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Even if you’d personally see clowns in your own eternal damnation, Aw, Hell—Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble’s upcoming modernized take on Inferno, the first part of Dante’s epic 14th century poem The Divine Comedy—still has something for the coulrophobes out there.
“There’s a lot of beautiful science fiction to [Inferno] with all of these landscapes and characters in a conceptual universe,” Aw, Hell director and PETE founding member Jacob Coleman tells WW. “The best clown work is working with failure, to a large degree.
“There’s even a kind of rigid, punitive darkness to it. A lot of the idea of the clown is that they don’t know right from wrong, there’s this innocence—societally, we know right from wrong, but putting a clown in this world’s that’s so obsessed with ‘You do these sins and then you get punished in this way,’ we thought we can speak to the reality of this time.”
Aw, Hell debuts at Reed College’s Performing Arts Building, running June 28–July 12. PETE has recently found physical humor in works like Dylan Hankins’ queer Castilian Spanish-language bullfighting comedy Faena and last summer’s Chekov adaptation a seagull, but the company hasn’t before done such a clown-focused original work. Rather than stick to a literalist retelling of Dante’s nine circles of hell like something out of a religious haunted house, Coleman says writer Chris Gonzalez has found eternal torture in everyday life.
“We’re focusing to some degree on pettiness and the small things as much as the huge things, and there’s a lot of fun in [the idea that] you’re stuck in hell and it’s the sound of the person next to you breathing that’s driving you insane,” Coleman says. “We had a lot of fun talks about our own personal hells, like waiting on hold with my health insurance’s phone tree [or] my neighbor’s leaf blower.”
Inferno characters make their return, like Dante’s real-life muse, Beatrice (Amber Whitehall), and the even-then-ancient Roman poet Virgil, who will be portrayed by every member of PETE’s cast. Dante’s canonical fart jokes return to the stage, but badly aged aspects of the epic poem, like punishing homosexuals, got chopped. But instead of confidently walking the crowd through a vision of hell, they see one that’s falling apart just like the real world—and the characters are struggling to hold it together, too.
“At the beginning, Virgil is like ‘I’m the expert here, I know how this all works, and I’m excited to share this with you; I’m a confident tour guide here,’” Coleman says. “It increasingly breaks down, and we see the process of how it falls apart and starts skipping and returning to places we’re not supposed to go, and then Virgil as our guide also falls apart alongside that.”
Along with clowning, Aw, Hell also features puppetry and immersive staging. The show starts as a literal tour before the audience is shown to its seats, where a cadre of larger-than-life underworld denizens introduce themselves. Gonzalez’s script was developed in collaboration with the cast and crew, which include guest performers like Australian-born comedic actor Emily Newton and London-trained clown dramaturg Sascha Blocker.
Maybe staging a hell-themed production when the world feels like it’s rushing faster than ever to get there is a bit on the nose, but Coleman finds Aw, Hell’s messaging appropriately timely.
“The world does feel like it’s literally falling apart around us. It feels very hellish, so how are we making work in response to the moment?” Coleman says. “We’re not particularly interested in deep Christian theology, but the idea of pursuing something we might use as our metaphor for grace or compassion or something better—to hold [onto] that.”
SEE IT: Aw, Hell at Reed College’s Performing Arts Building, 3017 SE Woodstock Blvd., 503-771-1112, petensemble.org. 7:30 pm Wednesday–Saturday and 5 pm Sunday, June 28–July 12; additional performance 7:30 pm Tuesday, July 1. $25–$45.