CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

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.

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Tags: Dance, Review, modern, fertile ground

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.

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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.

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Tags: Theater, Review, fertile ground

Review: (I Am Still) the Duchess of Malfi

At Artists Repertory Theatre through Feb. 12

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Jan 14, 2012 at 12:00PM 1 Comments

Photo credit: Owen Carey

Artists Repertory Theatre’s contemporary re-imagining of the Jacobean revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, re-titled (I Am Still) The Duchess of Malfi, begins with the portly Cardinal (Todd Van Voris) standing in a spotlight, back to the audience, bloodstains bleeding through his shirt from self-flagellation. Three men in black robes and masks dress him in red and white vestments as Carmina Burana-style choral music bombards the audience. A full-blown gothic tragedy is in order, it seems, until the Cardinal snaps his finger and demands of his manservants, “cell phone.”

So former-Portlander Joseph Fisher’s script quickly unfolds, injecting a biting modern wit into the macabre story of the Duchess. And if you’ve a stomach for violence and a taste for psychological thrillers laced with sardonic humor (i.e. you dig Quentin Tarantino), you’ll likely find it a sexy contemporary makeover of the 400-year-old revenge tragedy.

The Plot

Fisher reduces the characters from John Webster’s 1623 classic to the essentials: the Cardinal and his crazy brother, Ferdinand (Jake Street), their sister the Duchess (Sara Catherine Wheatley), her bodyguard Antonio (Vin Shambry), her handmaid Cariola (Camille Cettina), and the mercenary soldier, Daniel de Bosola (Chris Murray). The main difference is Delio, originally a shell of a character who functions as a sounding board for other characters’ exposition, is now a gay gossip of a narrator who steps in an out of the action, addressing the audience like he’s our tour guide to the juicy, twisted, royal scene of Amalfi.

The first act proceeds with a clip, establishing Amalfi as a modern-day, church-run, European city-state, if it were filtered through the celebrity gossip site TMZ. The Duchess, played with a red carpet strut by Wheatley, is just finishing the mourning period for her deceased husband, the Duke. Her brothers, who need her beloved Princess Di-like status to distract the common folk from their cruel rule, demand that she remain a chaste widow for the rest of her life and assign Antonio to watch her day and night. The Duchess sweetly obliges, but as soon as they depart, she tells Antonio she has seen him watching her and insists that they marry in secret, pulling dress and suit from her Gucci shopping bags. Suspecting she might have something up her sleeveless gown, her brothers command Bosola, played by Murray with a manic cockiness reminiscent of a young Christian Slater, to pose as her stable boy in order to spy on her. The act climaxes in a somewhat over the top, yet well choreographed, fistfight between Bosola and Antonio at an Amalfi disco set to Britney Spear’s “Til the World Ends.”

I left for intermission feeling that most of the characters were rather one-dimensional and predictable: the cold, arrogant Cardinal, the spoiled Duchess, the stalwart bodyguard. And although Fisher’s script is funny and the physical humor well directed by Jon Kretzu, comedy so saturated this adaptation that I wondered how or even if we were going to descend into the dark, violent tragedy of the original, where Bosola ultimately strangles the Duchess and her children, and then in an act of unexplained and somewhat unbelievable remorse, goes on to kill the Cardinal, an equally unbelievably remorseful Ferdinand, and, accidentally, Antonio. Press materials for Artists Rep’s world premiere had said the new Duchess “defies her brother’s chess game of power, manipulation and morality.” Perhaps, I thought, this version wouldn’t end in tragedy then, but with the Duchess prevailing.

Suffice it to say my hesitation was premature. The first half was but the Entertainment Tonight pre-show.

The second half opens with the Duchess restrained in a hospital bed, a prisoner of Bosola. Having discovered her relationship with Antonio, the Cardinal instructs Bosola to torture her until she renounces her title, so that the people will hate her and he can appoint a new duchess. But whereas Britney might have been all too quick to shave her head and abdicate her celebrity throne, the Duchess refuses. As Bosola and the Duchess pitch into a battle of wits, will, charm, and insults, the play evolves from Real Housewives of Amalfi into an intense psychological thriller.

