Oregon
Ashland New Plays Fest 2023: families facing tough times and choices | Oregon ArtsWatch
Even though theater is in trouble, both in Oregon and beyond, I still found many memorable moments in the couple dozen or so plays I attended in 2023. I won’t attempt a comprehensive review — ArtsWatch’s excellent theater writers Marty Hughley and Darlene Ortega hit most of my highlights, and many more — but definitely want to offer a mighty shout-out to stellar shows from Shaking the Tree, Fuse, the revitalized Bag&Baggage Productions, HART and many others.
I also encountered one considerable pleasant, non-local surprise: a touring big-name musical that actually offers promise for the musical’s future instead of wallowing in its past. The sugary pop songs of Six, which came to Portland’s Keller Auditorium in July, aren’t necessarily my jam, and I’m generally unmoved by theater that tries to cover sweeping swaths of history rather than focusing on the unities of time and place. And admittedly, the show’s creators never quite figured out how to conclude it, instead whiffing on a tacked-on tie-up that told instead of showing.
But up until then, the sparkling show’s tight pacing, gleeful embrace of the rock concert concept, sly, character-based humor, pop-culture sensibility, and respect for a modern audience’s intelligence and attention span all offer lessons in how to make musicals truly sing for today’s audiences. The proof was also offstage, in the sold-out houses and laughing, cheering, demographically diverse (including much younger than usual) audiences.
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Still, my most memorable 2023 theatrical experience came not in Portland, but in Ashland. And not where you’d expect. I wasn’t able to make it to the troubled Oregon Shakespeare Festival this year, but a week after it closed, I ventured a few blocks away to Southern Oregon University for the latest edition of the annual Ashland New Plays Festival, which began 30 years ago. Amid so much bummer news about American theater, I found plenty of hope for its future there.
For a detailed description of the nonprofit festival’s origins and approach, check my ArtsWatch feature and review of last year’s festival. Briefly: The plays are curated by the community, with dozens of volunteers (most from Southern Oregon) reading, cumulatively, hundreds of script submissions, discussing them in groups, winnowing them down to a dozen, from which Artistic Director Jackie Apodaca, an SOU theater professor, then chooses the final group.
This year only three made it to SOU’s Main Stage Theater, where each received two staged readings (no props, sets or costumes, with actors standing in place or seated in chairs on stage, scripts in hand) over the weekend of October 19-22.
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Many of the actors are professionals from OSF and beyond, directed by experienced professional directors, so performance quality is uniformly compelling. Each performance is followed by a Q&A session featuring the playwrights, directors, and cast members.
As before, I came away impressed by the audience members’ insightful questions and responses. The festival no doubt owes some of its high degree of engagement and conversation to the fact that many audience members actually participated in the curation process. They really are the secret sauce of ANPF’s success.
Because of the single-weekend run and limited rehearsal time, and because these are staged readings of scripts still in development, it’d be unfair to provide a standard review of these productions. (Don’t let that discourage you from attending: Good staged readings can be more powerful than full productions, as Shaking The Tree’s recent offering of Federico Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba and numerous Fertile Ground Festival of New Works shows have proved.) But all three scripts — which coincidentally revolved around interfamily interactions — offered plenty of worthwhile ideas that merit further development, along with a few shortcomings. Here’s an overview of what I saw, aimed at helping the playwrights take their work to the next stage.
Death Foretold
The strongest audience response erupted after Ashland, which admittedly had a home court advantage: Minneapolis-based Ashland native Isabel Estelle’s play drew old friends and fans from the playwright’s home state. There’s nothing in the script that necessarily binds the story specifically to Oregon, although the setting does require both a mountain and legal acceptance of death with dignity laws. Estelle, who received a standing O as she took the stage before the post-show Q&A, is telling a universal story about family.
This one is thrown into turmoil by a young woman’s sudden terminal illness diagnosis, as her siblings and new partner negotiate their own and each other’s complex, conflicting, and, as her condition progresses over a summer in Ashland, evolving responses to the imminent trauma. All love the dying woman in their own way, and all must reconcile her needs with their own — denial, closure, acceptance and more.
Because they’re all drawn as fundamentally good and loving people, serious conflict seldom flares. Given that the action is set in the Northwest (think Oregon/Minnesota nice) rather than, say, the South, over-the-top emoting would run the risk of melodramatic inauthenticity. But that also means the tension feels a little muted, despite the magnitude of the stakes. And the flashback finale coda proved not just anachronistic but also anticlimactic. Still, there’s plenty of drama in the tough physical and emotional realities expertly detailed here.
