Performance Third Rail Repertory’s rapid growth from a scrappy ensemble co-producing with CoHo to a beloved pillar of Portland’s theater scene has a lot to do with Craig Wright. The company included p ...   More

Performance A door isn’t just a door in Dutch dancemaker Didy Veldman’s Frame of View. It’s a vehicle to swing from, shimmy over and collapse against. It’s even a source of titillation, wh ...   More

Performance In 1999, Mike Schlitt, an actor/director/writer thoroughly in the grip of midlife crisis, was asked by a shady producer to direct a sexed-up, Spice Girls-themed production of Neil Simon’s totall ...   More

Performance Othello is among the most emotionally devastating of Shakespeare’s tragedies and tells a dark tale of consuming emotion and radical revenge. And yet, for all its emotional complexity, the sum mo ...   More

Performance With August Wilson’s final, furious denunciation of the assimilation of black America by white culture, Portland Playhouse scores a coup. Radio Golf, directed by co-founder Brian Weaver and co-p ...   More

Performance Portland’s stages have seen many adapted novels this season, and it’s become apparent to me that some books do not want to be staged. Such is the case with Miracle Theatre’s producti ...   More

Performance Opera companies tend to be conservative, regularly rotating the same-old same-old, big moneymakers (your Carmens, your Bohèmes, your Traviatas). Portland Opera’s Studio Artists series is ...   More

Performance The last work by the British playwright Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis, aggressively resists staging. Calling it a “play” is misleading—the text names no characters and has almost no sta ...   More

Performance In 1915, John Buchan published a novel about spies and cops chasing an innocent man around Scotland. In 1935, Alfred Hitchcock made that novel into a very odd film. In 2006, Patrick Barlow made that f ...   More

Performance When an opera company wants to make the leap into the big leagues, it raises millions and stages a Ring cycle. Since its completion in 1874, Richard Wagner’s 15-hour, four-opera cycle based on a ...   More