CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

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

Review: West Side Story

Posted by: Anne Adams on Jan 05, 2012 at 02:00PM 2 Comments

We all know the story: Maria and Tony love each other, the Sharks and the Jets hate each other, and it all culminates (like the Shakespearean tragedy it reprises) in a handful of regrettable deaths. Yet remarkably, this Romeo & Juliet redux has maintained its popularity for half a century, thanks in large part to its glorious Bernstein/Sondheim songbook that people literally still sing all the time. Girls named Maria are frequently regaled with their namesake song “Maria,” “There’s a Place for Us” remains a standing anthem for a legion of misfits, and “One Hand, One Heart” is practically as common as Canon in D at weddings. (And let’s not overlook the occasional embarrassment of hearing a primping woman burst into “I Feel Pretty.”) On merit of the material’s popularity alone, this year’s Broadway production of West Side is sure to hammer the heartstrings.

That said, there’s room for improvement, thanks in large part to a recent production of Billy Elliot upsetting the Broadway bell-curve. Where Elliot tore into the politcally-relevant topics of gay pride and labor dispute with razor-sharp political teeth, West Side doesn’t hook into its parallel opportunity to address the immigration debate with quite the same veracity. The choice to go with the bilingual 90’s rewrite of the original script is a step in the right direction, legitimizing the Puerto Rican characters as realistic Spanish-speakers, but under-enunciation in both languages ultimately compromises Sondheim’s witty political commentary, especially during critical number “America,” while arcane 50’s gee-whiz vernacular is delivered sans modern spit, keeping the narrative firmly rooted in a bygone time and place. Maria’s “I can kill now because I hate now” is the sole line that pierces through the quaintness of the past with heart-stopping significance.

Realistic casting has always been a stumbling block for Story; famously saddled with the challenge of presenting “gangsters” who also gracefully jazz-dance, the play delivers more of the latter than the former. Lead Jets Riff (Drew Foster) and Tony (Ross Lekites) could borrow a little more attack from the world-class 10-year-olds who did Elliot ‘s “angry dance,” or from their pugnacious costar Action (Jon Drake). Lead Shark Bernardo (German Santiago), however, brings plenty of fuego to his gang, and ensemble Jets numbers (especially the sans-Riff “Officer Krupke”) are refreshingly ragtag. Anyway, the implausibility of dancing gangsters is arguably part of West Side’s kitschy fun, even lampooned in the late 90s by a few winking GAP ads.

While the cast’s synchronized snapping mostly remains tongue-in-cheek, scenic designer James Youman’s sets are seriously stunning and realistic. Drenched in sunset mauves, crisscrossed with chainlink, bars and bridges, they pop with a presence that feels as much Eastside industrial Portland, as West Side New York. It becomes relatively easy to imagine the Jets and Sharks rumbling right under the Morrison Bridge, somewhere in the concrete badlands around the Montage—with varying gangster intensity, but a unified devotion to these timeless, treasured songs.

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Tags: Theater, Review, musical, broadway

6 Magical Children’s Plays

Posted by: Anne Adams on Dec 22, 2011 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

The paunchy penguins of ZooZoo are masters of playful suspense.

Mess around as we may with charity galas and Secret Santas, the holiday season tends to be a time for family and a chance to bring some magic into children’s lives. But what do you do with loved ones who are too young for eggnog?

Portland’s thriving theater community is literally leaping to help, staging six great memory-making productions this weekend to thrill and delight all good little girls and boys.

A Christmas Story
Even kids with a bit of an attitude can appreciate the classic lampoon of young Ralphie, who wishes for a BB gun, and his bumbling parents who refuse him on the grounds that he’ll “shoot his eye out.” The true-to-the-movie staging delivers all the laughable moments you already love.

The Wizard of Oz
With reportedly dazzling live special effects, this story is a veritable twister, sweeping kids off their feet and into a technicolor dreamworld full of munchkins, fairies, and flying monkeys. An adaptation of The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1939 material should pass muster with picky grown-up patrons, too.

ZooZoo
Children can’t help but marvel at Imago’s realistic animal costumes and burst into giggles at the creatures’ funny antics. Meanwhile, adults will wryly smile at the deft way that this peerless Theater plays with social dynamics, silence and suspense. These guys are true masters of mime, physicality, and “working a room.”

