CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

First Thursday Sampler

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Feb 02, 2012 at 03:00PM 0 Comments

Sculpture + watercolor

Mel Katz’s Anodized Aluminum and Henk Pander’s Worlds Apart at Laura Russo Gallery

Katz, one of Portland’s best-known sculptors for over 40 years, imparts his latest exhibition of large aluminum pieces with his trademark use of vivid colors and odd, organic shapes. In Worlds Apart, Pander, another veteran local artist, unveils his uncanny plein-air watercolors depicting somber expressionist landscapes.

Prints

David Hockney at Augen Gallery

British Printmaker Hockney has been compared to artists like Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. This collection features etchings, screenprints, and lithographs from a career that spanned 1965 to 1998, when Hockney left conventional media printmaking to focus on digital and traditional painting.

Sculpture

Joe Thurston’s Nothing Leading Anywhere Anymore Except to Nothing at Elizabeth Leach

Having established himself as as one of the Northwest’s most versatile painters, from portraiture to gestural abstraction, Thurston is leaving the two dimensional behind, and his shift to sculpture promises to be monumental. His rugged, monolithic containers will take over the gallery and possibly invade the viewer’s space as well—mentally, if not physically.

Big art explosion

The 100 Show at Wieden+Kennedy

Never short on good ideas, the folks at W+K asked hundreds of artists to submit a 10”x 10” piece of art with no restrictions on medium, with the plan of displaying them in the building’s gallery and pricing each at $100, of which half will be donated to MercyCorps and half will go to the artist. Apparently even less short on friends, they’ve received over 900 pieces from local and international artists, photographers, illustrators, painters, and more. Seems the only thing they are going to be short on is wall space. (Or you can shop online.)

Smaller art explosion

Deadstock at Compound Gallery

If 900 pieces of affordable art strike you as a little overwhelming, but you still want to support a good cause, head to Compound for Deadstock. Referencing the retail term for merchandise that does not leave the shelves or the warehouse, the show invites artists to dust off some of their disregarded products and works—their surpluses of creativity, if you will—with part of the proceeds going to the Right Brain Initiative program of the Regional Art and Culture Council.

Math paint + found objects

Xylor Jane and B. Wurtz at PNCA’s Feldman Gallery & Project Space

This two-artist show emphasizes the simplicity and sublimity of their artistic process. Jane utilizes mathematical algorithms as a basis for her intricate paintings on wood panels, while Wurtz adopts mundane found objects like string, socks, buttons, household implements, and plastic bags in his sculptural assemblages.

Meditations on mail

Clouds Inclose Comets: The Envelope at PDX Contemporary Art

Naysayers warn about the death of posted mail (and granted, post offices are closing), but the envelope still pervades our lives and will continue for a long time to come. In this group show, a variety of skilled artists riff on the unlimited potential forms and functions of the envelope.

The First Thursday art walk is a monthly event held by an assortment of galleries in Portland’s Pearl District. For more about Portland arts events, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

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Slideshow: Madame Butterfly

Posted by: Anne Adams on Feb 02, 2012 at 02:00PM 0 Comments

©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

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©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

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©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

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©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

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©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

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©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

Poor Cio-Cio-San. First she falls for the fickle charms of US Naval Officer Pinkerton, even forsaking her family’s religion, Buddhism, to make herself a more suitable bride to the Westerner. When her handsome blonde boyfriend departs for America, she faithfully roosts in their lovenest awaiting his return, never suspecting that he intends to leave her in the lurch. Against the sunset-hued backdrop of pre-World War Nagasaki, Butterfly gradually realizes she’s been had and succumbs to her shame, eventually committing hara-kiri, a ritualistic Japanese suicide. The nickname Pinkerton has given her, “Butterfly,” becomes an overt metaphor for their relationship: He, the butterfly collector, is compelled to capture a thing of beauty and pin it to a board—nevermind that in the process, he’s stabbing the fragile creature in the heart.

Puccini’s melodramatic, lovelorn gut-wrencher Madame Butterfly opens tomorrow at the Keller.
Click through the attached slide show to preview Kelly Kaduce’s kimono-clad performance.

