CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

Review: Portland Center Stage’s Anna Karenina

Portland Center Stage’s brisk, lush production captures the spirit of the book but, thankfully, not the length. Playing through May 6

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Apr 19, 2012 at 03:00PM 0 Comments

Kelley Curran in Kevin McKeon’s adaptation of Anna Karenina, playing through May 6 at Portland Center Stage. Photo by Patrick Weishampel

Just as every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, to quote the opening sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, every theatrical adaptation is unhappy in its own way, too. Not to say that there aren’t many wonderful adaptations, but just that the adaptation process is a struggle that, much like a family, involves fights, oversights, and sacrifices, from which few exit unscathed.

Which is why the success of Seattle writer Kevin McKeon’s adaptation of the classic at Portland Center Stage, directed by Chris Coleman and running through May 6, is no small feat. McKeon manages to condense Tolstoy’s sprawling masterpiece about a woman whose love rattles the prison of her social situation into a brisk, ensemble-based production that captures the tragedy of the original, adds a slightly anachronistic humor, and—the gargantuan length of the original be damned—does it all with intermission in under three hours. Whew!

As quick summary, Anna Karenina, considered one of the greatest novels of all time, tells the story of a married, aristocratic Russian woman who falls in love with another man, eventually abandons her husband for him, struggles with her consequent exile from high society and inability to visit her son, and ends tragically. Meanwhile, two contrasting couples serve almost as alternate endings: Anna’s brother’s wife accepts his philandering and they move past it in a mutually agreed upon ignorance of sorts, and that wife’s sister marries a painfully honest but existentially awkward man for love and the two come to respect each other.

In order to cover all the explication of the novel, McKeon uses a clever fix of ensemble narration: one character says one line and another says the next, often taken straight from the novel. Combined with Coleman’s incredibly tight blocking—they’re 89 costume changes between the 17 actors in Act One alone!—the story unfolds like clockwork.

Fascinatingly, McKeon’s method recalls another powerful ensemble performance currently running, Portland Playhouse’s Brother/Sister Plays. While Brother/Sister’s ensemble narration creates a sense of the mythological from the everyday (read our review here), Anna Karenina’s creates an overpowering sense of inevitability—Anna cannot escape the fate of her social position no matter what she does. And it has the same unfortunate side effect of somewhat distancing the play from its emotional impact. It’s not until the end, when Anna is on stage alone with no further narration, that the emotion of the story becomes truly palpable, building to crescendo with the force of a, well, steam engine.

The grand marble pillars of the set, the intricate costumes, and the evocative lighting (designed by G.W. Mercier, Miranda Hoffman, and Ann Wrightson, respectively) are utterly gorgeous. At points, the theater appears all the world like a Maxfield Parrish painting, if he’d romanticized his fellow Victorians instead of Grecian maidens. But though the costumes are period, McKeon doesn’t make the same overture with the language, which is surprisingly modern and adds a layer of humor to the tragedy that keeps the play fresh—although I think Downton Abbey has shown that you can include zingers while staying period appropriate, as opposed to taking McKeown’s at times almost Clueless route (e.g. “Fuck the privilege”).

The humor is amplified by Keith Jochim, who practically steals the show as Anna’s husband Karenin, playing him with the emotionless dryness of a bureaucrat who doubts nothing and schedules everything—even sex. Kelley Curran, who had to learn the role in less than a week after the original actress took ill, plays Anna with an inner steel that devolves to paranoid hysteria by the end. Michael Sharon plays her lover, Count Vronsky, with turns equally seductive and slimy, devoted and selfish. And R. Ward Duffy stands out from the ensemble with affable charisma as Anna’s cheating brother, Stiva.

All in all, under Coleman’s able direction, it’s an epic, entertaining journey through a classic. We can just be thankful that McKeon wasn’t paid the same way as Tolstoy: by the word.

