Time, A Fair Hustler

You'd be forgiven for gagging at the mention of "Van Sant" given Portland's recent binge on the director's work. The Essential Gus Van Sant series ran at the Northwest Film Center from April to June, when the Clinton Street Theater picked up the baton with a 30-year retrospective that's still rolling along.

Pretend you're a Van Sant virgin and go see Time, a Fair Hustler. It'll wake you up like the first time you watched River Phoenix hallucinate a house falling from the sky while he cums for a few bucks in the opening minutes of My Own Private Idaho.

After a seemingly endless road to the Artists Repertory stage, Jonathan Walters' Hand2Mouth production achieves something rare on any stage: a genre-hybrid performance where the characters writhe together in jazzy choreography, the original score undulates appropriately like in a well-edited film, and lighting tricks like an illuminating Pepsi machine make the set resemble a live art installation. Walters put in hundreds of hours transcribing the film, reminiscing with longtime Portlanders and interviewing the "real" Mike and Scott to make this a memorable funeral for old Portland, as Hand2Mouth executive director Jen Mitas dubs it.

Time fast-forwards 25 years from Idaho to imagine a Portland where the hustler Gary (Jason Rouse) works at New Seasons on Division Street and gets excited about his new weed whacker, Bob (Jean-Luc Boucherot) still dumpster-dives for bread, and the prodigal son Scott (New Yorker Erika Latta) is now the mayor. It's "a memorial to a lost city," said Mitas, and a conversation with the audience about Portland then and now.

The house lights stay on as the first act starts and Hans (Anne Sorce) peacocks onto the set of a present-day Portland courtroom. He wears a white suit and black turtleneck, takes a seat downstage to testify, and starts eye-fucking the audience and explaining in a voice like Schwarzenegger that performance is "a relationship, ja." Like this sleazy German and the gay prostitution ring of 1990s Portland that Van Sant mined in Idaho, Hand2Mouth's reinterpretation is dirty, intimate and splendid.

Though the play is mostly scenes from the movie re-enacted as flashbacks, this is no stage version of the film. Rather, Hand2Mouth riffs on Idaho like a live-action revival screening where the main character is sitting next to you, whispering production secrets in your ear. Tired scenes get a second life. Latta beautifully saunters onto the set as Scott, wearing the iconic leather jacket with an ease to rival Keanu Reeves, and Hand2Mouth's Julie Hammond captures all the sniffling vulnerability of River Phoenix's Mike.

As each modern character begins testifying about the "beautiful boys," Mike and Scott replay their entrances. "We're friends right? Good friends. And that's good," they banter again and again. Replaying lines and scenes straight from the film makes it seem like the stagehands are holding a real-life remote, and pressing "rewind."

It's like rewatching your favorite film. Portland does this often. Hand2Mouth does it well.

SEE IT: Time, a Fair Hustler is at Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 SW Morrison St., hand2mouththeatre.org. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays through Aug. 16. $25-$30. 

WWeek 2015