Willy Wonka
This live redux of the movie musical, helmed by the mercurial chocolatier and steered by the bizarre and whimsical oompa loompas, delivers a candy-coated moral message, hilariously punishing greedy children while rewarding generosity, patience, and manners.

The Nutcracker
A ballet still counts as a play, right? Either way, kids adore watching Marie coast through a dream-world on a sled bed, gazing in wonder at dancing candy and recoiling in fear from swashbuckling mice.

Ahhh Ha
This gravity-defying, physically prolific troupe unleashes all its energy (and an oversized dog) on delighted crowds, presenting a variety show that—while not specifically Christmasy—is certainly a celebration.

For more about Portland arts, 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, overview

Review: Angels in America

Portland Playhouse’s long winter epic proves bone-chillingly, exquisitely beautiful.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Dec 21, 2011 at 05:00AM 3 Comments

Superhuman actor Wade McCollum will freak you out in the most thrilling and transcendent way.

One wants to move through life with elegance and grace, blossoming infrequently but with exquisite taste, and perfect timing, like a rare bloom, a zebra orchid…

Twirling hypnotically in a black and saffron kimono, Prior Walter muses about himself, but seems to be tacitly revealing playwright Tony Kushner’s vision, a long lucid dream that speaks in transcendental tongues and slides through seamless transitions. Leveling an unflinching gaze at Reagan-era AIDS, Angels in America is surprisingly not a tear-jerker, but rather a bracing spine-tingler. It’s less a heartwarmer than an envigorating, icy epic that finds beauty by tracing a swirling pattern across the frosts of unrelenting fate.

The Story
Prior Walter (Wade McCollum) is dying of AIDS. We know this early on, and during most of the play, we watch him progress bitterly and bravely toward his inevitable death. But it’s not that simple. Angels ’ split narrative maintains constant motion and shines a light on several key characters, flashing the many facets of illness, politics, religion, romance, sex, and solitude. A Mormon housewife (Nikki Weaver) retreats into a dizzy Valium high to escape her secretly-gay Republican husband. Fast-talking Dick-Nixon-style politician Roy Cohn (Ebbe Roe Smith) passes off his HIV diagnosis as liver cancer, and his homosexuality as good-ol’-boy glad-handing. Prior’s longtime boyfriend Louis (Noah Jordan) recoils from Prior’s illness and comforts himself with street hustler sex and Woody-Allen-esque analytical rants. Meanwhile, two cute old Mormon ladies ruefully share a cigarette on a hill overlooking Salt Lake.

The Strengths
Content notwithstanding, this production is technically perfect. Acting is ace; stagecraft, superb. Actors, not stage-hands, change the scenes, sweeping the moving parts of the set along with their actions, so that tangible elements drift in and out as if by the winds of imagination. In the whole 3 1/2 hours (which feel like 2) this reviewer finds nary a hole big enough to shine a pen-light through.* The tech in particular shows a marked improvement from Portland Playhouse’s recent World Trade Center debut Gem of the Ocean, which, though well acted, was beset with distractions, most notably a stagnant set painted in screaming teal. This time, Playhouse doesn’t merely meet the challenge of working in their new space, they’ve set a new high standard against which all future WTC productions may be judged.

Who We Love
Believe it or not, we love every actor in this play. No one is mis-cast, and no one ever misses the mark. The most heavily burdened role, obviously, rests on the toned shoulders of Wade McCollum, who alternately embodies illness, cynicism, vanity, vulnerability, madness, love and lust with the aforementioned superhuman, gorgeous grace. But we’d also like to give a special shoutout to Gretchen Corbett and Lorraine Bahr, who split all the bit roles from Rabbi, to crazy bum, to heavenly angel—and pull each one off with amazing alacrity. And Playhouse newcomer Berwick Haynes carries a lot of the comic relief with a nuanced flair.

In Summary
Even if you don’t plan to see another play this season, even if you are jaded about the subject matter, even if you’d rather indulge your cozy Christmas spirit than be given shivers— Angels in America is a non-negotiable must-see.

*"Oh, Culturephile, you say that to all the plays." Not so. Visit our theater archive if you want to cross-check.

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Tags: Theater, Review

Review: The Santaland Diaries

Posted by: Anne Adams on Dec 06, 2011 at 06:00AM 2 Comments

You’ve got to hand it to Portland Center Stage for pairing childish memoir A Christmas Story with David Sedaris’s jaded rant The Santaland Diaries . Where the former is extravagant and optimistic, the latter is sparse and sardonic, giving the PCS winter program a nice balance, like bitter black coffee with fluffy tiramisu.