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Tags: Theater, Review, Portland Center Stage

Review: Shakespeare’s R&J

A gripping adaptation that makes Romeo and Juliet fresh again. Through March 18

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Mar 10, 2012 at 11:30AM 2 Comments

Sean Powell gives a stirring performance as the lovestruck…Mercutio? Photo by Casey Campbell

I’m not a big fan of Romeo and Juliet. Like most, I read it in high school and have seen more traditional productions and adaptations than I care to remember: Romeo and Juliet: The Musical; Romeo and Juliet Take Miami, starring Leo and Claire; Romeo and Juliet: Inspired by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Breasts; although thankfully not Gnomeo and Juliet—at least, not yet. For me, it comes down to the fact that it’s near impossible for the greatest love story ever told to rise far enough above its own overdone cliché to strike contemporary audiences with the power it no doubt once possessed.

So I don’t say this lightly: Google map Hillsboro’s Venetian Theatre, get in your car, and go see Bag&Baggage’s production of Shakespeare’s R&J before it’s over next weekend. Like no adaptation I’ve seen, it re-instills the raw, dangerous, thrilling, and emotional poignancy that the story lost somewhere between Gounod’s opera and Dire Straits’ “A lovestruck Romeo…”

The premise seems simple: four Catholic schoolboys discover a banned copy of R&J and proceed to act it out, each playing a number of roles. But playwright Joe Calarco, despite adding almost no new dialogue (the boys’ daily routine is established through simple choreographed pantomime), creates a nuanced and heart-wrenching story beneath the story.

At first, the boys attack the roles with the overacting zeal of, well, schoolboys, tossing their one copy back and forth, prancing their way through the female roles, and showing off for each other’s amusement. But quickly the story intrudes into their unexamined identities and relationships and begins to sweep them away. As Romeo and Juliet fall in love in the play, the boys playing their parts (Samuel Benedict and Phillip Berns) seem to fall, too, kissing for the first time with all the trepidation of two star-crossed young virgins at the start of their sexual awakening, lingering on each other’s lips well into the scene change, despite the shouts of “thou shalt not!” from the other two boys, who reel from the taboo.

Although an all male cast could simply be a return to the way theater was performed during Shakespeare’s time, Calarco’s play within a play introduces a homoerotic tension that creates a new subtext to everything said. In effect, two plays unfold at once, and yet the duality paradoxically seems closer to the beating heart of Shakespeare’s original than a straightforward contemporary production. Homosexuality, particularly in a religious all boy setting, creates a forbidden love that resonates with modern audiences in a way that forbidden love between warring families does not. Same sex couples today come far closer to the threat Romeo and Juliet faced of being rejected and even exiled by their families than any opposite sex couple.

Calarco doesn’t stop there, though. From the start, the boy playing both Mercutio and the Friar expresses a latent attraction to the boy playing Romeo, but then is forced to stand by and watch Romeo fall for Juliet (complex, silent drama unfolds between the boys even as they watch the scenes they’re not in). Performed with elastic, electric charisma by Sean Powell, he grows increasingly lovelorn and unhinged, and almost every line he says takes on an uncannily perfect double meaning that adds new charge. When Mercutio talks about how quickly Romeo deserted his first love, Rosaline, it’s like he’s talking about his own abandonment. And in his gripping death scene, as he casts a plague on the houses Montague and Capulet, he condemns too the boys playing Romeo and Juliet.

Meanwhile, the fourth boy, played by Ian Kane, is the sole homophobic holdout. He stands in for much of society then and now, watching with disgust as passions unfold.

Ultimately, none of the boys have the ability to deal with the dangerous intensity of the feelings the play awakens—lust, sensuality, disgust, love, hate. The play becomes so real by the end that it leaves them disheveled, sweating, and deeply changed, and the audience along with it. It’s the simple idea that a play can change a life, like Romeo and Juliet should do.

The stage is spare, but the actors fill it with such energy and zest, particularly during the grandly choreographed fight scenes, that it doesn’t for a minute feel empty. Though young, they all feel like seasoned Shakespearean actors capable of inhabiting his verse with all the added nuance Calarco’s adaptation instills, and they move with finely tuned harmony under the direction of visiting Glaswegian artist Jennifer Dick.

