Skip to main contentJudith Thompson's plays are smash-ups of bleakness with rough poetry, standing somewhere between Edward Bond's Saved and Sarah Kane's Crave. The Canadian's world is peopled with society's off-scourings--luck-soured souls long trapped in a scrounge-and-scratch existence. They may have been sold a bad dose of life, but embedded in their sputter of raw thoughts and words lies proof that they've not gone cold on hope.
Portlanders got their first taste of Thompson a few years back when Theatre Vertigo staged her excellent Lion in the Streets. The Crackwalker is Thompson's first play, though the writing is as assured as in Lion. Crackwalker is a tough play and not for the suburbanized and blinkered. Thompson's characters come from the loud poor who only have their voices to spend. They are part-time dishwashers, factory doughnut-makers, whores and truckers. They inhabit a vicious world in violent times, canaries in the collapsing coal mine of our age.
In a lower-depths district of Kingston, Ontario, a retarded whore, Theresa, searches for love. The closest she will probably come to experiencing it is in a fucked-up circle of friends that includes a couple, Sandy and Joe, and Joe's best friend, Alan. Alan, the most damaged of the lot, will actually marry Theresa. He's a drowning man grasping for preservation, though obviously an infantile street hooker might not be the most ideal lifesaver.
It's difficult to describe the quartet's relationship as friendship. An ever-present threat of violence boils under their interactions, making their existence together seem more like mutual trespassing.
Director Mike Dempsey is new to Portland, and he is most welcome. In a town with few good directors, his debut is worth noting. Dempsey creates Thompson's landscape in full on the difficult stage at the Firehouse Theatre. In fact, he utilizes the entire theater more effectively than anyone else in living memory. He's also pulled some dynamic performances from the second-year students at the Portland Actors Conservatory--performers who have embraced the bruising physicality required to bring Thompson's work to life.
As Theresa, Tonya Miller is shockingly good. Her subtlety in creating a brain-damaged girl on the make is surprisingly mature and terribly, heart-wrenchingly honest. Mario Calcagno's Joe is also excellent. Seen last in Beth Harper's production of Two Rooms, in which he played a gentle and sensitive soul who is kidnapped and tortured, here Calcagno is completely transformed into a brutal, torturing man who alone among his group succeeds. His swagger and feral alertness to the actions of others is frightening in its depth and complexity.
Leslie Harper's tired-eyed and hard-mouthed Sandy is equally good. Beaten down and deluded, Sandy is in many ways the play's most tragic figure, as she alone seems to have the intelligence and fortitude to extract herself from the mess of her life. Chris Graham's Alan is also powerful.
The Crackwalker is not easy, but neither is this life.
Portland Actors Conservatory at the Firehouse Theatre, 1436 SW Montgomery St., 274-1717. 7 pm Thursday, 8 pm Friday-Saturday, 2 pm Sunday. Closes May 2. $18.
The Crackwalker premiered at Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille, the same theater that first produced Drawer Boy.
WWeek 2015