In Christmas content, nostalgia looms large, and audiences tend to prefer ritual predictability to surprise. An “ain’t broke, don’t fix” spirit doubtless led PCS to stage Story as a faithful scene-by-scene re-creation of the 1983 movie, from costumes to cars. In the same vein, the company seemed primed to sign over Santaland‘s sole role of Crumpet the Macy’s Christmas Elf to the charming Wade McCollum in perpetuity. Alas, after a couple seasons of showing up with bells on, the Cabaret and Hedwig vet couldn’t resist the siren song of Portland Playhouse’s Angels In America . (Don’t fret, Portland. We’re not losing an elf; we’re gaining a gay!)

Into the curl-toed slippers steps Jim Lichtscheidl, whose credits include Coen Brothers film A Serious Man, and whose overall bearing maintains that title. Throughout his various impressions of addled Santa-seekers and manic Macy’s staffers, Jim maintains a sense of the narrator’s detached judgmentalism. The audience experience is, therefore, fairly complex: even as we marvel at the secondary characters’ quirkiness and naiveté, we perceive a steely glimmer of Sedaris’s disapproval shining through the corner of Jim’s eye.

Santaland isn’t merely a Christmas tale, but a deep exploration of the customer-service dynamic, pitting the whimsy that we’re sold (in this case, a snowy cotton wonderland peopled by magical elves) against the gears that grind behind the scenes (Breakroom, time card, vomit cleanup.) But while Sedaris is clearly tempted to demonize customers, he eventually reveals a philosophical twist: Cheerless providers are just as bad as thoughtless consumers; meanwhile, the real heroes are the believers on both sides.

“I’m not a good person,” Crumpet summarizes after watching a particularly devoted mall Santa bring a family to wistful tears. This bittersweet confession is a classic trope in comedy because it more or less speaks to us all. And it fits a Christmas cynic like a pair of candycane-striped tights.

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Review: Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Carol

Artists Rep replaces Scrooge with Sherlock.
But are they forcing a fit?

Posted by: Anne Adams on Nov 22, 2011 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

In Artist Rep’s rendition, Sherlock = Scrooge and Watson = Bob Cratchit.

This time last year, when A Christmas Story bumped A Christmas Carol from the PCS main stage, Culturephile ran through the relative merits of Scrooge v Ralphie. Now, Artists Repertory Theatre offers another substitute for Scrooge: Mr. Sherlock Holmes. In Seattle playwright John Longenbaugh’s rewrite of the Dickens classic, the great London detective paces his smoke-stained flat in his elegant brocade dressing-gown, then gets a moral come-uppance from the requisite three ghosts and a host. The stand-in for Bob Cratchit is Doctor Watson, and as for Tiny Tim: there isn’t one.

This kind of creative choice, intended to “shake up” cliches, also runs the risk of messing up tried-and-true classics. Ironically, while Artists Rep and Stumptown Stages opt for adventurous Carol variations and PCS continues to favor Midwest moppet Ralphie, 2011 would’ve been a prime season to stage the original Dickens tale. The current “Occupy” climate of rich-poor polarity would ring all too true for modern Americans, and Scrooge’s “Are there no prisons? No workhouses?” talking points could be pulled straight from the teleprompters at FOX News. Would that the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come had whispered in the ears of these theater companies before they opted to flip the script.

Watching Case, one can’t help but revisit what makes Carol tick: Scrooge emerges as an obvious villain who’s clearly at fault for current and future ills in his community. As we watch him review his own fairly universal nostalgias and regrets, we see him as an increasingly contrite and sympathetic pilgrim. We learn that if Scrooge weren’t a greedy workaholic, he wouldn’t have broken Belle’s heart. He’d have matured as a married (implied, happier) man. And if he changes his ways even now, he can still save Bob Cratchit’s faith and Tiny Tim’s life. We, the audience, are unanimous about Scrooge’s next moral step, and tremendously relieved to watch him take it.

But with Holmes in the hot seat, the ideology is far murkier. Longenbaugh’s admittedly crisp and elegant dialogue nevertheless sends Scrooge up on some nebulous, conflicting, and petty claims.

