicy.”

Despite Daisey's trademark facility with such turns of phrase, and his undeniable stage charisma, Tuesday's monologue suffered from a tone of persistent self-serving. Perhaps Daisey truly views himself, as he presented himself in every self-disclosure, as a Gulliver beset by Lilliputians. Or perhaps, to paraphrase the old sawhorse of stand-up comedy, Daisey simply needs to take more time before distilling his tragedy into good performance.

But right now? Half-way between veiled public apology and sophomoric rant on modern media's failures, JOURNALISM doesn't make for very good theater.

For more on Portland arts and culture, sign up for our weekly On The Town newsletter, subscribe to our RSS feed, and follow us on Twitter @aarondavidscott. Visit our Arts & Entertainment Calendar for our editors’ event picks.

Review: Vertigo’s ‘Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls’

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:28:00 -0700

Image: Gary Norman

In the final scene of Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls, Theatre Vertigo's last production in the Theater! Theatre! Space, one character, Derek, gifts another, Vivian, a snowglobe in which a pair of hula girls wave aloha amid a wintry Hawaiian landscape. The englobed scene is incongruous, even ridiculous—but something about that ridiculousness, something in the way the hula girls beckon, keeps Derek and Vivian gazing into the small, staged world.

Aloha, written by Naomi Iizuka and directed for Vertigo by New York's Jen Wineman, is not so different. The fragmented, surreal portrayal of youth angst has no small number of problems with its script, but the play's sense of humor and experimental structure, along with dynamic performances from the Vertigo cast, keep us looking on.

The play begins in New York, where nine loosely connected twentysomethings (plus one dog) are all, in one way or another, experiencing drastic changes in their lives and/or having quarterlife crises. Vivian's long-term boyfriend abruptly announces he's fallen in love with somebody else. Wendy gets a temp gig at a pet store, but tells anybody who'll listen that her other, more real self is an actress. Even the dog is confused; after being set loose and seeming to transform into a human, he wonders aloud, ears askew, what he is: “Am I a man? Or am I dog? Or am I dog who thinks I'm a man who thinks I'm a dog?”

As it follows its characters on their wandering journeys to improbable destinations in Hawaii and Alaska, Aloha itself too frequently wanders into self-indulgent navel-gazing. In the play's first half, when the New York setting is echoed in a frenetic pace, no character can feel sorry for herself long enough to bore the audience, but post-intermission, when the play transplants our protagonists to the stagnant beaches of Hawaii and tundras of Alaska, their self-pity, unfortunately for us, gets more stage time. In one scene, wise, nurturing Myrna gives Derek, of the snowglobe, some sugar cookies. “I love the kind with sprinkles,” he says. “But wait, don't you see? I have problems! I have deep, unsolvable problems!” “Shh,” Myrna responds. “Don't talk, OK? Just eat your cookies.” Our feelings exactly.

Aloha, Say the Pretty Girls
Theatre Vertigo
Theater! Theatre!
Thru Jun 8

Much of Iizaka's dialogue takes the form of a rant, and as in any good rant, there are pearls of wisdom amid the rambling. Aloha doesn't offer many answers to the many questions it poses, but then, life itself isn't so good in the answers department. At any rate, Iizaka's rants are often very funny, showcasing her firm command of language and flair for the absurd. Too, the playwright's avant-garde, fluid handling of time and space, which might feel disjointed if not for her smart use of recurring props, is stimulating, and director Wineman's uber-minimal staging suits it well.

Vertigo's cast gives strong, energetic performances all around, embracing their characters' particular absurdities without reserve. Especially good are Britt Harris, as the maternal but vaguely phony Myrna; Beth Thompson, as sensual Wendy; and—no joke—the guy who plays the dog, Tyler Ryan. Even in Aloha's meandering moments, these actors' all-in embodiment of their characters keeps the audience peering into this strange snowglobe of a show.

Review: Hand2Mouth and Portland Playhouse Tackle ‘Left Hand of Darkness’

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:01:00 -0700

Image: Christina Riccetti

Allison Tigard as Estraven and Damian Thompson as Genly in their tent on the Gorbin ice glacier.