A Re-Imagining

The influential English critic Kennath Tynan echoed several centuries of forebears by condemning Webster’s original for “the irredeemable mediocrity of its dramatic evolution of human passion,” which is the stuffy way of saying that the characters go to childishly absurd levels of violence and experience ludicrous changes of heart. But in Fisher’s snappy yet drawn out dialogue in the torture scenes, first of the Duchess and later of Antonio by Ferdinand, he instills motivation into the characters’ stories, giving weight and depth to figures that seemed rather flat in the first act (and certainly in the original tragedy). Wheatley’s increasingly gripping performance as the Duchess in particular goes from a sweeter play on Paris Hilton to the prideful gravitas of a noblewoman, as she recounts her marriage at age 13 to the Duke as being “handed over like a kitchen appliance and used as one.” It was her endurance of his groping and abusive hands that earned her title, and we believe her when she refuses to relinquish it, insisting, “I am still the Duchess of Malfi.” Murray’s unhinged yet charming Bosola also reveals secrets, pulled out by the steel-willed Duchess (“You’re an appliance like me, just a different brand”), that justify his ultimate change of heart.

As the action grows violent, and it gets very very violent, the script’s humor comes to serve a new Brechtian purpose, allowing us to watch the horror unfold without being consumed. It’s one thing to see someone tortured on TV; it’s another to watch it live 10 feet in front of you. But the show draws on modern references, from Shepard Fairey to Occupy Amalfi, as well as fine comic timing on the part of the actors, to incite laughter that manages simultaneously to round off the edges of the violence while also polishing the play’s meditation of power, status, and our need for idols—in today’s case a celebrity kind that has replaced the religious and royal ones of yore.

That said, not all the modern injections stitch up so nicely. Delio as swishy gay narrator, played with finger wiggles and ‘darlings’ by Nicholas Hongola, seems written for an audience that still finds The Birdcage edgy. His constant interruptions in the first act, while garnering many a laugh, weaken the play’s flow. In part, it’s his appearance mainly as a character and not as interrupting narrator in the second half—where he too is fleshed out with newfound ambiguity—that allows the psychological tension to simmer and boil. But he returns at the end for a final address to the audience, and while some closing words might be necessary, his nice moral conclusion and stage equivalent of walking off into the sunset wraps up this meat grinder of a tragedy in too clean of a bow.

We might be overly nice in Portland, but that needn’t mean we can’t handle some good new-fashioned tragedy every now and then.

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Tags: Theater, Review, fertile ground

Fertile Ground One-Liners

Next week, Fertile Ground Festival will present more than 60 performance works. We asked playwrights, “What’s your favorite line?” and they hit us with their zestiest zingers.

For individual performance dates and times, visit the Fertile Ground Calendar .

Posted by: Anne Adams on Jan 12, 2012 at 07:00AM 2 Comments

In New York you can’t make a living with misery. You have to resort to obscenity instead.
A Live Dress by Martha Jane Kaufman

You come here every night, sing your heart out, get ‘em all worked up so they get drunk on cheap booze, smash each other with chairs and bottles, until they collapse in each other’s arms, all in a glorious belch of genuine intimacy. Sounds very fulfilling.
Manful! by John Servilio

Knock it off, Man! We sit around day after day in this stinking heat, swattin’ flies and talking sh—, then something finally happens, and you get bent outta shape.
Triptych Americana by Karen Alexander-Brow

Being a bit hard on The Mum today, are we?
Kookaburra by AJ Doherty

Young lady, even if I wanted to be bad, it wouldn’t do me any good. Not without twenty-four hours notice and a doctor’s appointment.
Dad, I Hardly Know You by Gary Corbin

I’m sorry, I, it was tougher than I thought it— Okay. Okay. I, I still need to pull his teeth though…
Red Hands by Matt Haynes

Once upon a time, giants ruled the world.
Splasher by Ellen Margolis

Their kidneys weren’t filtering blood; their lungs were shrinking; their brains degenerating— even their taste buds had atrophied, so naturally they volunteered. Nearly eight hundred people volunteered.
Gift of a Thousand Tongues by Fengar Gael

Do you know what it’s like to ache all over and not be able to keep food down for a week at a time, and to have your aunt compliment you on the weight you’ve lost? Do you know what it’s like to be seventeen years old and go through menopause?
A Pretty Girl with Cancerby Dave Chapman

Grief is a cruel master.
Scrooge and Marley Have Dinner in Hell by Dave Chapman

Our backs were straight and instead of lowering our heads, we closed our eyes to the scene of our humiliation.
Cafe Baghdad by Sacha Reich

I laid my head down on my desk and prayed to God that I would not be a broken man
Redneck Mormon Thespian by Cory Huff

We like it, you see? The terrifying beauty of this world. The Dictators, the burning churches, beautiful monarchs with missing fingers. We crave it. We’re insatiable.
(I Am Still) The Duchess of Malfi by Joseph Fisher