SHERLOCK’S “SINS”
~He’s too analytical to be sympathetic, stating, “People are puzzles and problems, nothing more,” and “Imagination and fancy can cause more damage than a match in a munitions store.” The ghost of Christmas present censures him thus: “There is nothing so dull as a man who only traffics in sharp observations.” No matter that this trait is what enables his famous deductions.
~He’s quit his usual detective practice to conduct chemistry experiments. Since when was changing one’s course of study considered dereliction? (Nobody tell James Franco .)
~He refuses to help exonerate a local clerk who has been falsely accused of theft, because another detective is already working the man’s case. Monsterous!
~He insults Christmas, calling it “the thoughtless exchanging the unnecessary.” Okay, that’s pessimistic. Still….
~He faked his own death and went globetrotting for three years, which we are made to understand was—at the very least—a rude and dishonest thing to do to his partner Watson. That said, Watson doesn’t seem to have suffered too keenly, and Holmes likely used his travels to gather new scientific insight.

Where Scrooge was a heartless oligarch willing to let Tiny Tim die crippled in the streets, Holmes is merely an antisocial-yet-effective intellectual who leads an austere and private life, holing up to solve the conundrums of chemistry. Is that really bad enough to spark supernatural intervention?

If their rap-sheets bore equal shame, then Sherlock would work fine as a Scrooge stand-in. As it is, the comparison feels a bit forced. Where modern Scrooges abound in the form of corrupt corporate CEO’s, who would qualify as modern Holmeses? Drug researchers? CSI’s? Doctor Gregory House? Characters who, despite slightly blunted empathy centers, are nevertheless on a valuable path of inquiry for a greater social good. Are their actions flat-out wrong? It’s a hard case to make. Further credibility is lost for Longenbaugh as we watch a character who is known to demand hard evidence abruptly swap his skepticism for an unquestioning acceptance of the ghostly apparitions in his midst.

Those who can coast through the holes in the play’s premise will be regaled by exquisitely acted characters, witty writing, a lush Victorian aesthetic, and even a steam-punk-style train car. This audience will no doubt resent the above analysis as much as Holmes’ cheerless clinking of beakers. They might even haunt Culturephile with admonitions, not realizing that the critique comes from an unfulfilled wish to be emotionally moved by a narrative that doesn’t fully deliver. For them, director Jon Kretzu’s notes summarize the more general grounds on which the play can be appreciated: “Are there any two fictional characters more real in our hearts and minds than Sherlock Holmes and Ebenezer Scrooge? We offer up this theatrical holiday greeting to you with a wish to celebrate the Sherlock and Scrooge that live within us all.”

In other words, it’s rude to overanalyze a heartfelt holiday gesture. Better to arrange these two beloved English figures between the candles on your mantle and admire them with a misty eye.

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Carol continues through December 24. 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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Review: Mr. Darcy Dreamboat

Posted by: Anne Adams on Nov 17, 2011 at 02:00AM 2 Comments

Camille Cettina’s cuteness doesn’t gloss over unfulfilled hungers.

Camille Cettina can certainly make 80 minutes fly by. With her sprightly storytelling, impish impersonations, literal leaps and bounds around the room, and coy curlings-up in an armchair, the self-confessed “avid reader” reveals a rich private fantasy world, peopled by various book characters. She re-enacts a two-dimensional tale from her first literary love, Nancy Drew, with childlike exuberance, hopping back and forth and changing voices to play all the parts. But as the scene tapers to a satisfying conclusion, Cettina holds up the book and reproaches it: “I just can’t live in your black-and-white world, where all swarthy men are bad and all girls in a simple cotton dress are victims. I feel like we’re growing apart.”

As she abandons Nancy in search of titillating new territories (VC Andrews’ tween soap-opera smut, a full-on romance novel that teaches her the word “libido,”) we understand that we’re about to watch a bookworm blossom into a butterfly.

She soon finds the perfect food for her growing intellectual and romantic curiosity: the Jane Austen canon (specifically Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre). Both the play’s namesake, Mr. Darcy, and Jane ’s antihero, Mr. Rochester, imbue the young reader with unrealistic romantic expectations: Darcy, who first seems distant, turns out to be preternaturally noble and devoted. Rochester, who hides his ex wife in the attic, is also eventually revealed to be noble, tortured, and capable of boundless loyalty and love. While she winks at the far-fetched scenarios, she also admits to absorbing them.

“Books get a little bit dangerous,” she confides. “You imagine a Darcy finding you.”

