Krista Garver - Page 18

If you've been wondering whether you should see THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH at Artists Rep, the answer is yes. Here's why.

As soon as you walk into the theatre at Portland Center Stage, you'll start to feel overheated and a little claustrophobic. No, nothing's wrong with the air conditioning. It's because of G.W. Mercier's set, which features an authentic New Orleans second-story balcony jutting out over the two cramped rooms where the action of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE takes place.

I'm about to give away the best-kept musical theatre secret in Portland. Once every few months, a rotating group of incredibly talented singers and actors gets together and puts on a cabaret-style concert. For a big Broadway musical fan like me, this is about as close as it gets to a perfect night.

You know those shows that won't quite let you go? Heidi Schreck's GRAND CONCOURSE, now playing at Artists Repertory Theatre, is one of them. I saw the show with 10 people. We all had a slightly different take on it, and we have continued to talk about it -- both online and off. I take that a sign of something good.

This spring, Portland's Milagro Theatre, whose mission since 1985 has been to provide 'extraordinary Latino theatre, culture, and arts education experiences for the enrichment of all communities' is presenting the world premiere of its first commissioned play, INTO THE BEAUTIFUL NORTH: AN ADVENTUROUS QUEST, by Karen Zacarias, based on the novel by Luis Alberto Urrea. In advance of the opening, I sat down with Zacarias to learn about her life, the play, and what she thinks about the Portland theatre scene.

If you were to google 'information about love,' randomly click on 57 of the results, and then skim each page starting in the middle, you'd experience the digital equivalent of watching Caryl Churchill's LOVE AND INFORMATION, currently playing at Theatre Vertigo.

Are we the products of our cultural history? Or can we create ourselves from scratch as something new?

Chalk up another winner for Portland Center Stage this season -- THE PIANIST OF WILLESDEN LANE is one you don't want to miss! Mona Golabek's one-woman show about her own mother's escape from Nazi-controlled Austria on the Kindertransport is part-concert, part-storytelling, and all magic.

From now until May 7, you could sit around and wait for something glorious to happen. Or you could go see A DOLL'S HOUSE at Shaking the Tree and guarantee that it does.

In the middle of Samuel D. Hunter's THE FEW, Brian - a long-haul truck driver recently returned home after a four-year absence - slumps in a chair and says: 'I'm really terrible at being a person.' That statement perfectly encapsulates the struggle at the center of this play, which is about people trying to figure out how to be people and to perform the seemingly impossible task of connecting with themselves and with one another.

You remember Heathers, right? The 1988 cult classic movie starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater that gave the high school lexicon such classics as 'What's your damage?' 'That's so very!' and 'F**k me gently with a chainsaw.' (I wasn't allowed to see it, but I had a friend whose mom let us watch anything we wanted.) Well, now it's a musical playing at the Sanctuary at Sandy Plaza courtesy of triangle productions! and Staged! And it's great!

When Jackie Sibblies Drury wrote WE ARE PROUD TO PRESENT A PRESENTATION ABOUT THE HERERO OF NAMIBIA, FORMERLY KNOWN AS SOUTHWEST AFRICA, FROM THE GERMAN SUDWESTAFRIKA, BETWEEN THE YEARS 1884-1915 (yes, that's the complete title), in 2012, she couldn't have known the maelstrom that would be upon us in 2016. Since the shooting of Michael Brown led to protests in Ferguson, Missouri, race relations in the United States have been declining. According to a survey, they're currently at their worst in recent history.

In Chekov's THE SEAGULL, writer Constantin Treplev says: 'We need new forms of expression. We need new forms, and if we can't have them we had better have nothing.' And, with THE SEAGULL, the first of his four great plays, Chekov did indeed introduce a new form of theatre -- one that replaced the melodrama popular at the time with realism. Chekov's characters were real people, having real conversations, and doing real things. It wasn't always successful in his time (read about it in the STUPID F**KING BIRD Playbill), but it had a huge impact on theatre.

Women have served on U.S. battlefields since our country's beginning. Women were nurses, cooks, and even saboteurs in the American Revolutionary War. In the Civil War, women disguised as men were soldiers. In 1866, Dr. Mary Walker was awarded the Medal of Honor, becoming the first and only woman ever to do so.

At the beginning of his one-man show, EACH AND EVERY THING, when Dan Hoyle makes the mandatory 'turn off your cell phone' announcement, he jokes that by the end of the show you might want to just throw the darn thing away. You may scoff. But he's right. After 80ish minutes of watching Hoyle tell his own somewhat autobiographical story of finding connection and community, you might want to wait a while before turning your phone on again. You might decide you don't need your phone welded to your body 24/7. You might even decide to leave it at home once in a while.

Covering up the dinner table to hide the modest meal, talking about buying a piano, insisting that her son goes to art school -- these are just a few of the things Lala does to hide her family's dire financial straits in award-winning Cuban playwright Hector Quintero's 1962 comedy CONTIGO PAN Y CEBOLLA, now playing at Milagro Theatre. Presented in Spanish with English supertitles, CONTIGO PAN Y CEBOLLA is the only foreign-language play on the Portland theatre schedule this season.

Twenty or so years ago, gay Americans were second-class citizens and gay men were dying of AIDS. Today, members of the LGBT community can get married and adopt children, and AIDS is a controllable disease. That's a heck of a lot of change for one generation, and not everyone has accepted it.

In his review of MR. KOLPERT's premiere at the Royal Court, London, in 2000, Michael Billington wrote: 'Comedy doesn't come much blacker or better than this.' IMO, he nailed it. MR. KOLPERT, now playing at Third Rail Repertory Theatre, is one of the best examples of very-funny-meets-very-disturbing theatre I've ever seen.

Sometimes a total sausage fest can be a really good thing! Like in YOCTOTheatre's COCKTALES, an evening of storytelling and theatre all about -- you guessed it -- the penis. Honestly, I was a little unsure when I saw the description of this one: 'Dink - Dork - Shlong - Dingdong - Swinging Fury - Jumbo or just good old fashioned peewee, it's finally time to hear from the real Commander in Chief!' But it didn't take long for me to get over my hesitation, and in the end, I thought it was both a great night at the theatre and an important show.

As the lights come up (though only slightly) on Monica Byrne's WHAT EVERY GIRL SHOULD KNOW, we hear the moans of young women discovering their bodies. They record the results of their attempts in a log book. It's awkward and funny, and it sets the stage for this provocative dramedy about four girls coming of sexual age in a Catholic reform school in 1914.