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Talking Love and Sex + 5 Questions for Arianne Cohen

Hate Valentine’s? Go to these three talks to learn to love love again (or at least sex). Plus, the author of The Sex Diaries Project talks with us about how Portlanders differ in their erotic and romantic proclivities.

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Feb 01, 2012 at 04:00PM 1 Comments

Monday, Feb 6 offers a choice between the science of love and gushy radio stories about love that will 100-percent-for-certain make you blubber like a well-cherished babe:

As part of OMSI’s beloved Science Pub lecture series, past pub favorite and OHSU biologist Larry Sherman delves into the chemicals in your brain that drive the compulsion we call love in his talk, “Lust, Chocolate and Prairie Voles: The Neuroscience of Pleasure and Love,” at the Bagdad Theater at 7.
– or –
At Powell’s, Dave Isay, the founder and guiding voice of NPR’s crazy popular Friday morning tearjerker StoryCorps, shares stories of the heart from his new book, All There Is: Love Stories from StoryCorps. He normally plays his favorite excerpts from the thousands of oral histories they’ve recorded, making his talks some of the most emotionally gripping around. I promise you will cry. I’ve seen it before; it’s like he’s a King Midas for happy tears.

If you’re interested in the steamier side of things, then head to Powell’s on Wednesday, Feb. 8 at 7:30 for NYC transplant Arianne Cohen’s talk about her new book, The Sex Diaries Project: What We’re Saying about What We’re Doing. She’s spent several years compiling diaries about sex from a wide range of people—young and old, gay and straight, married and celibate, prudish and slutty, and everything in between. Along the way, she’s teased out some bigger themes and surprises. While we like to consider ourselves objective, dispassionate journalists, we couldn’t help but be a little intrigued:

How did you get started on the Sex Diaries Project?
It was a bit of a fluke. I wrote a cover story for New York Magazine in 2007 on New York City sex diaries, and the response was so good that it became a weekly online column of diaries. I soon realized that what I was reading was not what I had expected. What many people are actually doing in their private lives is wildly different from our culture’s rom-com sense of monogamous coupledom. So I began expanding outside of NYC, and commissioning wide and far.

What was it like to become a real life Carrie Bradshaw?
I won’t lie: it rocked. I found myself on every sexy invite list one would hope to be on. It was a great way to get an education. I did the column until 2010, when I moved to Portland.

What sort of patterns have emerged as you’ve compiled these diaries?
Lots. I think the thing that surprised me most was the realization that couples are like little two-person companies. Some make widgets; others provide customer service. And it goes much better for all involved if everyone understands what kind of company they’re in. The book outlines the three main types of couples I found, and the pros and cons of each.

What do you think your readers will find most surprising as they peek into others’ private lives?
I think there’s this idea that everyone is either in a long-term relationship, or looking to be in a long-term relationship. And when you read the diaries, that’s not what you find. At any one time, people are doing lots of different things—there’s a whole world of ways you can live out your private life. There are no rules.

You’ve been in Portland for two years now. How do sex and relationships differ in Portland from other places?
There’s more kombucha, and less f-word dropping. Here diarists talk about “their process” and “the connection” and "growth.” When I first started reading them, I’d read entire entries and have no idea what the diarist was talking about.

And breakup behavior here is very different. In New York City, diarists would leave relationships on horrible terms, doing things like screaming “fuck you” and then never really see each other again. Here, diarists know they’re going to bump into each other for the rest of time, and thus really go out of their way to avoid drama. Sometimes that means avoiding the discussion altogether, and just smoothing it over. It’s not altruism—it’s self-protection from future nausea.

We love to think of ourselves as unique, progressive, and sustainable. Does that extend into the bedroom?
Emphasis on sustainable. There’s a large population of people here who change partners every year or two for decades on end. Whether that’s progressive or not depends on your point of view.

What’s next for the SDP?
I’m doing a college tour this fall, Sex Diaries Project on Campus, having students keep anonymous diaries beforehand, and parsing out precisely what’s going on in their bubble. I can’t wait. And I’m developing a TV show based on the concept, which is very fun. Please feel free to come keep your own diary, or read other peoples’ diaries, at sexdiariesproject.com!

