Skip to main contentInaugurated last month with e3 Theater Company's production of The Diaries of Adam and Eve, the new Electric Company theater is one of the best new spaces in town. With a high ceiling, a large playing area and versatile seating arrangements, the Electric Company can easily rival Artists Repertory Theatre's space (the best in Portland) in everything but acoustics, which are a problem.
Other than e3, the Electric Company is now the new home for Theatre Vertigo, which has had a rough time of things after losing a number of important members. But the troupe seems to be back on track with its production of Amy Freed's Freedomland.
Titled after a defunct amusement park in the Bronx, Freed's Freedomland is Freedom's Land, this violent, grinning oaf of a country that we call home. Though Freed pins her play on the backs of a dysfunctional family, she possesses enough originality and wit to avoid most of the clichés associated with this tired dramatis personae, only falling into a Shepard pie of shouting and pantomimes of masculine insecurity toward the end.
Refreshingly, Freed spares no targets. She manages to take on the pastiche dead-end of American art, the crippling anxiety of influence that's stilted higher thought, the loutish bong dregs of the "it's all good" philosophy of hippies, as well as the impotent rage lurking in the emotionally damaged working class. And it's hilarious.
Set in that classic blood-sport arena, the family living room, a grizzled patriarch, Noah (Ted Schulz), endures the return of his three children: artist Sig (Nanette Pettit), an adept of the Keane style who paints pictures of unsavory clowns; Polly (Melody Bridges), a failed academic; and Seth (Ben Plont), a one-man militia with a grudge against Quakers.
The house is further made a home with Seth's girlfriend, Lori (Camille Cettina), who was raised in a closet; Titus (Neal Starbird), a pretentious art critic; and Claude (April Magnusson), Noah's in-heat second wife.
Freed's dialogue crackles with great lines, and the actors are mostly up for it. Pettit, Cettina and Schulz are particularly good, as they create powerful characters without slipping over the edge into caricature. Bridges' Polly too often employs lazy, unfunny schoolgirl mocking. But she's a genius at asides. Without ruining the joke, her reading of the line "Bindle. It's called a bindle," still has me laughing two days later. It's good to see Vertigo up and walking again.
The Electric Company's other premiere, the late-night Veronica's Room, by the new Cardboard Box Theater Company, is less auspicious. Ira Levin's potboiler, a kind of bloodless Guignol complete with madness, murder and a dash of necrophilia, is strictly an amateurville horror. The performances lend little aid, ranging from Kerry Silva's sloppy diction to Mercury theater critic Justin Sanders' windmill approach to physical action.
Punctuated by a needless musical interlude, what intrigue and interest one might have felt for this playlet was dispelled by actors breaking character over a dull bit of ad-libbing. Deadly.
2512 SE Gladstone St.
8 pm Thursdays- Saturdays, 7 pm Sundays. Closes April 12. $15. Call 306- 0870 for tickets.
10 pm Fridays- Saturdays. Closes April 12. $10. Call 232- 7667 for tickets.
WWeek 2015