Hinting that her Austen-inspired desires are often dashed on the hard realities of life’s limitations, Cettina assumes a more troubled muse, Salinger’s Franny from Franny & Zooey. Staring spacily from her now comfortless armchair, she gradually unravels into a nervous breakdown. (Or Franny does. Right?) This is the part of the play where, as they’d say in hiphop, “sh* gets real.” Slumping to the floor, hoarsely murmuring the mantra, “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me,” Cettina plunges us past whimsy into the disillusionment that idealists know all too well. Mr. Darcy isn’t coming to save you, because Mr. Darcy doesn’t exist.

Climbing the side of her towering bookshelf like King Kong on a skyscraper, knocking books around in a hail of righteous rage, Cettina destroys part of her universe—then gradually retracts her freak flag back into a more comforting nook of cuteness. Closing with a monologue about her love of reading that essentially echoes her intro, Cettina effectively book-ends her performance in pro-literacy platitudes. But as with a book, it’s the stuff in the middle that matters—the shifting and fragile material that curls and crumples between the sturdy covers. In this show, and the persona of Camille herself, that ephemera remains “extremely loud and incredibly close.”

Pushleg Theater’s Mr. Darcy Dreamboat continues at Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center through November 20. 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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Glengarry with Gals?

David Mamet’s Glengarry, Glen Ross has been restaged to include women. Do they sell it?

Posted by: Anne Adams on Nov 10, 2011 at 03:20PM 0 Comments

Stunning image of Grace Carter by Holly Andres.

Here at the PM offices, mere feet from the cubicle where Culturephile is honed into relative readability, there is a chart. On the chart are large red drawings of partially-filled thermometers, which represent—you guessed it—staff sales goals. Three out of four of the names on this chart are women’s, and all of the corresponding thermometers are, at the time of this post, relatively full. The old notion that sales is a man’s game, is clearly passé.

It was a reasonable instinct, then, that drove director Tamara Carroll to split Defunkt Theater’s staging of Mamet classic Glengarry, Glen Ross evenly between genders, laying the juiciest plum roles (Levene and Roma) on the sales ladies. “We hope that the context draws attention to and questions the notion that power and masculinity are synonymous,” she writes in the playbill. “Are power and aggression exclusively masculine traits? How are men and women perceived differently saying the same words? Do women need to behave like men to succeed in predominately male fields?” Relevant questions all, though not earth-shattering for many workplace women (including this reviewer) who’ve already given this topic tons of thought. Perhaps it was a bigger eye-opener for male audience members, or a way for the small company’s cast to stretch their own acting muscles.

To that end, Roma (Grace Carter) rules the stage, striding around in a fitted feminine pantsuit and alternating between brash bravado and soft, seductive cajoling. Since Defunkt zealously adheres to the original Mamet script, Carter has to sell lines like,“Who ever told you that you could work with men?”—and she does so remarkably well. Less convincing at the performance Culturephile saw, was her counterpart Lori Sue Hoffman in the role of Shelley Levene. Hoffman raced through many of her lines and swore with a jarringly unnatural inflection. Ultimately, it was hard to tell where the nervousness of the character overlapped with that of the actor. Hopefully as the run wears on, her anxiety will subside and Hoffman will own the role rather than vice versa. Overall, the implications of the womens’ gender in the workplace might have been pushed a little farther through bolder blocking. Roma’s seductive advantage over her male client could have been demonstrated more overtly, or Hoffman could have used more movement to play up the “act like a man to make it” motto.

Defunkt’s choice to honor Mamet’s original script is arguably more controversial than the inclusion of women; in fact, those most familiar with Glengarry in its movie or Broadway form should brace for a couple of surprises.

In the 2005 Broadway rewrite of the play he penned in ‘84, Mamet removed ethnic slurs against East Indian Americans from the script. Oddly enough, Defunkt reinstates them. To this reviewer, however, this seems a defensible choice. Though the words aren’t right, they help show what’s wrong with the characters. Watching the salesmen make bigoted remarks, the audience quickly understands that this is a play without protagonists. When the salesmen quickly judge a “Patel” lead as a dud, we see how their need to make numbers and spot trends has the nasty side effect of indulging their prejudices and de-humanizing their customer base. It also illustrates an all too familiar behind-closed-doors office culture of mutually insured destruction, where all parties engage in “HR violations” with the tacit understanding that said violations don’t leave the room. This type of loose talk may not be easy to listen to, but it’s valid to portray.