For more about Portland arts events, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

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Tags: 5 questions

Laura Gibson’s steamy new music video

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Jan 27, 2012 at 04:00PM 0 Comments

Laura Gibson just premiered her gorgeous new music video for “La Grande” over at NPR. Directed by local music video auteur Alicia Rose (whose video for "Cake’s Mustache Man just premiered on MTV2), it’s a Gothic tale about a woman checking into the eerie and beautiful Hot Lake Hotel in La Grande, Oregon, where people vanish into wisps of smoke, lost in the steam billowing from the 208 degree hot springs. Gibson described it to NPR as a “cross between Mary Poppins and The Shining.” In other words, the perfect way to end your week.

Gibson’s new album of the same name, La Grande, is out now. Read our review. Or catch her record release party at Mississippi Studios on Friday, Feb 3.

For more about Portland arts events, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

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Sun Angle + Stay Calm at Rontoms

Watch a cool music video, and allow us to demonstrate Portland’s astronomical band-to human ratio.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Jan 27, 2012 at 06:00AM 0 Comments

We’ve long suspected that Portland has more than one band per capita, and Sunday’s bill at Rontoms only strengthens that case. Six artists from 8 local bands matriculated last summer into the two new supergroups:

1) Sun Angle = Marius Libman (better known as DJ Copy) Papi Fimbres (from Please Step Out Of The Vehicle, and O Bruxo), and Charlie Salas Humara (of Panther).

2) Stay Calm = Claudia Meza (formerly of Explode Into Colors), Zac Pennington (Parenthetical Girls, Xiu Xiu), and Joe Kelly (formerly of Panther and 31 Knots).

Let’s see…that makes 10 bands (that we know of)…divided by 6 people…averaging 1.6 bands a head. With this level of saturation it’s a blessed mercy that so many of our local music-makers sound so good, as evidenced by the following Stay Calm song:

For more about Portland arts events, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

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Demitri Martin at the Newmark

The multi-talented Daily Show “youth correspondent” and Important Things host makes his own fun using song, drawings, and absurd infographs.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Jan 26, 2012 at 01:00PM 0 Comments

Around 2008, his mop top, calm demeanor, and deceptively teenaged looks made Demitri Martin a fixture as a “youth correspondent” on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show . While a glance at the now-38-year-old’s driver’s license might challenge the moniker, his comedy stylings fully support it. Combining animation, songwriting, and info-graphics, Martin’s approach is tailor-made for the multi-media and DIY-savvy millennial generation, earning him his own spinoff, Important Things . See what we mean in this episode—and who knows? It may whet your appetite for his appearance at the Newmark this weekend.

For more about Portland arts events, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

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Meshi Chavez: …or be dragged

Fertile Ground Festival delivers tense, spooky Butoh with a layered live score.

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Jan 26, 2012 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

Through a visceral solo performance titled …or to be dragged, Portland dancer, butoh performer, and choreographer Meshi Chavez explores the process of confronting the myriad choices life bombards us with. Set in a deep, blacked out theater mostly lit by single spotlights, with a live score of layered and filtered vocals by Lisa Degrace, his performance is stark, pained, and bombastic. He alternates between slow motion and frenetic movement, sometimes seeming to be literally tossed and torn by life’s options, though his white-painted face stays mostly frozen like a mask. Imagine peering into the dark, Butoh-tinted mind of a chronic undecider. Running less than 30 minutes in a studio intimately capped at 25 people, the show is like a quick but vigorous workout to energize you between longer Fertile Ground performances.

For more about Portland arts events, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

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Tags: Dance, Review, modern, fertile ground

Interior Margins at the lumber room

Exhibition closes Monday, Jan 30.

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Jan 26, 2012 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

This weekend is your last chance to immerse yourself in the lumber room’s exhibition, Interior Margins, featuring an intergenerational group of some of the Northwest’s most skilled women artists. Originally conceived during an eight-hour dinner party consisting of some of the artists, Lumber Room founder Sarah Miller Meigs, and Reed College Cooley Gallery curator Stephanie Snyder (one of our 50 Most Influential Portlanders), this is arguably the most thoughtful exhibition of the region’s art in a very long time.