In our preview of The Left Hand of Darkness, director Jonathan Walters said that he was originally drawn to the science fiction classic because it was impossible to stage. Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 story involves an extraterrestrial world of gender-morphous aliens and a dangerous trek across an 800-mile ice glacier. Yet Hand2Mouth Theatre and Portland Playhouse struggle valiantly in their collaborative world premiere to cross that grand barrier of theatrical impossibility. With a bare-bones set and an equally bare-bones budget (although it was the first time both got NEA funding), they manage to create something that almost transports us to that faraway world—a narrative space ship of extension chords and imagination—but ultimately it sputters out, running out of fuel and technology before touching down.

The plot involves a frozen planet inhabited by white, genderless humanoids, who can take on either sex during their fertile period, split into two nations that are skirmishing over borders. Into this combustible icebox steps a black, Earth-born envoy, Genly (played by Damian Thompson with a trepidation—and hoodie and messenger bag—that feels rather contemporary and nonchalant for an intergalactic dignitary), who’s come to invite the planet to join a grand interplanetary coalition, only to be met with fear and distrust. After being thrown into a prison camp by one nation, he is rescued by the exiled prime minister of the other, Estraven (a regal Allison Tigard), who guides him over an 800-mile glacier to safety.

It’s little surprise that Le Guin’s masterpiece (and most sci-fi) has received little theatrical love (it was staged once in Chicago 17 years ago). How does a company, particularly one with a small budget, bring such an otherworldly setting to life? Although Walters said some original ideas involved hundreds of pounds of rock salt or dry ice, ultimately set designer Peter Ksander goes the route of minimalism, building a stage covered in blue AstroTurf and surrounded by a frame of wood and steel bars. The effect is that of looking into a diorama, where our imagination is left to do the heavy lifting, spurred on by the crystalline lighting design of Chris Kuhl and the cinematic, adrenalizing soundscape of Casi Pacilio.

The Left Hand of Darkness
Portland Playhouse
May 2–June 9

The rich themes of the play—which uses literal aliens to explore issues of race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, and, primarily, the delineation of the other—translate to the stage. Patriotism, at one point, is defined by Estraven not as love of one’s country, but “fear of the other.” And ultimately the story is strongest in the second act when it’s just Genly and Estraven together, spanning their differences as they struggle to cross the glacier together.

Yet the storyline itself doesn’t find nearly as smooth a landing. There is so much ground to cover that the script, adapted by University of Oregon professor John Schmor and relying on bulky expository narration, sinks deeper and deeper into the snow with every scene. The two and a half–hour production struggles to maintain momentum as Genly meets one group after another, none of whom grow into characters of much depth beyond Estraven and the crazy king (who is played with delicious if slightly over-the-top insanity by Lorraine Bahr).

Walter’s and H2M’s experimental, collaborative style of theater involves ensemble sequences of stylized movement and song (and, if the first rehearsal was any indication, ensemble directorial decisions) that further weigh things down, particularly in an extended fortune telling ritual and the long transport to the prison camp. While the almost Greek chorus nature of the gender-neutralized ensemble, which is made up of both H2M and Playhouse regulars, helped to evoke our foreign world, I yearned for a more ruthless, autocratic direction to speed us through.

Perhaps I lack in imagination, but I have a hard time envisioning how even a Portland Center Stage–size budget could create the physical suspense and danger that would bring the glacier crossing to frigid life, to say nothing of the full multi-setting scope of the epic journey plot. But if the allure was the impossibility of the voyage, then the ambition and the courage to attempt it should be lauded. And given that H2M usually has a multi-year incubation phase, perhaps in time this voyage, should they continue it, will also touch down.

For more on Portland arts and culture, sign up for our weekly On The Town newsletter, subscribe to our RSS feed, and follow us on Twitter @aarondavidscott. Visit our Arts & Entertainment Calendar for our editors’ event picks.

Review: 'Bob’s Burgers Live!'

