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A few weeks ago, after staged readings of short plays in The Frederick Douglass Project<\/a> by Corrib Theatre, actor\/director Bobby Bermea interviewed another Black actor, Curtis Maxey, onstage. The main thrust of Maxey\u2019s comments went to a feeling he said was prevalent among most of the Black folks he knows, performers or otherwise: (As I recall the gist of it) We\u2019ve had enough, at least for the moment, of depictions of Black trauma. We need a break. How about some shows that just show us being regular folks?\u00a0<\/p>\n I found that perspective understandable, but not, for me, convincing. (Perhaps, though, that\u2019s part of the rationale behind, for instance, the simple Black-family comedy Chicken & Biscuits <\/em>currently at Portland Playhouse.) I\u2019m much more in tune with a view that the Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks put forth in a recent interview with The New Yorker\u2019s Vinson Cunningham: \u201cThe marketplace is telling us that Black joy is what sells,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m very suspicious about what the marketplace wants me to create, because I know in my experience where real Black joy resides\u2014and sometimes that\u2019s in the place where there might be some traumatic thing that also happened.\u201d<\/p>\n Parks might have had in mind something like the ripple, the wave that carried me home<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>a remarkable play by Christina Anderson presented in a captivating co-production <\/em>by Portland Center Stage and Artists Repertory Theatre. As charmingly warm, personable and down-to-earth as it is politically incisive, poetically eloquent and emotionally grand, the ripple\u2026 <\/em>serves up Black joy that\u2019s been earned through generations of effort in the world and reflection in private places. It shows Black life in marvelous specificity and fullness, neither as tragic historical trap nor as clowning cliche. We see everyday people \u2013 just with an extra rock or two to push up the hill.\u00a0<\/p>\n Directed by Daniel J. Bryant, the production has a feel of practicality and also a look of luminosity, both afforded by Brittany Vasta\u2019s striking scenic design and Xavier Pierce\u2019s lighting, which make the tall tile walls of a swimming pool serve as multiple spaces, from family home to municipal battleground to eventual sea of tranquility. Anderson\u2019s story, about a family legacy involving the fight to desegregate public pools in a Kansas town in the 1970s, is full of heart, humor, and underplayed struggle. <\/p>\n As wonderfully written as it is, what may stick with you most here, though, is the acting. Lauren Steele \u2013 as Janice, the daughter at the center of what\u2019s essentially a memory play \u2013\u00a0 continues to look like a rocket ship of a young talent taking Portland on a thrilling ride. Andrea White is beautifully warm and centered as Janice\u2019s unsung mother, Helen. Chavez Ravine does fantastic double duty, as the voice of an unseen character called Young Ambitious Black Woman (mostly referred to as \u2018Young Chipper\u201d) and as Janice\u2019s sweet-but-brassy Aunt Gayle. <\/p>\n Most impressive \u2013 at least considering that he was a replacement who joined the show just before technical rehearsals \u2013 is Don Kenneth Mason, as the father, Edwin. He\u2019s exuberant, funny, playful, but also serious and passionate. Above all, he comes across as a relatable and highly specific character, not a generic Black dad. His struggles and triumphs are a cultural legacy, sure, but they\u2019re first and foremost his.<\/em><\/p>\n Black joy, after all \u2013 like all joy \u2013 is personal.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s that time of year when the nights are growing long and cold and humans seem reflexively to lean into the darkness, conjuring images and stories of evil, assuming the awful in the opaque. Which makes this the obvious time for The Stage Fright Festival<\/a>, a \u201cfestival of theatrical horror\u201d this weekend at Curious Comedy Theatre, featuring a variety of physical comedians \u2013 meaning, in this case, scary clowns \u2013 and others.<\/p>\n Speaking of leaning into darkness, Oregon Children\u2019s Theatre\u2019s Young Professionals company takes a trip to Southern France \u2013 which sounds lovely except that it\u2019s the middle of the 14th century and the bubonic plague is all the rage. Pestilence: Wow!<\/em><\/a> presents the existential dread and practical bumblings of humans in crisis as, in the description of New Play Exchange, \u201cpart reality television, part psychedelic fever dream.\u201d Sounds timely.<\/p>\n Though hardly what you\u2019d call a scary story, Lucas Hnath\u2019s compact chamber drama The Thin Place<\/em><\/a> sidles up to the supernatural, then poses questions about what\u2019s more unsettling: fraud or faith? The story concerns a young woman\u2019s yearnings to connect with her beloved but once-estranged and now-deceased grandmother. She meets and befriends a woman who works as a medium, who seems to divine much about her and her relationship to her long-gone Gran. But her desire to learn how to make contact with the other side for herself doesn\u2019t go as she expects.<\/p>\n Jen Rowe, artistic director of The Theatre Company, plays the young woman, Hilda, with an earnest, watchful intensity, but the show\u2019s energy center is in the charismatic Linda, who\u2019s part empathetic spiritualist, part working-class lass. The terrific Diane Kondrat makes the character by turns sweet, sly and steely, keeping the lines of both emotional affinity and narrative direction slippery, heightening the intrigue. Adding some looseness and dimension to the proceedings are Kerie Darner as another friend of Linda\u2019s, and Mario Calcagno as a political operative of some sort who has enlisted Linda to give pointers in persuasion to one of his clients. Calcagno \u2013 who I often thought looked self-conscious during his time as a Theatre Vertigo regular a decade ago \u2013 is an especially pleasant surprise here; both he and Darner play an extended wine-and-conversation scene with ease and assurance.