The abstract work filling the lumber rooms beautiful loft space is uniformly strong and evocative, though sweeping in its range. There’s the seeming weightlessness of Victoria Haven’s spare Oracle photographs of geometric sculptures made by linking nail heads with rubber bands, where the pure white wall disappears in the photos, leaving only the crisp black lines of the bands and nails and the blurred black lines of their shadows as they seem to float and fold in on themselves. Then across the room is the deceptive denseness of Blair Saxon-Hill’s installation of burlap that has been coated in dry plaster and concrete and then draped on a wooden block leaning against the wall. Titled What that Entails, and What Comes After, the varying shades of gray and softly sifted concrete powder clinging to the burlap give it the appearance of the hides of office buildings that have been skinned, tanned, hung, and scraped by some stalker of skyscrapers. There’s the brightness of Judy Cook’s Chord 1 and Chord 2, like the abstraction of a crossword puzzle, to the darkness of Kristan Kennedy’s E.G.S.O.E.Y.S., where ink and gesso on linen pull you in and coat you like the swirling iridescence of an oil slick.

At last week’s talk, a couple of the artists, who have also been volunteering to staff the exhibition, described watching the art transform over the course of the day as the light streaming through the Lumber Room’s grand windows changed. We only wish we had a day to sit and watch quietly.

For more about Portland arts events, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

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Live Music Review:
The Brothers Young

Somebody get this epic 6-piece to a stadium, stat.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Jan 25, 2012 at 03:00PM 1 Comments

“Please welcome my favorite band,” quipped the (admittedly biased) Ritchie Young, frontman of Loch Lomond, last Saturday as his three younger brothers and their three accompanying bandmates crushed into the front corner of micro-venue The Press Club to honor his birthday. “I used to be in this band, but I got kicked out for being bossy.” An understated intro for the thrilling performance that ensued.

The official history of the group that straightforwardly goes by “The Brothers Young” spans more than 4 years of Portland scene participation, though one imagines Ritchie and his three bros have dabbled in co-music-making their whole lives. The stranger phenomenon is that this band, despite its established name and the epic scope of its sound, is all too often cornered in small rooms, suffering from a uniquely Portland problem: Too many musician fans, too few followers.

Fellow musicians are, in some ways, the best fans to have. Their vote of confidence can be taken to heart. They’re ardent listeners. They even help you tweak your levels. On the other hand, they’ll never effectively “talk up” your band because A) they’re busy promoting their own, or B) they only discuss bands with other band people, who are similarly preoccupied with their own projects. Besides this, fellow musicians have a bad habit of secreting a great band away as a private muse, a way to refill their own creative coffers alongside other taste-makers at a bar that’s never too busy. Bearing the dual credit and liability of their highly musical fanbase (and somewhat swept into the shadows of their more established older brother’s flourishing band), The Brothers Young have unfortunately been slow growers. That said, it’s high time they were ushered into bigger rooms more often, because they simply deserve it. And where musicians nod approvingly, mere music fans who hear this band are bound to swoon with amazement.

Siblings Dustin, Mike (HurtBird), and Dylan Young each sing with a full-throated, almost Tuvan multi-tonal quality, and not surprisingly, their genetically and chronologically close voices are also similar. As their arrangements alternate between solo, duet, and trio vox, they achieve an extraordinarily rich vocal timbre. Even more than their harmonies, their unison is arresting and almost unreal, with the triplicate of samey voices creating the same effect as a synthesizer or studio multi-tracking. As this single, strong voice of a unified multitude explores pseudo-Gregorian, wide-open melodic terrain, the brothers’ lyrics till the parched soil of existential themes. “There’s so much hate from everyone,” the world-weary brothervoice laments. “In the end, life and love are the same,” it also exalts. “Things will take their true shape,” it reassures (or warns?).

Of course, the Brothers hold no monopoly on sibling-bands or the accompanying vocal advantage. Fortunately, they’ve got other tricks in their bag—most notably refining the heck out of an arrangement. Sometimes in the course of a single song, they’ll expand into sky-filling thralls of intricately interlocked shoegazer riffs, then artfully collapse into simple interludes of a capella or insistent little rattles and clicks of percussion. Switching instruments and passing around maracas, the boys maximize the flexibility of their six-piece act, covering the wall of sound with an ever-changing mosaic, ala Spoon or Menomena.