But now, the worst news for film fans: There is no “Alec Baldwin” character (Blake) in the original Mamet script, and hence none in the Defunkt production! While not original, Blake’s lines have, for many, become indispensable to the story. On a par with “You can’t handle the truth” from A Few Good Men, or “You complete me” from Jerry Mcguire, the unforgettable Blake zingers have etched themselves firmly into mass memory: “My watch costs more than your car!” “My name is ‘F—- You, that’s my name.” “First prize is a Cadillac El Dorado, second prize is a set of steak knives, and third prize is you’re fired!”

In a Glengarry staging where none of this gets said, the missing lines ring louder than the spoken ones. To borrow a phrase from Blake, it takes brass balls to exclude this character.

The play on the whole had an unfinished feel. The intermission crept up unannounced, and the ending gradually dawned with no curtain call. That might’ve been attributable to the fact that in the second act there was no curtain; still, when the lights came up for the final time to no final applause, and no bowing actors, there was a sense that the work was left incomplete. Whether you’re a man or a woman, there are rules in this business, and one of them is, “Always be closing.” Hopefully the remainder of the run will meet its targets.

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Oklahoma! Closing Thoughts

A look back on the discussion that the all-black production inspired, and an apt comparison to another current production: Gem of the Ocean.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Nov 04, 2011 at 10:30PM 0 Comments

It’s been just over a month since Portland Mercury’s review of Portland Center Stage’s all-black Oklahoma! sent the winds of critical discussion sweeping down the plane. Noah Dunham contended that with an all-black* cast, it would have been more historically appropriate to see Jim Crow-era discrimination play out onstage. The lack of racial tension, Dunham claimed, caused PCS to miss its presumed target of “a new Oklahoma!.”

The play’s lead actor, Rodney Hicks, rebutted Dunham on the PCS blog. He justified the play’s historical premise by pointing out that a few all-black cowboy communities flourished at the turn of the century without too much outside intrusion. He also added that as a black actor, he relished the opportunity to play a role that wasn’t specifically written for his race and simply portrayed “who we all are as Americans.”

On behalf of Portland Monthly, I shared the following thoughts with the PCS messageboard :

It’s a relief when black actors are afforded the chance to portray the normal gamut of universal human emotion, outside the context of a struggle against racially-motivated oppression. While hammering away at that topic has brought gradual enlightenment, empathy and change, it’s also created an unfortunate Pavlovian reaction in many theater audiences: See a black person, brace yourself for racially charged themes. I admit I had that response myself a few months ago, when I caught Broadway’s Mary Poppins, complete with a [newly added] black villain that Ms. Poppins locks in a cage. When a period drama features mixed ethnicities, you naturally weigh the action against your perception of the race/class issues of that time and place. So in that context, the actor’s race “stuck out” to me, and the implications of empire and exploitation bothered me. Similarly if Oklahoma were a mixed-race production, audiences should be put on guard for era-appropriate Southern tension. But this production sounds like a good chance for audiences to shrug off their preconceptions and embrace the obvious: Black actors are just actors. Black people are just people. Why SHOULD a black Oklahoma be “a new Oklahoma!?” No good reason.

Interestingly enough, amid this dustbowl of discourse, Portland Playhouse debuted its own all-black* production, August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean , which reinforced the aforementioned audience tendency to equate black acting with the portrayal of the African American struggle. As slavery and racial persecution colored every line of dialogue, a couple of the cast members visibly suppressed their sophisticated modern style under a hangdog mantle of “slave” mannerism. They carried it off, no doubt moving their audience to a better understanding of a torrid time—but they also labored under the burden of black history throughout, and it’s easy to see why a talented performer wouldn’t want to be saddled with that responsibility every time.

Acting is one of the only professions where demographic discrimination is considered an acceptable occupational hazard. You simply can’t get the role, if you look wrong for the part. And all too often, race has been considered a casting deal-breaker, causing black actors to joke about resumés rife with criminal and slave roles. The recent production of Oklahoma! gave some great actors (singers/dancers…in Broadway parlance, “triple threats”) an all-too-rare chance to shine without enslavement to a heavy political subtext. What a beautiful morning.

That said, the fact that this discussion has (ahem) overshadowed appreciation for Oklahoma! ‘s production values and individual performances, suggests that Portland isn’t yet as progressive as we pretend.

*Each production included one non-black actor.

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