Estelle also commendably keeps the action tight and moving (in both senses), which further avoids wallowing in grief, but also leaves a couple of characters (the protagonist’s sister and a hospice nurse) somewhat underdrawn. The current version also seems to need an additional backstory scene that might set up the ferocity of the protagonist’s partner’s resistance to her lover’s chosen course. While I too often find contemporary dramas overly didactic or just too darn long, I enjoyed these characters so much that I’d trade a bit more length to achieve greater depth.
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Even if Ashland mostly eschews dramatic fireworks, it finds surprising power in, of all places, its, er, dead-on use of humor. “Grief and humor are inseparable to me,” Estelle explained in a program note, “because dying is such an absurd, unceremonious thing, it’s impossible for it not to be funny.” Ashland’s humor reflects how real people (especially the protagonist’s brother) often deal with grief, and gives the audience a break from what could have been strictly a weep-fest. “It’s about taking care of the people you love,” director Caroline Shaffer noted in the post-show Q&A. “Humor is part of that.”
Of course, tears do emerge, on stage and off — but they’re earned, not wrung forth by easy sentimentality. Death is something we all must face sooner or later, and Ashland skillfully and movingly navigates the difficult, uncertain emotional terrain between toughness and tenderness, poignance and laughter, living and dying. I hope other theaters, especially in Oregon, will produce it.
Family Fusses
Both Ashland and New York playwright Bleu Beckford-Burrell’s Lyons Pride share a similar setup — siblings who don’t always align. Each also contains a fun family dance scene. But they differ drastically in just about every other way. As cast here, the former is white, the latter Black Jamaican immigrants. While Ashland’s characters, like the dormant volcano of nearby Mt. Shasta, hold a lot inside, the Lyons roar. Estelle does a lot more showing than telling; it’s the reverse with Beckford-Burrell. Although end-of-life care can be expensive, Ashland avoids financial implications, while class issues suffuse Lyon’s Pride — a near-universal issue that far too many American plays unfortunately avoid entirely. And where Ashland flashes almost too quickly over its interpersonal intricacies, Lyon’s Pride basks in them over its two and half hour run time, nearly twice as long as Estelle’s show.
At the post-show Q&A, the first-generation Jamaican-American actor/playwright explained its ambitious if overstuffed structure: It started out as a different story entirely, some of which she folded into (or more accurately, stitched onto) Lyons Pride, which itself is part of what looks to be a fascinating, complex larger cycle involving the same family.
What really drives the action here is money: who has it, who doesn’t, how to get it to survive. That gives rise to themes about how the need for money can conflict with pride and dignity, and how people can make tough situations even harder on themselves as a result. In that sense, Lyon’s Pride traces its lineage of financially struggling families back through other American classics, from Clifford Odets to Arthur Miller to August Wilson.
I especially appreciated Beckford-Burrell’s nuanced depiction of differing attitudes toward money and class among immigrant families of different generations and arrival times. But too often, those attitudes, and even some characterizations, were conveyed through sometimes didactic declamation, rather than via dramatic action.
The male characters mostly remain underdeveloped, representing points of view or idealized objects more than fully realized people. Yet Beckford-Burrell draws such vivid, memorable, funny (especially the character of Queen), flawed, real female characters that they invite actors (all superb here) to flesh them out and make audiences want to spend more time with them. If later incarnations of this family dramedy can shed some superfluous subplots and tighten the focus on those compelling figures, I’ll gladly return to their messy and moving portrayals of the complexity of family love.
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Future Imperfect
Immigration, class conflict, assisted suicide … the festival’s community curators apparently, and admirably, favored plays that addressed contemporary social issues. And there’s none more urgent than the impending human-caused climate catastrophe. Long Time Coming laudably strives to show why some 20th century Americans who actually had the power to shape the future made — and are still making — morally deplorable choices that jeopardize their children’s future. The story, which involves yet another interfamily interplay, ping pongs between 2124 and 2024, and, we gradually learn, revolves around events from decades earlier that contributed to present and future disasters.
As a lifelong fan of speculative fiction, I admired Los Angeles-based playwright Weston Gaylord’s smooth, organic integration of futuristic details though action and judicious passing references, a hallmark of compelling SF since the middle of the last century but too often missing when dabbling writers unfamiliar with that heritage clumsily try to incorporate speculative elements.