THIS FRIDAY IN ASHLAND, The Brothers Young will make a rare festival appearance at Ashland’s Americana Music Festival —hopefully a shadow of bigger gigs to come. If things do, in fact, take their true shape, this band’s influence and renown can only expand.

For more about Portland arts events, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

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tEEth Debuts Make/Believe As Part of Fertile Ground

At Lincoln Hall this Thursday through Saturday, Jan 26–28 at 8pm.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Jan 24, 2012 at 05:00PM 3 Comments

tEEth dancers seem to have no problems getting heard. Photo by Aaron Rogosin

In 2010, longstanding local contemporary dance/performance art company tEEth launched Home Made, a minimalist, mostly-nude pas de deux about monogamy accompanied by a hypnotic vocal soundscape. It proved to be critics’ catnip, scoring a slew of rave reviews from local critics and garnering a $10,000 prize from Seattle’s premier arts promoters On The Boards.

Hoping to build on last season’s buzz and critical acclaim, tEEth is staging a quartet with Home Made’s Noel Plemmons and three dancers hand-selected from a national search as part of the Fertile Ground Festival. Presented by White Bird, the piece is called Make/Believe, and if the photos and video foretell anything, it’s going to wrap your brain up in knots.

“This piece will be more percussive, less melodic,” reveals artistic director Angelle Hebert. “The dancers will use mics and cabling as props to deconstruct the formalities of communication and social interaction.” Meanwhile, minimalist elements will heighten the audience’s somatic perception: sparse, sustained musical notes, warm lighting, sporadic outbursts of vocalization, and choreography that reveals and lingers on oft-overlooked body parts.

Make / Believe from tEEth on Vimeo.

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Tags: Dance, modern, fertile ground

Review: Famished

A “theatrical documentary” about what we crave and the troubles we get into stuffing our mouths feeds both the belly laughs and the indigestion. Through Feb 5.

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Jan 23, 2012 at 12:00PM 2 Comments

Jessica Wallenfels as Our Lady of Insatiable Desire feeds Isaac Lamb’s voracious hunger. Photo: Christina Riccetti.

When you walk into Portland Playhouse’s world premiere play Famished, you are given a card asking, “What are you really hungry for?” Tacos, sex, maybe a Pine State biscuit? Playwright Eugenia Woods and Portland Playhouse spent 18 months asking Portlanders such questions and digging into the myriad ways we go about satiating those hungers, be they physical, emotional, sexual, or spiritual. The resulting “theatrical documentary” is clever, well staged, and well acted, but nonetheless left me feeling somewhat overstuffed by the end.

Using themes from the interviews to craft its narrative, the production basically unloads an entire city’s dump truck of food angst onto three generations of a single family, following them from the birth of the second generation to the death of the matriarch. Along the way, it explores the various roles hunger and food play over the course of a life, touching on some Lifetime-special usual suspects—anorexia, depression-fueled binging—while throwing in many newer, keeping’-it-local foodie dysfunctions, from the middle generation couple fighting over his desire for a burger and her insistence that he eats too high on the food chain for their relationship to be sustainable, to the older couple arguing over the wife’s craving for processed sugar in defiance of her unprocessed, low-glycemic, whole foods cancer diet.

Developed through interactive performance installations at CoHo Theatre and Portland Center Stage, Woods’s witty script makes jabs at everything from Michael Pollan to macrobiotics, and the actors each have their moments, particularly Sharonlee Mclean as the grandmother, who one minute goes on a hysterical diatribe against foodie fascism, and in the next tugs at the heartstrings as she lies in her hospital bed listing all the things she wants to eat before she goes. The staging by director Megan Kate Ward is equally sharp, alternating between a long alienating dinner table, a white step structure, and a kitchen set consisting of a large wall with fridge, stove, and shelves all painted white, where the panel above the stove opens to become a food cart.