In conclusion, don’t forget to go to ‘changeboliviatobandivia.com’ and register your vote to give Antonio Banderas his own country—his birthday’s coming up and it would mean so much to him.
One Day, a musical by Kevin Muir

We wouldn’t plan immediately. Just hang out and let an opportunity slip into our lives.
Best Son by Paul Handley

The sex you had last night. The eggs you had this morning. The sound of my voice right now. At the moment of creation, all of those things existed as unrealized potential, lying in wait.
Dear Galileo by Claire Willett

Double, double, Willamette and bubble —
How to Talk to Little Girls by Tina Connolly

Just between you and me, I think you’d look quite dashing if you let me plant bananas and maybe some radishes on your neck.
Skin Garden by Jeremy Benjamin

I know that this might sound strange, but I always loved olives and he, never. No, did not, would not touch them, did not like them, would not eat them. And that’s how I knew, and that is how I knew.
Something’s Got a Hold of my Heart by Hand2Mouth

This might seem like a funny question to ask somebody in southern Missouri, but do you, by any chance, have access to firearms?
The North Plan by Jason Wells

I can yield to anything but temptation.
-Oscar Wilde, from Famished by Eugenia Woods

Goldilocks: Bitch is a noun and a verb and I got both covered with a rap sheet to prove it.
Alpha Bitch by Eugenia Woods

If we take him down to the jail and turn him in, what you think they’re gonna do? Just open the doors and let him go back to his cell? And if they do, how is hegonna get out? They killed his last hope. We don’t have money for the lawyer to try to find some loophole.
Asylum No More by Sandra de Helen

Perdóname, cabrón, pero no soy una criminal. (“Forgive me, a—hole, but I’m not a criminal.”)
B’aktun 13 by Dañel Malán

What happened to the Woobbie? Soupy? Toodles, Harry, Teddy, Sue, Snuggles? We lose the ball, we drop the ball for something bigger, better, manly, the video game, baseball bat, the gun, trying to be the man. The Wild Man.
Kingdowm by Nick Zagone

I’m no genius, but my short educational tenure has taught me that maybe there should be a long term commitment to ending poverty before you destroy the public education system.
A Noble Failure by Susan Mach

The force of this feeling is not static. No. It is a moving energy. A fluid force. A flow. It is like the blood coursing through your veins, the blood coursing through mine. Can you feel it?
Spellbinders by Brad Bolchunos

Folger snatches me up in his mighty jowls and suddenly I’m as weightless as an astronaut eating sponge cake on the moon.
Last American Gladiator Part 3 by Slash Coleman

How does an 11-year old ‘nurd’, living in the middle of nowhere, act out his 007 fantasy? I find the key to my neighbor’s house…sneak in while she’s at work, and eat a bowl of Neapolitan ice cream.
Teenage Commando by auGi

I like chocolate turtles with pecans. I don’t like babies much—they’re too small and you can’t eat them. Well, I guess some people might eat them… But that’s just plain sick.
Ruby Rocket, Private Detective, animated film short by Sam Niemann and Stacey Hallal

The penguin is the saddest of all God’s creatures: he cannot masturbate because his arms are too short.
David Saffert’s Birthday Bashstravaganza 2! Older & Wisier by David Saffert

Hundreds of miles of terrain, scrapes with death, mosquitos, eye gnats, thorns, near drownings, icy winter weather, starvation, endless rain, boiled elk fondue, difficult negotiations in which the peace of the nation hangs in the balance…how can you endure such things and still find yourself terrified by some lousy big footprints?
Sacagasasquatch by Brad Bolchunos

Oh heavens to Betsy! He don’t love you. He just wants to drive your truck!
Oil Change the Musical Comedy by Klay Rogers

In Portland, there are more sex clubs per capita than practically everywhere else in the nation and every year during the Rose Festival thousands of sailors get serviced here–the City looks the other way.
Stories: From Survivors of the Sex Trade by Ann Singer

Yeah, there’s no ‘purity of urine’ competition in the Miss America Pageant.
Graceland, Paraguay by Jason Rosenblatt

I always thought traveling by airplane was like padlocking a canary in a cage, throwing it out the window, and telling it to fly! Fly for your life!
Waxwing by Emily Gregory

Are you confusing sodomy with lobotomy? Again?
Satanic Organics by Jason Rosenblatt

If I was reading a novel, I’d have seen the foreshadowing; but this was my life, so I missed it.
City of Roses/City of Thorns by Eileen DuClos

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Tags: Theater, author, fertile ground