Gaylord knows his science. The Seattle native, who describes himself as “a writer and mixed-reality creative technologist,” majored in Symbolic Systems with a focus in Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford University, and in his day job creates mixed-reality installations and other dramatic works that center science. Here, he even imagines how language might gradually evolve (plausibly based on texting and other contemporary expressions), yet, in the tradition of writers like Anthony Burgess and Russell Hoban, keeps the meaning clear.
Communication is a major theme. The main future characters (who are descendants of their present-day counterparts) make their living as “Tellers” in a post-apocalyptic future. They recount from memory what used to be stored digitally before the big disaster(s), which are referenced but wisely not detailed: We all can too easily imagine what they might be.
However useful that skill might be in 2124, and as intriguing as the world Gaylord imagines can be, all that telling doesn’t make for very riveting 21st century stage action. In fact, most of the play consists of one character sometimes tediously telling another about a whole lotta stuff that happened a long time ago, almost like an old bardic ballad. But at least the old bards had music to make the info go down easier.
Admittedly, it’s a tough challenge to dramatize the systemic forces that threaten civilizational collapse, which don’t always lend themselves to simplistic hero vs. villain conflicts. But that’s a prime task facing 21st century playwrights. We desperately need them to address crucial social issues in a humane way that journalism and even other art forms can’t. Kudos to Gaylord, Beckford-Burrell, Estelle and ANPF’s community curators for taking on that vital challenge.
At a moment when that other, more famous Ashland theatrical institution is receiving so much blowback from some of its legacy audiences, in part for its recent perceived turn from historical to contemporary focus, it’s inspiring to see so many Ashland theater lovers, of all generations, demanding dramas that speak to our fraught present — and future.
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Dates for next year’s Ashland New Plays Festival haven’t been announced yet. Stay tuned to ArtsWatch for information on ANPF 2024.
Hey look! A familiar face on the 2024 Oregon football schedule! It’s even a regional matchup in the brand new era of the Big Ten.
Dan Lanning and the Oregon Ducks will get the distinct pleasure of welcoming the Washington Huskies to Autzen Stadium in Eugene as the 2024 Oregon football schedule (kinda) wraps up with its final regular season game (there should be more football after this, but it will be postseason type of stuff).
This is probably the perfect rivalry matchup for these two former Pac-12 teams who have migrated into the Big Ten. Despite both teams’ move to the Big Ten, this Pacific Northwest rivalry remains intact, adding a familiar and passionate element to Oregon’s new conference landscape.
Familiarity matters sometimes. And it should be fun to see how these two teams measure up against one another this year.
After all the success that Washington had a season ago, most of the key contributors from that College Football Playoff team (right along with the coaching staff) left Seattle for greener pastures in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
So, it’ll be interesting to see what Jedd Fisch has assembled with the Washington Huskies in his first season in the Pacific Northwest.
It’s also just fun that this rivalry has been preserved. With this matchup coming at the end of the Oregon Ducks’ first Big Ten season, it offers a chance for Oregon to make a definitive statement about their place in the new conference. On top of that, it gives the Ducks a chance at revenge for the two losses last year that kept Oregon out of the College Football Playoff.
And, well, regional rivalries are great for this sport. We don’t need to justify that.
With the sort of expectations that Oregon has this year, and when considering all that has been lost from Washington’s roster and coaching staff, this is a great chance for the Ducks to put an exclamation point on what is hopefully a great 2024 Oregon Ducks schedule during the 2024 college football regular season.
But hey, rivalries get weird sometimes. It’s totally possible that happens here. I don’t necessarily expect it, but it’s college football.
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The Here is Oregon team is thrilled to announce our newest partner, Literary Arts. The Portland-based literary nonprofit is responsible for the infamous Portland Book Festival, Oregon Book Awards, and countless other programs designed to connect, inspire and support readers and writers of all ages.
A History of Supporting the Literary Arts
What began in 1984 as Portland Arts & Lectures, the organization merged with the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts in 1993, becoming known as just Literary Arts, and bringing the Oregon Book Awards and Fellowships under its wing.
In 1996, Literary Arts began programming for youth with Writers in the Schools and now serves thousands of local public high school students every year through various programs. In 2014 Literary Arts officially acquired Wordstock, transforming it into the Portland Book Festival. With writing workshops and other events happening year-round, it has long served as a vibrant hub for the community.
