The Eternally Present Past

For two nights (last night and tonight) Melanya Helene and Marc Otto are performing their therapeutic play The Eternally Present Past at The Brooklyn Bay on SE Franklin.

This has to be the best play I've seen since I returned to Portland this winter. Most of the plays I've seen, while fun, are ultimately forgettable. They may scratch the surface of profundity, but shy away from something that plumbs the core of the audience’s being in favor of pop culture homage. Helene and Otto are performance-psychologists who use performance to help people heal in the way they relate to others. Eternally Present Past is one step away from a workshop where the participants explore their own explicit and implicit memories. They began evening by inviting us to access a memory of feeling connected and to take note of how that memory effected our bodies. This helped me to reflect on myself and my own memories and state of being throughout the performance, trying to find parallels between myself and the stories they demonstrated on stage with language, music and movement. In fact, my only criticism is that they didn't go far enough in including the audience in their performance.