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:38:00 -0700

Image: Richard Foreman/FOX

The cast of 'Bob's Burgers': (from left) Dan Mintz (Tina Belcher), Eugene Mirman (Gene Belcher), John Roberts (Linda Belcher), H. Jon Benjamin (Bob Belcher), and Kristen Schaal (Louise Belcher). Standing: creator Loren Bouchard. (This image is not from the Crystal show.)

If you ever want to see the good and bad side of Portland's young and hip population in all its (vain)glory, pack a few hundred of them into uncomfortable plastic chairs in a hot, muggy venue, keep the beer and liquor flowing, and then put the stars of a beloved TV show in front of them.

So it was that the cast of Bob's Burgers, the animated show that is managing to outwit and outshine the rest of the Sunday night lineup on FOX, appeared onstage at the Crystal Ballroom this past Friday for a live event that allowed them to drink in both the love and the weirdness of their Rose City fan base.

The show featured all of the main cast members of the show—H. Jon Benjamin (he voices Bob—read our Q&A with him), Eugene Mirman (Gene), Kristin Schaal (Louise), Dan Mintz (Tina), and John Roberts (Linda)—as well as Larry Murphy, who plays one of the supporting characters. (Noticeably absent was Bob's Burgers creator Loren Bouchard who had to return to L.A. to help finish up the show's 4th season.) Each one of the principles were given a few minutes alone on stage to do standup, then the whole cast did a table read of their upcoming Thanksgiving episode. And all of it was wrapped up with a Q&A, and that's when things got especially freakish. But we'll get to that in a moment.

The set up of Bob's Burgers: Live was a pretty brilliant one, as it allowed fans to see exactly why Bouchard tapped the comedians that he did for their parts on the TV show. The personality and attitude of their characters is directly reflected from their standup acts.

Mintz's one-liners ("Breasts are a lot like batteries...if they're AA, they're smaller...if they're D, they're bigger, and if they're square, you don't want to put your tongue on them.") are delivered with the same dry, solemn tone as he gives Tina. Schaal and her character share a hyperactive energy cut with a dark side. And you could absolutely envision the weird and wonderful Gene growing up to be Mirman shouting to his girlfriend at the other end of grocery store aisle, "You know what? I am getting toilet paper. I don't think it's a waste!"

As warmly as all of these sets were received, the energy started to get a little rowdier once everyone sat down for the table read. When Roberts turned on his Linda voice or Mintz did his signature Tina moan, the crowd exploded with gleeful shouts and applause. But many of the best jokes in this pretty hilarious episode that centered on the mystery of how the Thanksgiving turkey ended up in the toilet were lost thanks to the unforgiving acoustics of the room and a steady stream of hollering and murmurs from the audience.

So it was that, by the time members of the crowd were given a microphone to engage with the cast of the show, things turned weird. The first gent didn't want to ask a question but instead to get Roberts to sing a song from the show with him. Another younger member of the audience wanted to know the cast's favorite colors. The seemingly well-meaning question about how to break into voice acting turned into a painfully bad tryout for the show. And let's not forget the nervous woman trying to promote her Bob's Burgers–related blog.

It was an interminable exercise meant to engage with the fans, but not surprisingly, a good chunk of the crowd vacated the Crystal Ballroom as it wore on. Kudos to the actors for gamely answering the strangest of questions or wittily batting them aside—"The best way to become a voice actor? Probably...doing standup for about 10 years.”—but they really deserved better.

Review: Lauren Weedman’s ‘The People’s Republic of Portland’

Wed, 08 May 2013 14:06:00 -0700

Image: Patrick Weishampel

Lauren Weedman in 'The People's Republic of Portland.'

The Los Angeles–based actor and comedian Lauren Weedman has officially drunk the Portland Kool-Aid. Or, given this is Portland, the kombucha. She's also visited the strip clubs, suffered the baristas’ scours, and been to geek trivia night.

