Performance In my June review of the work-in-progress production of this pastiche of family life by Hand2Mouth Theatre, I advised readers to see the show with their siblings. I take it back. The current version o ...   More

Performance While many recession-battered arts groups are playing it safe, Portland Opera is going for broke. The company’s staging of Philip Glass’ Orphée may scare away conservative patrons, ...   More

Performance Two men stand on a dark stage. They greet each other calmly, sharing a series of slow, intimate embraces—but the kindness doesn’t last. Before long their encounter has turned into a wrestl ...   More

Performance I would not want to be married to Steven Dietz. I’m sure the Seattle playwright is a nice guy and all, but a good number of his 30 or so plays are about marital infidelity. At some point one wou ...   More

Performance OK, I know what you’re thinking. Ben Franklin: Unplugged? When did PCS get into the historical impersonation business?Don’t worry—this is no after-school special. Josh Kornbluth, a B ...   More

Performance Ragtime, the National Book Award-winning novel by E.L. Doctorow, is a bleak and sprawling survey of life at the beginning of the 20th century, encompassing both the era’s giants (J.P. Morgan, Ha ...   More

Performance “Puccini is stupid,” wrote Ezra Pound. He’s right, of course, but only in a certain regard. Puccini is stupid in the way that rock ’n’ roll is stupid: It is purely viscer ...   More

Performance With the economic and political Depression of ’09 hammering the arts world, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival decided to make some lemonade out of today’s sour reality, turning to a great vo ...   More

Performance Long ago, in a damp and dreary principality on the edge of a chilly estuary, lived a sexually ravenous ruler who never ended a sentence with a period, speaking only in endlessly digressive manic jags ...   More

Performance This fascinating project has more names than a ’50s jazzbo had euphemisms for Benzedrine. The third in an ongoing series of jazz-accompanied readings derived from Robert Briggs’ evocative ...   More