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DeLanna Studi’s Debut Play Is a Personal Exploration of the Trail of Tears

In “And So We Walked,” playwright and performer DeLanna Studi recounts an early memory. The child of a white mother and Cherokee father, her father once told her, “You will be a bridge between your mother’s people and mine.” Instead, she tells us, she’s more of an island between two shores. “And So We Walked” is Studi’s first play. It’s getting its premiere at Portland Center Stage, where she recently starred in Astoria. Throughout the autobiographical performance, Studi explores her relationship with her father and her Cherokee heritage. This culminates in a six-week, 900-mile trip along the Trail of Tears that she persuades her father to take with her.

Larissa FastHorse Talks About Her New Play at Artists Rep and Why White Liberal Theater Is Sometimes Her Biggest Enemy

FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play, which is getting its full premiere at Artists Rep, is about characters who aren’t as uninhibited: three actors and one director who are attempting to create a play for Thanksgiving that will be politically correct, 45 minutes long and appropriate for an elementary school audience. WW spoke to FastHorse, an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, about writing The Thanksgiving Play and the worst things about white liberal theater.

New Play “The Mermaid Hour” Is Less About its Transgender Protagonist Than Her Parents

A few scenes into The Mermaid Hour, transgender preteen Vi (Jaryn Lasentia) watches an inspirational YouTube channel helmed by Crux, a genderqueer social worker. Dressed as a mermaid and wearing massive, blue-glitter stilettos, Crux (Michael Cavazos) emerges into a spotlight on Milagro’s dark stage. “I am not of land or of sea, I am of heavens,” Crux tells the audience, while Vi sits at the foot of her bed at the far side of the set, silently beaming in the glow of her iPad. “The secret of our kind is that we’re not in between, we’re above.” It’s a brief, touching moment of contentment—in the previous scene, Vi’s parents argue in the kitchen about their daughter’s future.

A New Theater Company Debuts With a Chekhov Play That’s Set in New Jersey Instead of Rural Russia

The production’s ingenious set is a joke in its own right. The set’s walls are pale pink and covered in Masha’s delightfully horrid paintings, colorless eyesores that are supposedly portraits of Irina. As the play progresses, the walls literally close around the sisters as their hopes of escape dim. It also cleverly reflects the way Laufer streamlines Chekhov’s narrative. By eliminating every male character in the original play, she transforms a story of women suffering in a male-dominated world into a more intimate exploration of women who, while certainly in pain, are still the masters of their own destinies.

A Portland Playwright’s Remake of “The Scarlet Letter” Has the Same Amount of Puritan Shame, More Catchy Songs Than the Original

Scarlet is an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter in a very loose sense. For one, it’s a musical. In one early scene, Hester Prynne (Rebecca Teran) and the Rev. Arthur Dimmsdale (Isaac Lamb) sing a duet about their secret passion for one another called “Fallen for You.” Later, they lie in bed together and crack jokes about the Bible. Written and composed by Portlander Michelle Horgen, Scarlet is now getting its world premiere at Portland Playhouse’s newly renovated theater. The musical is packed with revisionist flourishes, from a rambunctious drinking song called “Before You Fall (for a Puritan Girl)” to a sympathetic solo by Hester’s villainous husband, Roger Chillingsworth (Darius Pierce).

There Are No Men or Boats in Third Rail’s Production of “Men on Boats”

On the surface, “Men on Boats” seems a conventional play. Written by Jaclyn Backhaus, it’s a rollicking tale of the 1869 mission to explore the Colorado River, when a group of 10 intrepid adventurers, financed by the U.S. government, struck out to survey one of the last remaining pieces of the American frontier. But two sentences in the script’s casting notes transform the play into something different: “The characters in Men on Boats were historically cisgender white males. The cast should be made up entirely of people who are not.” What that something is, though, isn’t easy to pin down.

With Syde-Ide Collaborations, Actors Tyharra Cozier and Monica Fleetwood Are Creating the Roles That Weren’t Available to Them

When Portland Actors Conservatory grads Tyharra Cozier and Monica Fleetwood started making the rounds during casting season, something didn’t feel right. They were roommates at the time, and Cozier recalls sitting in their kitchen and venting about a disappointing audition. “For a young, black woman, you had two choices,” says Cozier. “Play a role you weren’t 100 percent comfortable with, like a maid or slave, or audition for a role that better suits you, but the guy who got cast as your partner is 20 years your senior, so the role goes to a woman who’s been around longer than you.”

“2.5 Minute Ride” Recalls a Drug-Addled Trip to an Amusement Park and a Sobering Journey to Auschwitz

“2.5 Minute Ride” is not an easy play to produce. Lisa Kron’s autobiographical one-woman play doubles as a scalding standup routine and a love letter to her father, a Holocaust survivor. Its blend of black comedy and real-life tragedy demands that its director and star strike a balance between overwhelming scenes set at Auschwitz and lighter moments when Kron jokes about everything from her mother’s fear of being photographed to her father’s arguably life-threatening obsession with roller coasters.
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