Weedman's one-woman world premiere production of The People’s Republic of Portland begins with her first touching down in our city two years ago for her debut at Portland Center Stage in another one-woman show, Bust. The next 90 minutes are a caffeine-fueled travelogue through Portland Weird, over the course of which her mispronunciation of WILL-e-mette and ignorance about LEED transform into a tender love of bike paths and farmer's markets. But although the show is exuberantly funny, in the end, like all vacation recounts, it doesn’t go much of anywhere at all.

Daniel Meeker’s set, bare white with two TV monitors and PDX in giant white letters, has all the slickness of a TV studio, which sets the perfect stage for the Oprah level excitement of the audience's applause. And there’s no question Weedman's flair for characterizations and energetic physicality fills it, her body bounding across the stage like a champion boxer and then breaking down for dance party interstitial moments colored with concert lighting by Don Crossley.

The problem is: her story, commissioned by PCS and directed by Rose Riordan, almost entirely lacks stakes and a narrative arc. There’s no tension or conflict beyond Weedman's "isn't it a little weird" resistance to Portland’s stranger quirks. Like some LA pop culture anthropologist confronted with lesbian cyclists and a little ecstatic dance, she strings together satirical vignettes of Portland culture, but never to any greater end.

The People's Republic of Portland
Portland Center Stage
April 23–June 16I didn't have the fortune to see Bust, but the power of Weedman's show last November, No…You Shut Up, was the grounding of her outrageous performance style in her vulnerable, morally ambiguous, and very personal narrative about an unstable Los Angeles performer returning to her Midwestern hometown where nothing (and everything) had changed, combined with a recurring cast of colorful characters. People’s Republic mostly lacks that vulnerability, personal exploration, transformation, and recurring cast. Weedman weaves in her two-year-old son (nicely jabbing the Pearl's elevation of dogs over babies) and a storyline about her relationship with her husband, who goes away every summer to work on a commercial fishing boat, but they feel tangential at best.

The most unexpected and ambiguous, and thereby substantial, part of the show is when Weedman asks, “Where are all the black people?” (and I don’t just say that because she cites our article). Upon visiting the Vancouver Avenue First Baptist Church, toying with the idea of raising her son in a black church, she finds the first Portlanders who don’t love Portland. When she tells them she wants to visit their neighborhood, they say, “Why don’t you go to Mississippi? You’ll like it there”—leaving us to wonder uncomfortably at whose neighborhood exactly they mean to say it is now.

My companion was touched by the fact that, ultimately, Weedman seems to "get it" (Portland, and all us wacky Portlanders, that is), which is nice and affirming and all, but I kept waiting for her to give us some reason for why we should care. Instead, we get exactly what I feared: another comic parachuting in to skewer all of Portland's peculiar proclivities. Weedman has the love and the skill to do PDX right, but she’s got work to do before her story touches down.

Read my conversation with Weedman about how she planned to set People's Republic apart from the rest of the Portland pillory, as well as about her raging exhibitionism and the process of creating one-woman shows.

Review: Artists Rep’s ‘Ten Chimneys’

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:50:00 -0700

Image: Owen Carey

Michael Mendelson as Alfred Lunt and Linda Alper as Lynn Fontanne in Artists Rep's 'Ten Chimneys'

What does it mean to love art? To so truly admire and obsess over your medium that you’re willing to literally marry for it, and then bicker with it, cajole it, and forgive it, to say nothing of putting up with its family?

Jeffrey’ Hatcher’s Ten Chimneys reveals one such possibility. If ever there were two people so in love with their artform that they couldn’t separate it from their own relationship, it was the legendary theater couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Married for 55 years, the Broadway power players rarely appeared on stage without the other. And, at least in Hatcher’s wonderfully funny dramatization of their relationship, they rarely shared a room without the theater somehow playing a role in their scene.

Artists Repertory Theatre’s production is a grand backstage comedy—a theatrical romp through everything that makes theater joyous. It is a play about playing, a show about theater, and the medium is so deeply ingrained in our historic cast of characters—add the early movie star Sidney Greenstreet and nascent ingénue Uta Hagen to Fontanne and Lunt—that they narrate stage directions for themselves and others in their day-to-day life.