I understand: Hillsboro is a haul. Perhaps make an outing of it with dinner and drinks at the Venetian’s vaulted restaurant. But if you want to understand what it’s like to watch Romeo and Juliet for the first time again, untainted by all the predecessors, make the trip.

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Tags: Theater, Review, Shakespeare

Review: Red

Portland Center Stage’s bold but monochromatic production runs through March 18

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Mar 08, 2012 at 10:00AM 1 Comments

Photo by Patrick Weishampel

We’re reaching the vibrant red peak of what the mayor may as well declare Mark Rothko Appreciation Month. Portland Art Museum’s 45-piece retrospective of the revolutionary abstract expressionist has garnered raves; Third Angle Ensemble will perform Morton Feldman’s meditative homage “Rothko Chapel” this Saturday, March 10; and Portland Center Stage’s production of Red is half way through it’s run. It’s a grand assemblage of the art, the musicality, and the personality of one of the century’s most important artists, who also happened to call Portland home during his formative teenage years in the 1910s (read Portland Monthly’s profile).

But fast forward to the late 1950s, the setting for the Tony Award-winning play Red. Rothko labors on a series of commissions for New York’s Four Seasons restaurant in his sepulchral studio on the Bowery, when he takes on a naïve but earnest young assistant, Ken (a fabrication of the playwright, John Logan). Spanning two years in one act, the play delves into the meaning of art, the role of the artist, the Oedipal changing of the artistic guard, and, to a lesser extent, the relationship between these two men in a beautifully staged production, aptly directed by Rose Riordan, that brushes between exhilarating, provocative conversation and pompous, art history-seminar pontification.

Opening with Rothko asking his assistant “What do you see?” as he stares at a painting on the fourth wall between him and the audience, Logan’s script is a combative Socratic dialogue bordering on monologue. Rothko lectures, questions, and rants on the meaning of color, the history of Western painting, and the importance of Nietzsche, Freud, and Shakespeare. But mostly he talks about himself and the purpose of his art. “Just like that, I’m a noun,” he says during one tirade against the commercialization of art bought to match a sofa. “A Rothko….It’s cheaper than a Pollack.”

Ken’s responses, at least in the beginning, function merely as commas between Rothko’s paragraphs, thin stripes between his color blocks. But as time passes, Ken learns from his disdainful master and begins to fight back, accusing Rothko of being “the high priest of art…decorating a temple of consumption,” until finally he trades places and forces Rothko to question himself instead of others.

At times, this intimate portrait of a brilliant painter feels like a sacred glimpse into the complicated relationship between a master and his work. Golden Globe-nominated actor Daniel Benzali, playing Rothko with a bombastic misanthropy that paints a thick coat of narcissism over a desperate need to be understood, captures the troubled nature of a man whose only true relationships are with his paintings—a man to whom selling a painting is like “sending a blind child into a room full of razor blades.” But after a while, his monologues sag under their own weight until it feels like you’re stuck in an art history seminar that simply won’t end.

Unfortunately, the character of Ken, played by San Franciscan actor Patrick Alperone, does little to introduce the human drama that might be the glue to Rothko’s monologues, serving mostly as a sounding board and mirror with little but a tragically absurd childhood story to flesh him out. Alparone shouts his lines with such emphasis that it feels like he’s shooting his syllables out with the staple gun he uses to stretch canvasses. When he finally does get angry, it lacks real strength since he’s been shouting all along.

The sad result for me is a play that feels ironically monochromatic, lacking the tonal and emotional variations and shifting nuance of the paintings that made Rothko famous.

