Fens and farewells

For many of the students in Portland State’s Department of Theatre and Film, this week’s performance of Caryl Churchill’s Fen will be their final time onstage together. Though they are bracing for an emotional conclusion, the cast expects a production that will be a fitting farewell to their college experience.

Fen will open with a low-cost preview Thursday, May 24. Evening shows will run throughout the weekend and the following week, with a matinee performance Sunday, May 27. All performances will take place in the Lincoln Performance Hall.

Directed by performance Professor Lorraine Bahr, Fen, penned in 1984, tells the story of a farming community in the fen wetlands of England. The play follows the emotional journey of Val, a woman torn between her love for a tractor driver, Frank, and obligations to her family. Leaving her husband for her lover, Val comes to realize the importance of her children, after having abandoned them.

But while the play follows Val, its focus remains on the larger community. Crafted from the stories and anecdotes of real people, the play depicts the lives of those laboring in an impoverished farming town overrun by multinational conglomerates.

“A lot of the text is right from stories that those people told,” Bahr said. “It seems the story of Val and Frank is actually something that came out of a newspaper article years ago, but almost all of the stories that people tell came from the mouths of real people.”

Each actor plays multiple roles, which were purposefully cast by the writer. Often, the actors are called upon to perform across a spectrum of ages.

Shana Carr, who plays a stepmother and her stepdaughter’s best friend, explained that each role emotionally informs the other.

“My characters are different ages, in different places in their life. It’s almost as though they have the same feelings, but go different ways with them,” Carr said. “Churchill really tries to express that we’re all connected, and we all experience the same themes in different ways.”

“It’s non-linear; it’s very circular, and a lot of plays aren’t like that,” said Jayne Stevens, a theater student who plays Val. “It feels more like the female perspective on the world.”

Churchill, whose work often touches on women’s equality and social justice, crafted Fen as a story about the emotional ties of a community and the community’s effect on the world around it.

“To me, Churchill really speaks in a language of emotions. She’s really connected to how people are affected and connected to the world they live in and how that world is affected by the outside world,” Carr said. “She really explores relationships and how those affect not only the people within the relationship.”

The play’s relationship theme reflects the experiences of the cast; they developed a close bond during rehearsals. As a small group of actors each playing multiple roles, they were tasked with developing a tight working relationship onstage.

“With something like this, it’s so incredibly important to build a relationship,” said Judith Ford, an actress and student in the senior studies program. “It’s a very small group, so Lorraine has been great about getting us to be an ensemble.”

“Theater is really about relationships. It takes a lot of openness and the ability to struggle in front of your cast-mates and directors,” Carr said. “There’s a lot of trust and truth in relationships that are built on theater because of the feeding into each other.”

Ricardo Vazquez—the only male actor of the ensemble who, of course, plays Frank—said there are many challenges in portraying multiple roles before an audience.

“The audience has to be able to know instantly that this is not the same person, so vocally, physically, even hand gestures—anything you can do to make that clear for them, so they don’t have to wonder who’s talking,” Vazquez said.

Stephanie Woods, a theater major, described her learning experience throughout the production of Fen:

“I’m learning through each play that making theater an art is a decision. It can be very much a business or an art. Choosing your roles and what you put into it can make it an art, as opposed to just signing up,” Woods said. “It feels like a really good ending to my PSU career, because it’s what I want to do.”

As seniors and graduates, Woods, Vazquez, Carr and Stevens will all be performing their final show for the university. Carr said that it will be an emotional farewell, but everyone agreed it’ll bring an affectionate close to their stint as theater students.

“People will be pleasantly surprised. I think this is one of the most talented casts I’ve ever been a part of, and the coolest thing about theater is that each performance is one special moment between the audience and the performers that will never be recreated,” Vazquez said. “You can’t just pop in a DVD and watch it again.”