Ten Chimneys is the name of the Wisconsin estate Lunt owned, where he and Fontanne summered with a host of famous guests, and where his mother and half-brother lived year round (tended to by his disgruntled half-sister and her burnt muffins). The setting is the summer of 1938, and Lunt and Fontanne are rehearsing Chekhov’s The Seagull.

Everyone has a different idea about what the play is about, depending on their situation and its concomitant strife—whether they’re the flamboyant couple visiting or the hosts coping with wild guests. Greenstreet says it’s about “all the wrong people in love with all the wrong people,” and his summation serves to describe one of the main tensions in the play, if not the heart, as Lunt’s openness to Hagen’s romantic interest, as well as a previous relationship, torture Fontanne (and Hagen as well). But these are two people so ruthlessly consumed by their art that, above all, the show’s the thing, and everything else is subsumed as character motivation, though it continues to lurk unspoken just below the surface in proper Chekhovian fashion.

Ten Chimneys
Artists Repertory Theatre
Apr 23–May 26
Under the inaugural direction of Artists Rep’s incoming artistic director, Damaso Rodriguez (read our Q&A), the action is as quick as the script, the actors moving nimbly through comedy and drama both. The cast of seven—Linda Alper as Fontanne, Mendelson as Lunt, Abby Wilde as Hagen, Todd Van Voris as Greenstreet, JoAnn Johnson as Lunt’s mother, Chris Harder as his half-brother, and Sarah Lucht as his half-sister—dive into their roles with zest, although Oregon Shakespeare Festival veteran Alper shines particularly bright as the exquisitely complex queen of the stage, who seems to suffer more than Lunt for the emotional sacrifices they make for their work.

The most humorous and dramatic moments both, unsurprisingly, come between the two stage-crossed lovers. Their rehearsals together—apparently the couple was always running lines—are sheer dynamo. With each flubbed line, they drastically switch their style, so that for one read-through they’re moony eyed, and the next they’re circling each other and snarling like fighters, always overcompensating for their previous mistakes and utterly relishing in the interaction.

“There is nowhere I know Alfred better than on stage,” Fontanne tells Hagen at one point. Hagen follows with the obvious question: what happens when the two are not on stage?

“My dear, we are always on stage,” Fontanne answers matter-of-factly. And fortunately for us, we have front row seats.

Review: Prince’s Late Show at the Roseland

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:20:00 -0700

Image: Courtesy Penner

Prince at Coachella. Photos at the Roseland were strictly prohibited, as in multiple people were thrown out.

The concert began before the curtains even opened. With the first notes of “Let’s Go Crazy” strummed on heavy, distortion-seeped guitar, bright light flooded over the top of the curtains. As they swung open, a light display of dancing decibels on an LED screen blinded the audience. And from the light emerged the backlit silhouette of Prince. Calmly sauntering down stage, his shadow had more fierceness in it than most fully lit performers.

“Portland, you ready to get crazy tonight?” he asked. The sold out crowd answered unanimously, its stadium-volume roar filling the Roseland like it was the Rose Garden.

Having already played an earlier show, Prince took the stage a mere fifteen minutes later than the scheduled 11:30 pm start time—that’s early for a man who has been known to be fashionably (read: extremely) late. Known for his outrageous outfits, the Purple One kept it simple with a black-and-white long-sleeve spandex shirt, tight black pants, and a chunky metal necklace.

This seemed to be a new Prince—one who seeped his music in a wash of feedback, distortion, and psychedelic visuals and rung it out when he wanted to slow things down. Rock ’n roll numbers such as “Bambi” scorched through the speakers at a volume that blurred the line between cacophony and harmony to create something beautifully arresting. It’s a line that others may try to straddle, but Prince strolls along it with precision and flair—whether he’s addressing his affectionate side with the blues (“Beggin’ Woman Blues”) and tender soul (“When We're Dancing Close And Slow”) or exercising his solo muscles by letting his guitar wail.

