Performance When Portland author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, she imagined it as a thought experiment. What would a world be like, she asked, where humans spent most of their liv   More

Performance That comedy comes from pain is a well-worn trope, but in International Falls, Thomas Ward’s compassionate and sharply observed world-premiere play, it’s a two-way street: Not only do misfortun   More

Arts & Books Writers don’t pretend to be mathematicians, but even I know that four times four does not equal eight. You know what else isn’t eight? Seven. 4x4=8, the “mini-musical” montage from producer John Oules and curator Mark LaPierre, turned out to be a mystery with one mini gone missing at Thursday night’s Fertile Ground performance.Inspired by the space constraint of Ten Tiny Dances, 4x4=8 uses ...   More

Performance In 2001, Oregon City teenagers Miranda Gaddis and Ashley Pond disappeared, and local playwright Susan Mach found herself confronted with billboards of the girls’ faces. Both intrigued and dist   More

Arts & Books The theater is quiet. Yellow light from stage left beams over a cluttered set, the floor covered in dozens of overlapping oriental rugs. Myshkin (Mikhail Kalinichev) and Rogozhin (Andrey Kurilov) stalk in drunkenly, Myshkin as bumbling as Rogozhin is jumpy. “Where is... Nastasya Filippovna?” Myshkin asks about the object of his and Rogozhin’s affections. “She’s... here,” Rogozhin replies, ...   More

Performance She’s a gorgeous parasite, a kept woman and a deranged femme fatale, but Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov, from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, is not easy to pigeonhole. Director Viacheslav Do   More

Arts & Books You don’t need me to tell you this, but The Book of Mormon is wildly fun, gleefully raunchy and surprisingly touching. Written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park with Robert Lopez (composer of puppet musical Avenue Q), the show has been a phenomenon since it opened on Broadway in March 2011, and securing tickets has become more difficult than bringing Jews into the fold. Portland marks the ...   More

Performance The playwright George Bernard Shaw did not craft subtle plots. That’s clear from the first minutes of his anti-militarism comedy Arms and the Man, in which Bluntschli, a Swiss mercenary, crash   More

Performance Ephemory opens with a tableau: A mother sits at a table working on her embroidery wheel. The father, dressed in a black suit, sits and smokes. Legs and frumpy dress splayed on the floor, the lit   More