What Is Portland's Artistic Future?

Theater is Portland's artistic future.

Amanda Hunt and Disjecta's "Portland2014," partially exhibited at Southern Oregon University's Schneider Museum of Art through December 6, respectfully nods to studio art's 2D past while drawing focus to its interactive and performative future.

The body of Portland2014 is 2D: Modou Dieng and Devon VanHouton's Tranquilo references public mural. Travis Fitzgerald represents tapestry with Objects of Permanence I & II. Blair Saxon-Hill's double-sided quilt Shifting Ground and Occupation hangs in the center of the gallery, and D. E. May's geometric musings hang towards the far end. Abra Ancliffe's interactive Personal Libraries Library nestles in a corner near the entry. The its membership card reads,

"The Personal Libraries Library is a lending & subscription library located in Portland, Oregon. The Library is dedicated to recreating the personal libraries of artists, philosophers, scientists, writers and other thinkers & makers. It, and the books, function as a locus for research, connections, convergences, discoveries, curiosity & happenstance.

"The PLL Press produces and disperses printed matter that investigates the material, conceptual, textual and social presence of the Library."

Enhanced white noise emanates from Kelly Rauer's Locate, a triptych of video loops meditating on human movement with its locus in the spine, in the back antechamber. Studio art, dance and video converge in this geographically isolated yet aurally pervasive piece.

PLL and Locate stand out by their difference. In a space dominated by satisfying but ultimately predictable work, these two pose questions: what is a lending library doing in a museum? what is that noise coming from the back? Without ignoring the pedigreed place that 2D art holds in such a venue, Portland2014 guides museum art towards the interactive and performative. Hunt and Disjecta are telling their artists and venues to think theatrically.

We're used to the two dimensional in art museums. There's not a lot of ground left to cover. If artists want to grow, they need to encourage their audience to engage with their work, like Ancliffe. They need to pull divergent media together like Rauer. They need to think like theater makers. 

Terpening-Romeo's Vanity Project

The proliferation of small theater companies in Portland is creating fertile ground for vanity projects like Anon It Moves and String House's current production of Hamlet.

Driving this production is early career director and Anon It Moves co-founder Erica Terpening-Romeo's desire to play Hamlet and not a lot else. This might be excusable if Terpening-Romeo had the chops for Shakespeare's iconic character, but, more's the woe, she hasn't.

This Hamlet opens with a dumb-show presentation of a loving family, until the King disappears leaving his crown floating mid-air. The cast continues to explore the relationships established in this scene through the duration of the play: Hamlet and Ophelia's (Crystal Ann Muñoz) decaying love, Hamlet's sacrificial relationship with her dead father (played by a masked chorus), and her fraught relationship with her mother (Ethelyn Friend) and uncle/step-father (Jamie Peck). Director Elizabeth Watt elevates Ophelia's importance by staging a relationship between her and her spectral father (Chris Porter), and of course her importance to Laertes (Heath Hyun Houghton) is given in the text.

These relationships constitute the framework for Watt's directorial premises: "before the murderous act that began an irreversible unraveling, this was a love-filled world." Watt's program note continues, "The project was seeded with Erica [Terpening-Romeo]'s image of a strong female Hamlet." This could be a great idea to call attention to the patriarchal world out of which Shakespeare's canon springs, or about the gender neutrality of emotional malaise, or any number of intriguing things. It might even work as a platform for a great actor, although we just saw that formula crash and burn with Portland Shakespeare Project's Tempest. Unfortunately, Terpening-Romeo's not a strong enough actor to carry this particularly challenging play in that even more challenging role. She seems to be out of her depth and played a superficial Hamlet, breathy and fast. She got lost in the pedigree of the role, and, except for one brilliantly genuine moment in the fifth act, bombed. Since her desire for the role dominated everything and everybody else, there was hardly an opportunity for any one else's contributions to redeem the play.

It's to be expected, however, that we will be getting uninteresting vanity projects like this one in Portland's ballooning fringe theater scene. Small groups of friends banding together and performing for their friends create the perfect condition for work done for the artists not the audience or community. Why would anybody else be interested in seeing an early-career director play Hamlet just because she can?

The Revenants

I’ve found love in Portland. In a basement. Oh, it’s not for me. It’s two other people  There’s a man and a woman. They have chemistry. Their undead spouses are chained to the wall.

The Reformers’ new production The Revenants is about love. There may be zombies inside, and there may be zombies outside, but the story is about the conflicted love that Gary (Chris Murray) and Karen (Christy Bigelow) have for each other and their spouses (Jennifer Elkington and Sean Doran). Murray and Bigelow are riveting. Not to say they’re perfect – some of their lines (on Thursday the 3^rd) sounded learned. But the majority of their performances stuck me to my seat, even with the zombified Elkington looming over me.

The horror genre’s easy to do campy, which sometimes works. And the Reformers could have taken that route and potentially still had an entertaining play. But Murray and Bigelow’s choices – made honestly from a place of love, loss and feeling lost – make the difference between entertaining and enchanting. They treat the play as serious drama, rather than a theatrical homage to a popular genre. Not to say there isn’t humor or gore – there are zombies chained to the wall, close enough to touch me in my aisle seat. A couple times I almost fell into the lap of the guy next to me. But the bulk of the humor comes from the Murray and Bigelow’s attempt to cope with their impossible situation. The rest comes from Caitlin Fisher-Draeger’s awesome effects and movement work with Elkington and Doran.

Long story short, the Reformers chose to tell a love story that takes place during a zombie apocalypse, instead of a zombie story with a love-interest in it. That choice, to ground the fantastic in reality, makes The Revenants an exciting play, and is helping make the Reformers one of my favorite theater troupes in Portland.