The spotlight may have been set on Prince and his guitar, but there was another name on the marquee next to his. His backing band, 3^rd Eye Girl, weren’t there to simply provide the foundation. Towering over him, Hannah Ford (drums), Donna Grantis (guitar), and Ida Nielsen (bass), decked out in leather pants, studs, glittering headbands, and wild hair, were like glamazon rock warriors. Each packed formidable musical chops and played an integral part of the team with Prince assuming the role of master bandleader and controlling the flow of the music with a point of the finger or a head nod. And the relative intimacy of the Roseland meant every person in the room could see his flirty eyes and sparkling grins.

Waiting in the line that wrapped around three sides of the block before the show, the man next to me giddily listed off all of the songs he wanted Prince to play: “Purple Rain,” “Kiss,” “1999,” “Raspberry Beret.” No doubt most in the audience wished that they would witness a two-hour greatest hits medley with some Purple Rain-era salacious grinding. But aside from the stripped-down version of “Let’s Go Crazy” and “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man,” the setlist was filled with deep cuts, never-released songs, and covers. Although Wild Cherry’s “Play that Funky Music,” at which point Prince just stopped singing and let the crowd turn into a writhing frat party karaoke cluster, was questionable at best, the cover of India.Arie’s “Brown Skin,” wailed by Portland’s hometown girl and Prince backup singer Liv Warfield, who took the stage twice, was one of the most mind-exploding moments of the night.

By the first encore, it became apparent that this concert wasn’t about resurrecting old tropes or styles; it was about the music. It was about forging a distinctively new experience: one drenched in funk-heavy jams. If there were any dissidents in the crowd, their jeers were drowned out by the explosion of applause after each song. Even without many hits, Prince had the crowd wrapped around his perfectly manicured finger—to the point that he had the us yodeling halfway through the set.

Although he kicked off the encore by saying, “We’re going to be here all night” (as many hoped we would), he only came out for a second single-song encore. The lights went up a mere 75 minutes after the first notes, leaving one to wonder if his multi-hour shows are a thing of the past, or if Portland just didn’t make the cut this tour. (To his credit, he had already played one concert that night...)

Either way, as I was walking back to my apartment, I overheard the same man I met in line gushing about what he just saw. “I didn’t recognize half those songs, and I can’t get them out of my head.” Who else can shatter your expectations and still leave you wanting more? Prince, that’s who.

Review: Radiation City's 'Animals in the Median'

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:40:00 -0700

Image: Courtesy Tender Loving Empire

After much time spent with the new album by Radiation City, the deservedly reigning champs of Willamette Week’s annual Best New Band poll, I can safely pronounce it to be an abundance of riches and the perfect soundtrack to spring. Released on local label Tender Loving Empire, Animals in the Median is a highly polished gem, glittering with a bossa nova whimsy that provides the pulse for a dozen sophisticated pocket-orchestra pop songs that never venture past the five-minute mark.

Since first emerging in 2010 as the duo of keyboardist and lead singer Lizzy Ellison and her guitar-playing partner Cameron Spies, Radiation City has expanded to a quintet and garnered gushing reviews from NPR—which named RC one of the “10 Bands You Should’ve Known in 2012”— as well as Time and Nylon magazines. And while last year’s EP Cool Nightmare definitely qualifies as a catchy collection of songs, Animals in the Median’s tracks are stronger and more intricate, and they aim higher.

Radiation City
Wonder Ballroom
June 28 at 9 pm

Ellison’s heavenly, unfettered voice is the acknowledged star of the show, but bandmates Spies (guitar/vocals), Matt Rafferty (guitar/bass), Patti King (vocals/multi-instrumentalist), and Randy Bemrose (percussion) all distinguish themselves as thoughtful, humble players contributing to a harmonious greater good. It’s a winning formula and a bracing tonic, whether the mood is percolating (“So Long”) or pensive (“Entropia”).

