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Portlanders are getting a rare—possibly unprecedented—chance to tell the city's oldest theater what show to put on stage.
Artists Repertory Theatre is pioneering a public voting model this year, and the polls just opened for the first-ever Oregon Play Prize.
Anyone can vote online for one of three finalist plays written by Oregon playwrights. They are anonymous because ART wants voters to decide based on merit and interest, not big names, but the point is that they come from Oregonians. The three finalists were selected from 131 submissions by a team of readers from Artists Rep and Portland's theater community.
The winning play will be announced September 21 and is guaranteed a run at the theater, making this the first time in the US that a regional theater will produce a play selected by a public vote, according to ART's communications director Nicole Lane
In their current state, the plays are unfinished.
"It may not get produced during the 2017 season," says Lane. "It depends on how much work needs to be done."
Instead, voters choose based on descriptions and a five-page writing sample (subject to change. It's art, ya know).
The Oregon Play Prize is one facet of ART's new development program, Table|Room|Stage, which the Theatre established with a $125,000 grant it got from the Oregon Community Foundation in 2014.
Table|Room|Stage's mission is to "ensure that underrepresented voices are heard on stage." That means eight new plays in 2017—at least four by writers of color, at least four by women, one must be for a young adult audience, and one is the Oregon Play Prize-winner. Half of the commissions have been assigned so far. They went to Yussef El Guindi, an Egyptian-American playwright profiled in the New York Times, Oregon Shakespeare Festival actress Linda Alper, Native-American playwright and former ballerina Larissa FastHorse, and Portland native Andrea Stolowitz.
Math people, you can work out those odds for what diversity is left.
Voting for the Oregon Play Prize is live, and the full descriptions are here. These are your choices:
Good Citizen – an exploration of Oregon's role in the Japanese internment camps during World War II and one man's fight to be recognized.
Signs – A surrealistic comedy about love, purpose, and the little things that seem to matter so much to us.
The Snowmaker – a psychological thriller in which a girl meets her estranged father and must figure out who – or what – he is running from.
Willamette Week