Which isn’t to say it isn’t worth seeing, particularly if you’re a fan of the artist and enjoy lengthy artistic rumination. The set, designed by Daniel Meeker with lights by Diane Ferry Williams, is a layered character unto itself, where you can see the light of the day shift in the high windows, and where Rothko’s commissioned paintings progress and multiply through the play. The interstitial moments between scenes, when Ken is clearing the studio or prepping a canvas, serve as deep breathes between bombasts. One particular scene change, when all the paintings rise and shift like some giant, blood red, Abstract Expressionist, inside-out rubrics cube, is a moment of such beauty it’s almost worth the ticket price alone. And the most powerful, emotional moment in the play is a scene in which the two men prime a large white canvas with red paint in a frenzied duet of sorts set to Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 that leaves both covered in sweat and paint. Although there are no words, it seems one of the few moments where they’re truly engaging each other in dialogue. Which makes one wonder if this play, for all of its heady bluster about art, might have done better to follow the old, clichéd adage: show, don’t tell.

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Tags: Theater, Review, Portland Center Stage

Review: Shakespeare’s Amazing Cymbeline

Portland Center Stage’s masterful re-telling hits the plays emotional pressure points, even though the new piano-playing narrator occasionally strikes the wrong key

Posted by: Martin Patail on Feb 27, 2012 at 04:00PM 0 Comments

Photo by Patrick Weishampel

For our preview of Chris Coleman’s production from our January issue, click here.

Chris Colemon’s Shakespeare’s Amazing Cymbeline succeeds in making a rather difficult play not merely accessible, but perhaps even meaningful again. The play, which debuted last month in the PCS’s Ellen Bye Studio in the Armory, is an intensely personal and intimate re-telling, eschewing the stately pageantry of so many modern Shakespeare productions and focusing instead on highlighting its emotional pressure points.

The play opens with the Pianist, an elderly black man who shuffles in under the glare of a single spotlight. Uncovering a dusty old piano, he plays a few somber notes and begins speaking, hinting ominously at trouble to come.

As his opening words fade out, the stage lights brighten on a square, stone slab, set directly in the middle of the Armory’s smaller, underground Ellen Bye studio. It is here that most of the action of the play takes place—beginning with the exile of Posthumus, a man of lowly birth who has married the king Cymbeline’s daughter without permission. Posthumus departs hastily for Rome, leaving his heartbroken wife Imogen to her father’s ire. From here the plot quickly spins off in multiple directions: the Queen’s machinations to get her feckless son installed on the thrown instead of Imogen; Posthumus’ wager against his distant wife’s faithfulness; Imogen’s eventual escape from the castle into Wales; a battle for the very freedom of the kingdom; Posthumus’ pivotal forgiveness of the man who sought to destroy him.

All the while, guiding us through this Shakespearean labyrinth is the Pianist. His music is appropriately minimal—melodic, sorrowful, and sometimes shockingly dissonant—but all too often the Pianist’s spoken explanations of the action onstage feel unnecessary. While some of his interjections are indeed moving—and provide occasional comic relief—it is often as if he is playing the role of a musical Cliff Notes—repeating the action onstage, but not adding to the drama itself. As the play reaches its climax, the screenwriter’s maxim, “Show, Don’t Tell,” frequently comes to mind.

Part of the problem is that the Pianist remains a faceless character from beginning to end. He frequently alludes to the Bard’s thoughts and frustrations (or perhaps they are Coleman’s)—but we learn nothing of the Pianist himself. His tone and dry wit hint at past trauma, but beyond that, his pain (and our sympathy) remains unscratched. Walking out of the theater, I found myself longing to know who the Pianist really was—and, most importantly, why Cymbeline’s story meant anything to him. Juxtaposition—as opposed to clever explication—may have been a more successful tact for the Pianist to take.

But like Posthumus, I find it easy to forgive these sins. The cast and costuming are superb. The staging is exquisitely restrained. And who can forget the particularly realistic looking severed head toward the end of the play. On the whole, Coleman’s resurrection of Cymbeline is a masterful work and one that deserves much of the praise it has garnered so far.

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Tags: Theater, Review, Portland Center Stage

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 2 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: Aaron Scott and 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.

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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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Tags: Theater, Review