Center Stage at Portland Center Stage (and the Portland Art Museum)

Portland Center Stage Artistic Director Chris Coleman ain't fiddlin' around in his performance in Michael Hollinger's Opus, in which he plays the first violinist in a fractious string quartet.
I've known Chris for ten years. He directed the workshop of my play Birds of a Feather at PCS's JAW Playwrights Festival. We've hung out, gone to the beach. He even once heckled me while I was raising $20,000 for the theater, so he's damn lucky I didn't return the favor on his opening night.

Seeing him act for the first time was a revelation. First off, there was the immense relief that he didn't suck. Quite the opposite, he was fantastic--real, exposed, raw. It was a particularly brave performance for a public figure because the character can be such a jerk.

I'm immensely proud of him and look forward to seeing how it affects his directing of both plays and the theater itself. According to his blog, it's already given him new insights into both.

Working on more than one side of any equation really helps your understanding of your own discipline. Like Chris, I'm a product of the Carnegie-Mellon theater program, where studying acting and directing really informed my career as a writer. Being an opera singer gave me an education in 400 years of western history. And I know I'm a better writer because I teach.

That said, I seldom take center stage. I'd much rather write a musical than be in one. But I will tread the boards this Friday night for my last public appearance in Portland before moving to New York. I'm the emcee of Objectivity, a game show produced by my partner the Long-Suffering Floyd, to promote Object Stories, an innovative installation created PAM's education director Tina Olsen, in which regular people (and irregular, I suppose) bring their personal objects to the museum and record a commentary about them.

Here's the deeply moving one Floyd did, of which I could not be prouder, and not just because it makes me sound like a helluva guy.

Objectivity is one-night only this Friday. Admission to the museum is free, so seating will be limited. I'll be joined by a panel of Portland luminaries, including NY Times bestselling author Chelsea Cain, Mayor Sam Adams, Oregon Ballet Theatre's Christopher Stowell, Daria O'Neil Eliuk of The Buzz and Helen Raptis of AM Northwest.

Here's our groovy game show music, as performed by Gwen Verdon to the Bob Fosse choreography that inspired Beyonce's "Single Ladies."

Jeez, could I drop any more names?

The Play's the Thing

Portland Center Stage's JAW Playwrights' Festival is eating me alive. I haven't had more than four hours sleep a night since it started, what with all the rewrites.

That said, I wouldn't have it any other way. I have a dream cast, an astonishing support staff and a director whose approach is like good sex--gentle but vigorous. I couldn't be happier with how my new play is developing there.

Hope those of you who are around will come to the free staged reading this Friday, July 24th at 4 PM at PCS.

New Day #205

Am in a bit of a time warp because I'm spending the entire weekend at Portland Center Stage's JAW playwright's festival. As a result, I unexpectedly ended up with an extra new thing Friday night as I emceed the Commission, Commission fundraiser for the third time.

The event is an evening of sheer madness in which ten playwrights are auctioned off to drunk patrons who commission a short play on a subject of their choosing. The playwrights then have exactly a half an hour to write the play, which is then cast, rehearsed, and performed that same evening. It's insane, in part because I'm also the auctioneer, a job for which I possess no training and for which I have been known to have patrons bid against themselves or to even send the bidding downwards.

This year, however, I did Something New. Dissatisfied with the final total, I decided to auction myself off (fetching an extra thousand bucks, thank you very much). But that meant I, too, had to write a play in half an hour. My commissioner asked for something about a man who feels he can't get ahead in American culture no matter how hard he tries, which somehow ended up as a piece about a self-help guru who encourages a hapless loser to binge and purge his way to happiness by gagging on her patented spoon, available for $99.95.

It was an adrenaline high.

And it did inspire me to do some bingeing myself on Saturday--at the happiest place on earth Cupcake Jones, where I tried their newest creation: a root beer flavored cupcake.

But I left out the purging.

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New Day #188

While it might seem that my life is a series of madcap adventures, the truth is that I pursue these experiences partly as a way of keeping depression at bay. Without constant stimulation, I can misuse my imagination to feed my myriad of anxieties.

So today I once again biked over to the Large Nipples house (14 miles roundtrip--whoo hoo!), this time to work on my next book while Storm worked on her one-woman show for Portland Center Stage. I really savor working in the same room with another writer--when we each get stuck we have someone to unstick us. Of course, you run the risk of influencing each other too much. When we were done, Storm told me she found her work much lighter for my presence, while I wrote a joke about puppies drowning in the "death bag."

Eventually we took a break to partake in one of Davey's son's favorite pastimes and today's New Thing: Burning Barbies. Otherwise known as the "Barbiecue."

Here's Davey with a Disney doll he decided looked like Shaggy from Scooby Doo



That siren you hear at the end is not the fire department, though it wouldn't have surprised me if it were.



Turns out there are innumerable ways to mutilate dolls, all of which I found creatively stimulating. Like the best art, it allowed me to look at something ordinary through new eyes.

I forgot to mention yesterday that Storm has an antique chest at the foot of her bed onto which are carved the words "Hodie non cras," which means "Today, not tomorrow."

An apt reminder to Live Large.

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