It’s too easy to draw comparisons to Stereolab and Astrud Gilberto at her most ethereal (check Ellison’s languid vocal on album closer “Call Me”), or to invoke a Brian Wilson who never stopped following the sun. But they do offer a point of reference. Indeed, it’s hard to avoid the word “dreamy” when describing the effervescent charms of Radiation City, since wondrous songs such as “Wary Eyes,” “LA Beach,” and “Lark” are never resolved in any semblance of orderly pop-song fashion. Instead, they gently cajole us to relax and bask in a gloriously sunny, indefinite present (e.g., “Don’t stop now / you won’t always be around”).

This wash of noise is calling me to you. It’s everything, you’ll see. —“Wash of Noise”

Ellison’s voice is a graceful, soaring bird that energizes Radiation City’s spread-your-wings-and-fly/don’t-worry-be-happy lyrical tilt—songs emerge, drift by like sweet, suggestive clouds, and fade. Thankfully, the restorative effects do not.

Head to Portland Monthly's Culturephile blog for our premiere of the music video for "Foreign Bodies."

Review: PCS’s ‘Clybourne Park’

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:17:00 -0700

Image: Patrick Weishampel

Sharonlee McLean, Kevin R. Free, Gavin Hoffman, Kelley Curran, Sal Viscuso and Brianna Horne in Clybourne Park.

What do white women and tampons have in common? Do black men ski? These aren’t the sorts of things decent folks are supposed to talk about—and certainly not in public. But they’re the smoldering social issues that fuel Bruce Norris’s blistering Clybourne Park. The Pulitzer-winner play so gleefully dramatizes the taboo topics that make people uncomfortable—race, suicide, privilege—that the result of Portland Center Stage’s fabulous production is a shared exorcism of sorts, with laughter as our holy ghost.

The story opens on a 1950s couple packing to move to the suburbs from their home in the mostly German and Irish neighborhood of Clybourne Park. When a neighbor tries to talk them out of selling by revealing that the buyers are an African American family—the very family in Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun—prejudices and tempers flare, pulling the community priest, the African American maid, and her husband into a cavalcade of increasingly hilarious discomfort.

Act two, set in contemporary times, sees the neighborhood on the brink of another transition. A young white couple has just bought the house and is confronted by an African American couple from the neighborhood association who wants to stress the importance of honoring the history of what has been a black neighborhood since the white flight of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Of course, tempers and prejudices flare, pulling both sides and their lawyers into a deliciously discomfiting and hilarious escalation of racist jokes.

Norris’s script is so smart, nimble, and ferociously funny that it’s easy to see why it won a Pulitzer, a Tony, and an Olivier (London's Tony). As in his play The Pain and the Itch, which Third Rail Rep mounted in 2011, dialogue unfolds like a war: multiple skirmishes take place at once, as characters’ overlapping conversations collide and align in the most amusing and often illustrative ways. And beautifully mirrored parallels in both acts work to emphasize the continuity of history while also dismantling its stereotypes, from the persisting obsession over five-minute commutes (although the place of work has changed) to the role of skiing, that powdered pinnacle of privilege, which switches from being used in the first act by the racist neighbor to illustrate that whites and blacks just live differently—“skiing doesn’t appeal to negroes”—to being an activity in the second act that now only appeals to the African American characters.

Clybourne Park
Portland Center Stage
Gerding Theater at the Armory
Apr 6–May 5Portland Center Stage outdoes itself with a production that is shining Broadway-excellence across the board (if Sweeney Todd hadn’t been so devilishly good, I’d have no qualms saying this is the best big production of the season). Chris Coleman’s direction is as sharp as the dialogue, moving characters through what amounts to two extended single scenes with economy and zest while using stylized blocking details to capture the spirits of the times (the stretching by the female lawyer at the start of act two elicited particular guffaws). Without exception, the ensemble cast of locals and visiting artists—Kelley Curran, Kevin Free, Andy Lee-Hillstrom, Gavin Hoffman, Brianna Horne, Sharonlee Mclean, and Sal Viscuso—is fantastic. Curran’s portrayal of a deaf woman in the first act (another drop in the cascade of provocative choices by Norris) was so genuine that one audience member who works with deaf students said during the talk back that she believed Curran was a deaf actor.