<\/p>\n Both the title and the ending of The Thin Place <\/em>suggest that perhaps there really is something \u201cbeyond the veil\u201d and a way to get in touch with it. Whether or not that\u2019s true (it isn\u2019t, said the rationalist), this production is thick with the stuff of fine theater.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Bill Cain\u2019s The Last White Man<\/em><\/a> <\/em>\u2013 lovingly, scrupulously directed by Scott Palmer for Bag & Baggage \u2013 is a play about Hamlet <\/em>and Hamlet. That is, it\u2019s a multi-layered musing on Shakespeare\u2019s play and its place within cultural tradition and theatrical lore, as well as on the title character, his famously mysterious, mercurial psyche, and what he demands of \u2013 or visits upon \u2013 those who portray him.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sponsor<\/p>\n It\u2019s also a play about acting and actors. And that\u2019s where this production creates uncanny, if unintentional, echoes of its own text. (You can read DeAnn Welker\u2019s ArtsWatch review here<\/a>.) Presenting a backstage chronicle, in a cleverly scrambled chronology, of a high-profile Hamlet <\/em>production, it shows us three different actors wrestling with the role, their own egos, and at times each other. There\u2019s Charlie, the young Oscar-winner trying to legitimize himself via the stage; Rafe, the thoroughly prepared but unspectacular stage journeyman; and Tigg, the faded former star with the hidden powers of hard-won wisdom.<\/p>\n In the Bag & Baggage production, James Luster as Rafe does much of the heavy lifting, and his performance is strong \u2013 winning our affection, then squandering, but remaining at ease and in command. The script infers that Charlie isn\u2019t quite the actor the others are, but here that\u2019s sadly too true of Khail Duggan, who pushes his lines out in a rush, with no sense of the progress of thought or feeling. The character\u2019s clashing qualities \u2013 intelligence, cockiness, self-doubt, anger, etc. \u2013 are smushed into mere petulance.<\/p>\n But then comes the Seattle actor Tim Gouran (who\u2019d worked previously with Palmer at Company of Fools in Idaho) as Tigg. In a theater season full of admirable acting performances, this is one of the finest I\u2019ve seen: Measured, thoroughly considered while feeling off-the-cuff, infused with an understated charisma, framed in weariness (Tigg, we learn, is seriously ill) yet charged with an energy that\u2019s at once desperate and deeply grounded. I\u2019ll dip fully into (warranted) cliche: riveting, at moments, spine-tingling. Well worth a trip to Hillsboro.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m so sick of Mother Teresa! She\u2019s just like Sally Jessy Raphael, only different. Oh my god, I\u2019m rambling!\u201d<\/p>\n Hoo-boy, is she ever! Delivering a firehose of a monologue about her adventures and altercations during a normal (?!) day amid the stress of the big city, the woman in Christopher Durang\u2019s Laughing Wild<\/em><\/a> <\/em>is both a hoot and a worry. That is, amid the hilarity of her acidic opinions and unhinged antics are references to stints in mental hospitals and, despite a certain charm she has, a sense of barely contained menace. Brooke Totman gives all this a wonderful edgy energy, in a performance that\u2019s full of fine, precise choices even as it feels like a brick glued to the accelerator. In a matching monologue and in an odd second-act duet, the ever-skillful Darius Pierce is just as impressive, presenting a character with greater self-control and self-awareness, but under no less pressure from a mad and maddening world.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n This weekend also is your last chance to sop up some Chicken & Biscuits<\/em><\/a> at Portland Playhouse, or to peruse the houseplants in Stumptown Stages\u2019 Little Shop of Horrors<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n The maddening part of Macbeth<\/em>, to my mind, is that, the prophesies of the witches having come true so far, our rampaging protagonist seems to take their fantastical prediction about the manner of his death as assurance of his invincibility rather than as fair warning. Sometimes a little paranoia can be useful. But blunders (perhaps including that one?) apparently are the focus of Upon This Blasted Heath: a one-hour Macbeth<\/a>, the latest site-specific presentation from Speculative Drama, a \u201clive, immersive, outdoor performance exploring Shakespeare\u2019s spookiest play from the perspective of Macbeth reliving his mistakes.\u201d Dress for a tragic chill.<\/p>\n The theatrical and the spooky are twinned and twined yet again in Venomous House<\/em><\/a>, by Oregon Book Award-winner Steve Patterson, an \u201ceerie play-within-a-play about a theater company rehearsing a new script about an infamous, reportedly true English ghost story.\u201d Director Matt Zrebski, Patterson\u2019s compatriot in Playwrights West \u2013 which is presenting this reading \u2013 brings his own skills in evoking the psychological and the macabre.\u00a0<\/p>\n What better time for a Monster Chiller Double Feature?<\/p>\n \n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.orartswatch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/52425659326_e819420429_c.jpg\")
A frightening proposition<\/h4>\n
Opening<\/h4>\n
Closing<\/h4>\n
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One show only<\/h4>\n
Reading is fundamental<\/h4>\n
The flattened stage<\/h4>\n