But compared to Portland Playhouse’s most recent production, Angels in America, where three hours flew by in seemingly half that time, Famished’s two hours of nonstop fighting over food drags on. It might be different if it were done in the multi-voice style of The Vagina Monologues, but too stuff all of these documentary-style food burdens into the narrative of a single family, where almost every scene revolves around some new food-based conflict, gets exhausting. The joys of food seem far overpowered by the pathologies, which focus primarily on foodstuff white people fret about (it was, after all, created from interviews conducted at places like food cart pods)—although the satirically self-reflective script is at least aware of this, pointing out at one point that diets are a privilege.

If you can’t get enough talk about food and enjoy watching Portland’s food fads skewered, you’ll likely find Famished entertaining. But at least for me, it’s two hours ultimately felt too literal and heavy-handed, like a chef who over seasons a stew for fear that you won’t get the flavors, when in fact they might taste better if they were allowed to simmer below the surface.

Famished – Trailer from Softbox on Vimeo.

For more about Portland arts events, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

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Tags: Theater, Review, fertile ground

Review: The North Plan

Portland Center Stage’s uproarious new comedy speculates on how a national crisis might redraw party lines.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Jan 23, 2012 at 08:00AM 0 Comments

In an all-too-plausible dystopian future, the US government has gone into “red alert.” As Facebook, Twitter, and online bank accounts flicker and founder, high-ranking government agents use the chaos to cloak a coup, targeting and detaining civilians as part of a master plan called Readiness Exercise 1984, penned by one (naive, heroic or Machiavellian?) Ollie North. (Famously testifying in ‘87 that he thought Reagan’s Iran-Contra scheme was “a neat idea,” has also apparently hypothesized that mass incarceration of America’s peaceful political dissidents might be neat.)

Playwright Jason Wells wisely contains the hypothetical national conflict in a microcosm, a police precinct in small-town Missouri with two temporary prisoners: loudmouthed redneck gal Tanya Shepke (Kate Eastwood Norris) who’s being locked up for DUI, and neurotic Jewish gay State Department worker Carlton Berg (Brian Patrick Monahan) who fears that he’s about to be disappeared by G-men for his attempt at whistle-blowing. While their two guards try to remain stoically impartial, it’s obvious where their differing allegiances lie. A part-time law student, police clerk Shonda’s (Ashley Everage) conscience is pricked by Carlton’s plight, but her boss, good ol’ boy police chief Swenson (Tim True) makes it clear that he implicitly trusts the governmental chain of command, and doesn’t cotton to Carlton’s kind.

The dialogue that ensues is nothing short of uproarious. Tanya’s pottymouthed exclamations seem plucked from a particularly countrified episode of Cops, while Carlton’s nervous urgency and straight-man stance are classic (if not clichéd) Jewish comedy tropes. Even as the severity of Carlton’s—and the nation’s—circumstance gradually dawns on the other characters, Tanya’s self-indulgent antics continue to rack the audience with irrepressible fits of laughter. There’s a strong sense that we’re all complicit in cognitive dissonance, laughing while the world might very well be ending. As director Rose Riordan puts it, we’re “trying to do the right thing when no one knows what the right thing is.”

Upon the arrival of two Department of Homeland Security agents, the plot, as they say, thickens. “It’s a new world, Pal—one without consequences for us,” declares titanium-jawed Homeland henchman Dale Pittman (Frederic Lehne) to his lighter-loafered partner Bob (Blake DeLong) while calmly tasering Carlton in the balls—but he’s mistaken. Showing how swiftly totalitarian tactics galvanize resistance, Wells suddenly redraws his characters’ party lines, pitting power-mongers against freedom-lovers regardless of their prior political or aesthetic leanings. Suddenly sympathizing with his prisoner, an indignant Swenson threatens: “I can call some dumb crazy redneck friends of mine…tell them there’s a couple of bureaucrats from Washington here to take their guns away….” These fighting words kickstart a darkly comic showdown that spills blue and red blood on both sides.

Philosophically akin to last October’s The Pain and the Itch and The Real Americans, and funnier than both of them combined, The North Plan ultimately unites its audience behind an unlikely hero: the blonde broad with the big guns.

For more about Portland arts events, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

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Tags: Theater, Review, fertile ground