Performance Nick Kroll isn’t a spiteful, paranoid, self-centered prick, he just plays one on TV. On FX’s The League, the 34-year-old stand-up comic and actor portrays Rodney Ruxin, a Napoleonic product li   More

Performance In middle school, I acted in a production of The Odyssey. Bored by a dumbed-down script, our adolescent cast attempted to punch it up with absurdity: Circe wore a sweater vest yet spoke in slang.    More

Performance The history of the blues is complex, meandering its way from rhythmic African chants to Southern spirituals to Chicago pop hits. In Portland Center Stage’s final production of the season, howeve   More

Performance Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima’s work is filled with seeming contradictions: the confluence of sex and death, the modern grotesqueries that result from the unremitting pursuit of t   More

Performance Horny teenagers are going to have sex whether it is explained to them or not. It’s in our nature, and desire can be repressed for only so long.  Following a group of kids growing up in a    More

Performance The story of Huddie William Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, is a classic American parable: A musician from a very early age, Ledbetter was unknown outside West Texas until 1933, when the gr   More

Performance When I left Portland Playhouse after opening night of the first part of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s trilogy, I felt...   More

Performance Tolstoy’s masterpiece Anna Karenina is a uniquely difficult novel to adapt into a play. It is a long and somewhat baggy affair that constantly swings between two contrasting main plots stitche   More

Performance This weekend, the Bridgetown Comedy Festival will bring more than 200 comedians to nine venues along Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard. That’s a lot of funny people. But how well do these so-calle   More

Performance If you’re going to run from the swamp, you’d best keep running. Oya runs fast enough to earn a track scholarship, but stays behind to care for her ailing mother. When autumn rolls around again   More