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“Drag is going to single-handedly save and revolutionize the American theater,” Anthony Hudson, the writer and performer best known as drag clown Carla Rossi, tells WW.
He should know.
Hudson has taken Rossi everywhere from seedy dive bar stages to last year’s Venice Biennale over the past 15 years, bringing their critically acclaimed persona to life. Now, for the third year in a row, Hudson and frequent collaborator Pepper Pepper will give drag artists space to grow their craft at the Risk/Reward Festival of New Performance’s Portland Drag Theatre Workshop in front of an audience more accustomed to experimental theater than drag. During Risk/Reward’s June 20–22 run, drag artists Sterling Francis Kennedy (aka Silver DeBris) and Honey Hart will develop new works along with the musical group Body Academics.
When Hudson began producing the Hollywood Theatre’s Queer Horror film series, he started to meet other drag artists with similar dreams of full-length theatrical productions staged beyond the bar crowd. Inspired, he helped launch the Drag Theatre Workshop while serving on Risk/Reward’s board in 2023. Hudson hopes the Drag Theatre Workshop will help other drag artists pivot from the nightlife world’s instability, like the volatile personalities of shady producers and inconsistent income.
“Too many of my friends have been through it, and we want to start just changing that narrative for people and give them opportunities to really get away from that toxic system,” Hudson tells WW. “This is a place where we really want to empower people to begin producing theater on their own.”
The Drag Theatre Workshop joins works by writer Ilvs Strauss, musician Joe Kye, and dancer Jordan Isadore in confirming Risk/Reward’s reputation for producing compelling new avant-garde pieces. Body Academic’s Little Polycule on the Prairie is a three-act original based around the chaos of a 19th century Midwest “unstable but loving polycule.” Kennedy—a leading member of Reed College’s student drag club’s House of Elvira—will present their work Dead Body. Hart, long known as “The Evil Queen of Portland,” premieres their performance surrounding a drag queen yearning to become a Disney-esque villain.
“There’s live singing. There’s puppets. There’s fabulous outfits,” Hart says.
If they keep their momentum going, artists can use what they learn to perfect what’s seen at Risk/Reward. Baby LeStrange, a burlesque artist who was part of the Drag Theatre Workshop’s first cohort in 2023, developed her show Seasonal Delusions into an hourlong production she toured to Olympia, Wash. Hudson would one day like to reunite past Drag Theatre Workshop participants to turn more smaller works into full-length performances.
“This was Broadway’s most successful year,” Hudson says. “That was majorly in part to the absolutely revolutionary work that was Oh, Mary!, which is a queer, nonbinary person in drag, putting a queer theater piece of high camp and comedy on stage. That’s something people haven’t seen before, and that’s what theaters in town need to learn to start doing.”
SEE IT: Risk/Reward Festival of New Performance’s Portland Drag Theatre Workshop at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, 15 NE Hancock St., 503-893-4739, risk-reward.org. See website for start times Friday–Sunday, June 20—22. Pay what you want.