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"Please read these instructions carefully. Arrive at the site alone and unaccompanied. Turn off your cellphone."
The ticket for TeatroSOLO, a traveling theater experiment that opened in Portland on April 29, reads like a dispatch from MI6. The last sentence is underlined for emphasis.
"If I'm not back by midnight, come find me," I told my housemate before heading to my 10 pm reservation for "Wish," one of five one-on-one performance pieces Buenos Aires-based TeatroSOLO is staging at venues across Portland.
Intimacy is the focus for TeatroSOLO. One spectator at a time receives a private show not in a theater, but in a public venue meant for some other purpose—the Central Library, a St. Johns tennis center, the Portland Art Museum, a Chinatown street corner, a light-rail train. Its creator, Argentinian artist Matias Umpierrez, calls the performances "theatrical interventions" into regular life.
You are not an anonymous audience member any more, hiding yawns in the dark from actors blinded by stage lights.
In "Wish"—where actress Alex Leigh Ramirez literally stumbled across me in Chinatown—I could see the tiny snag in her cardigan as she recounted sneaking across the Mexico-U.S. border. For "Myth," Paul Susi walks you around NoPo's tennis center, offering you a paper cup of water, telling you to mind your step, asking you to perch on a preschool-sized red plastic chair while Susi rambles about being a do-nothing youth.
"Once in New York City, a random guy on the train got interested and just joined in," actress April Sweeney tells WW. She performed Umpierrez's show "Witness" on the NYC subway, and will do it again on a Portland streetcar. "It moves so slowly," says Sweeney. "We had to slow the pace of the performance." They adapted the performances to Portland in another way, too—by making the characters more "blue-collar."
But performance art often stumbles on its own genius. TeatroSOLO is meant to shatter the fourth wall, inspire rediscovery of everyday locations and harken back to ancient storytelling techniques. The experience instead recalls a mediocre Tinder date—except sober, more expensive and even more one-sided.
Lacking dialogue except for a few questions that seem rhetorical, the scripts are rambling and largely depressing confessionals from melancholy characters that spout platitudes like "I finally felt alive." The characters come across like the type of loners who are starved for attention and quote Kerouac in everyday conversation, and you are their captive audience.
It's like paying $20 admission to a blind date. You get invited to unexpected venues and, if you show up, a stranger will ramble at you while onlookers stare. But at least on a real date you might get a word in edgewise—not to mention a cocktail.
See it: TeatroSOLO is at various venues, through May 15. Boomarts.org. $20. An accompanying art exhibit is at c:3 initiative, 7326 N. Chicago Ave., 971-267-2340.
Willamette Week