Of course, the house itself is the silent central character, and scenic designer Michael Olich does a magnificent job of transforming it during intermission from a sparkling ‘50s home to a battered, abandoned abode (read our story about how he creates the change).

Clybourne Park is a story that could be set in North and Northeast Portland with little more than a change of name, and it flays Portland liberalism accordingly. The white characters in act two are veritable stand-ins for many of the young, white homebuyers who swept through Alberta, Mississippi, and the city’s other African American neighborhoods, ultimately resulting in the displacement of 10,000 African American residents. Echoing conversations you might hear any day of the week at the Mississippi food cart pod, the white husband and wife talk and talk, going on ad nauseam about how the system dehumanizes and abandons African Americans, but then seem completely (and rather willfully) blind to their own participation in the process. After all, they love the neighborhood now—once they stopped seeing it as it "used to be" and overlook the floundering schools—and they’re only talking about one house.

But the play isn’t a guilt trip—at least, not exclusively. By lacing conflict through the married couples as well as between them, it allows us to step together into that scary area that most of us are squeamish to discuss, and to engage in that conversation that is, consequently, direly needed in this whitest-of-all major American city. And most importantly, Clybourne Park injects the existential and very un-PC humor that’s embedded in the angst of these conversations to show that, perhaps if we stop pussyfooting around, we might actually get somewhere. Or as one character puts it, “Maybe we should all learn what the other eats.”

Review: Benjamin Percy's 'Red Moon'

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:58:00 -0700

Image: Courtesy Grand Central Publishing

While Red Moon might open with a scene well known to many Northwesterners—aboard a flight from San Francisco to Portland—the familiarity ends quickly when a passenger transforms into a werewolf and slaughters the helpless passengers. In novelist Benjamin Percy’s parallel universe, “lycans” live alongside other Americans, dosed up on a mandatory anti-transformation drug called Lupex. (Their “disease” is transferred by blood.) The attack on the airplane, we soon learn, is part of a larger movement of werewolf extremists whose mission is to fight against the West’s oppressive, imperialistic inclinations. Sound familiar?

In his first critically acclaimed novel, The Wilding, Percy took readers on a modern day Deliverance through the untamed landscape outside Bend. Red Moon returns to Oregon to follow the interconnected lives of Chase Williams, governor of the state and anti-lycan activist; Patrick Gamble, the sole survivor of the opening terrorist attacks; and Claire Forrester, the lycan daughter of two prominent, retired lycan revolutionaries. As anti-lycan sentiments and military backlash grow, the trio tumble into each other’s lives.

“The moon glows and casts a sickly light. Claire tries not to look at it. She hates it. She knows how ridiculous it is to hate a spinning ball of rock, but she does ... It reminds her, like a grinning skull, of what she is.”

—Page 113

The language is as sharp as the fangs and claws it describes. “Her skin itches horribly, as if bubbling over with hives, and then the hair bristles from it in a rush,” Percy writes, describing Claire’s transformation. “Her bones stretch and bend and pop, and she yowls in pain, as if she is giving birth, one body coming out of another. She always cries. Tears of blood.”

Place exerts a powerful pull on Percy, who grew up in Bend. The novel makes a careful character of the damp, lush, gothic landscape of the Pacific Northwest, and local landmarks soak their way into Percy’s scenes: from PSU’s Park Blocks to the Sandy River—and even the setting of our own foiled terrorist attack, the Christmas tree lighting at Pioneer Courthouse Square.

But another Grimm this is not. Monster narratives may be in vogue, but Percy’s novel stands out from the pack as an allegorical tale of post-9/11 America that asks serious questions about identity and xenophobia. Here, the werewolf is the ominous Other—unknown, separate, and therefore feared. Call it lycan via Lacan. Red Moon does what good art should: it asks us, without preaching, to interrogate not only the worlds within us, but those around us, too. Benjamin Percy will read at Powell’s Cedar Hills on May 10 at 7.

Head to Portland Monthly's Culturephile blog for our Q&A with Benjamin Percy