A new chapter
Beyond their exceptional programming, Literary Arts is starting a new chapter with a brand-new headquarters, just in time for their 40th anniversary. The building, located in the heart of Portland in the Central Eastside Industrial District, will not only house their office but also a bookstore and café, and will have space for community gatherings, events and workshops.
“This building will be transformational for Literary Arts. Not only will it be one of the largest physical centers in the nation for literature and storytelling, but it will also stand as a love letter to this city that has been our home for four decades,” commented Andrew Proctor, executive director at Literary Arts. “It will be a place for our community to tell and hear stories, to write in community and in mentorship, to meet each other and talk about the ideas that matter most, and we are grateful every day to our supporters who have made this possible.”
Literary Art’s mission statement is to engage readers, support writers, and inspire the next generation with great literature.
As a good-news platform, Here is Oregon aims to celebrate the people, places, and experiences that are unique to Oregon through storytelling.
This community update is shared courtesy of the Here is Oregon Community Connections team. The team works with community partners and supporters through events and key initiatives throughout the state, amplifying and sharing good news that’s aligned with our mission. See our submission guidelines and learn more today.
By most metrics, Oregon is heading into wildfire season in better shape than recent years.
There’s no drought statewide in June for the first time since 2017, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
It’s been a relatively cool late spring and early summer. And forecasters say the transition from El Niño to La Niña weather patterns could mean a wetter than normal summer.
“We’re in a pretty good spot,” said Jessica Neujahr, wildfire spokeswoman for the Oregon Department of Forestry. “It’s actually a little bit similar to what we used to see heading into fire seasons in the 1990s and 2000s.”
With the exception of southeast Oregon’s rangeland, most of the state is forecast to see normal, or maybe even below normal, fire activity.
“I think the region as a whole will end up with below normal fire activity,” Jon Bonk, fire weather meteorologist for the Northwest Coordination Center, said at a meeting where he briefed Oregon’s congressional delegation on the upcoming fire season.
But Bonk, and every other forecaster, also was quick to highlight how difficult wildfires are to predict. Just one east winds storm, lightning burst or human-caused fire can change the shape of an entire season.
The 2020 wildfire season — the worst in Oregon’s history — had very little fire activity until a historic east windstorm hit in early September. Hotter summers and more people in the forest also make forecasting wildfires more difficult than ever.
With wildfire, you just never know until it happens.
“It’s all about confidence, and I wouldn’t say we have the confidence to say it’s going to be a below normal fire season,” Bonk said.
Active wildfires already rolling in central and southwest Oregon
Oregon already has seen some impactful wildfires this season.
The Upper Applegate Fire took flight in southwest Oregon last week, burning 830 acres and bringing evacuation warnings south of Medford, before a crew of more than 400 firefighters and numerous aircraft got it under control.
The Long Bend Fire near Maupin burned more than 1,000 acres, brought evacuation warnings and closed two popular campgrounds. On the Deschutes River — normally packed with rafts — helicopters could be seen dipping water to fight the blaze.
“Even in this type of year, we’re still going to see some large wildfires,” said John Saltenberger, fire weather program manager for NWCC.
Neujahr said the number of fires so far this year was about normal.
Fire season normally begins in northwest Oregon in July
Northwest Oregon typically enters fire season around early July. The rest of the state enters fire season earlier and is in fire season currently.
That doesn’t mean campfire prohibitions — that wouldn’t come until later. But it usually does mean that debris burning is no longer allowed without a permit and there are other limits on open flames.
Why might this be a quieter wildfire season in Oregon?
In projecting a quieter wildfire season, Bonk looked at drought, fuel moisture, long-term weather projections and other factors. But one place he zeroed in on was the transition from an El Niño to La Niña weather pattern.
He looked at past years with similar conditions and picked out 2010 and 2016 as “analog years” where weather patterns were similar to this year. Both of those turned out to be some of the state’s quietest wildfire seasons. In 2010, about 87,000 acres burned, and in 2016, 220,000 acres burned — both well below normal.
Over the past decade, Oregon has burned an average of over 600,000 acres per year.
“We’re expecting more onshore flow from the Pacific, which typically means higher precipitation amounts and more frequent weather systems,” he said. “The thunderstorms (instead of coming from inland) tend to come off the Pacific with more moisture.”
Bonk said that in 2010, the state had above average lightning but that it came with wetter systems. And in 2016, which represented a warmer scenario, there was a lower lightning strike count than normal.
