Season 19

 ‘NIGHT, MOTHER // The Snowstorm // Grounded

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‘NIGHT MOTHER

October 17- November 8, 2014

Script by: Marsha Norman

Direction by: Gavin Hoffman

Performances by: Jacklyn Maddux & Dana Millican

Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and nominated for 4 Tony Awards following the legendary Broadway production, Marsha Norman’s ‘NIGHT, MOTHER  is an iconic work celebrated for its explosive specificity and cathartic force. The play begins with reclusive Jessie calmly telling her mother that she plans to kill herself at the end of the evening. In the real-time events that follow, Mama reasons, argues and begs for her daughter’s life as Jessie prepares the household and defends her right to end her own suffering.

“…honest, uncompromising, lucid, penetrating, well-written, dramatic, and…unmanipulatively moving…It is as artfully designed as a sonata, rising in each dramatic movement until it arrives at its inevitable destination.” NY Magazine

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The Snowstorm

January 16 – February 7, 2015

By: Eric Nordin
Directed & Choreographed by: Jessica Wallenfels
Musical Direction & Piano Performance by: Eric Nordin
Script Advisor: William S. Gregory 
Performances by: Kira Batcheller, Chris Harder, Elisha Henig, Brian Demar Jones, Matt Kerrigan, Garland Lyons, Jamie Rea, and Beth Thompson.

This visceral, sonically vivid new performance piece brings the classical piano music of Rachmaninoff to life through cutting edge physical theatre spun around a classic romance with magical elements of puppetry and mask. The power of music to connect, to ignite, and to heal weaves through this original fable by some of Portland’s most inventive and cherished collaborating theatre-artists.

“…very talented Jessica Wallenfels and company…stands out as a fine example of the kind of interesting, original work that could, someday, put Portland on the theater map.”  – Willamette Week

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Grounded

May 1 – May 23, 2015

Script by: George Brant
Direction by: Isaac Lamb
Performance by: Rebecca Lingafelter

With a meteoric rise including the National New Play Network’s 2012 Smith Prize and the Edinburgh Festival’s 2013 Fringe First award, George Brant’s Grounded is a solo-play of Odyssean proportions. After discovering she’s pregnant, a maverick F-16 fighter pilot finds herself reassigned to the Air Force’s drone program, piloting a remote-controlled Reaper in Afghanistan from a trailer in the Nevada desert for a 12 hour day of war until returning home each night to her husband and daughter. This thrill ride of a play asks if there is a price to be paid for floating above the atrocities of war. Its shocking conclusion implicates us all.

“a spare, profane yet surprisingly lyrical string of words that invites us into the head of the swaggering pilot, whose work day involves killing from afar and home life includes a husband longing for her to unwind and a daughter who plays with pink ponies.”  –  New York Times

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