Forecasts can always be wrong
In 2017, there were signs that it could be a quiet wildfire season. There had been an excellent snowpack, no drought, and it had generally been a wet year.
The Statesman Journal published a story quoting experts saying it could be a quieter wildfire season than normal.
That, of course, didn’t happen. Instead, it was one of Oregon’s worst wildfire seasons, with the Eagle Creek, Chetco Bar, Milli and Whitewater fires bringing some of the scariest wildfires in recent history.
“August and September always arrive, it’s almost always dry, and at that point it’s very difficult to predict what’s going to happen,” Neujahr said.
Higher than normal fire danger for southeast Oregon
The one place Oregon has above-normal fire danger is the southeast rangeland.
“We’ve seen two years of buildup of fuel from the rain, so we’re anticipating more fires than normal in the southeast,” Saltenberger said.
Those would largely be grass fires in areas that are not heavily populated.
Rangeland Fire Protection Associations, a nonprofit, is the lead group often fighting fires in that remote part of the state.
“They operate on a really tight budget but play a huge role,” Neujahr said.
Central Oregon also has some area of “abnormal dryness,” according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
“We’re keeping an eye on that area as well,” Neujahr said.
Urban wildfires on the rise in Oregon
One of the biggest trends from the 2023 wildfire season — and the last few years overall — has been the rise of urban wildfires. For the past three years, residents of south Salem have faced evacuations due to fast-growing wildfires. Multiple wildfires outside Eugene brought evacuations last summer.
Neujahr said hotter summers in metro areas have brought fire danger to places people aren’t used to it.
“We’re seeing more human-caused fires in areas where fuels are drying out in ways they didn’t in the past,” she said. “There seems to be a learning curve where people have trouble getting used to the fact that maybe they can’t pile burn as late in the summer as they could when they were growing up. There isn’t an awareness of what could ignite and spread a fire.”
A good example is the Liberty Fire in south Salem, which last summer led to the evacuation of 600 residents and cost more than $1 million to fight. A report on the fire’s cause and origin revealed the fire likely ignited when the hot exhaust of an ATV contacted dry vegetation. Two years earlier, the Vitae Springs Fire sparked when a car crashed into a telephone pole near tall grass and ignited a brush fire. Firefighters narrowly contained it to 15 acres.
“It’s just becoming easier for fires to get started and spread,” Neujahr said.
Firefighter staffing in Oregon
One issue that could plague the Northwest this summer is whether the state has enough wildland firefighters.
The U.S. Forest Service said it was at about 80% of firefighting capacity this season.
“We continue to struggle to staff at our full level,” said Ed Hiatt, assistant director for fire, fuels and aviation management for the Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest Service.
Neujahr said the Oregon Department of Forestry was staffing close to previous years with about 700 firefighters and wasn’t facing a major shortfall.
Hurricane season could limit emergency personnel numbers
Another possible drain on emergency personnel is the likelihood of a busy Atlantic hurricane season.
“The hurricanes obviously aren’t going to hit us, but what happens is that once they make landfall, there is a big demand on resources and emergency personnel,” Saltenberger said. “And their peak hurricane season — late August and September — comes at almost exactly the same time. It just creates a lot of competition for emergency relief.”
Mountaintop cameras, with some using AI, monitor wildfires
There has never been more eyes on Oregon’s forests, thanks to the proliferation of remote mountain cameras.
ODF’s system of mountaintop cameras numbers 77 statewide, and will grow to 95 in the next two years. The cameras are watched by remote fire-watching centers in multiple parts of the state.
In addition, the Oregon Hazards Lab at the University of Oregon — in partnership with ALERTWest — currently operates 45 remote cameras with plans to deploy 30 more. All firefighting agencies can tap into that system, which also uses artificial intelligence to monitor for smoke.
“When the algorithm detects smoke or heat, someone verifies it’s an actual incident, and then it goes out to dispatch,” Doug Toomey, UO professor of earth sciences and director of OHAZ, said in a news release. “This enables faster response times and helps fire managers better allocate resources when battling many blazes at once.”
Zach Urness has been an outdoors reporter in Oregon for 16 years and is host of the Explore Oregon Podcast. Urness is the author of “Best Hikes with Kids: Oregon” and “Hiking Southern Oregon.” He can be reached at zurness@StatesmanJournal.com or (503) 399-6801. Find him on X at @ZachsORoutdoors.
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