The dawning of a new season

The upcoming Portland theater season is chock-a-block full of performances varying between old favorites and new endeavors. Here are several recommendations for the best bets.

This year from Portland Center Stage, the premier theater in Portland for expensive and lavish productions, brings Portland patrons something other than the usual Neil Simon shtick. For a holiday pleaser that is not A Christmas Carol, go to The Santaland Diaries, a true-account comedy of literature darling David Sedaris’ life as a Macy’s Christmas elf. Another PCS production and autobiography worth checking out is John Kornbluth’s Ben Franklin: Unplugged, where a man decides that his resemblance to America’s favorite founding father is a bit too odd and looks into the statesman’s past, finding out more about his own life along the way.

One of the most consistent theaters in town for better-than-average productions, CoHo Productions opens its season with a Sam Shepard classic, Fool for Love. With Shepard’s distinctive use of natural settings and unstable relationships, Fool for Love is a great choice for CoHo’s penchant for extremely talented performers.

Hand2Mouth Theatre had a great run last year and, with its return of the original work Everyone Who Looks Like You to its new locale at Theater! Theatre!, the same can be said for its upcoming season. Performed last year at Milepost 5 in a refurbished chapel, Everyone Who Looks Like You is a great, experimental piece looking at family resemblance beyond the physical¬—in parent and child, and between siblings—with honesty and a rawness that pulls at the heartstrings and makes you nostalgic for times past.

Profile Theatre, a group founded a dozen years ago with the goal of showcasing one playwright’s works for a season has chosen Horton Foote for the current season’s dramatist. The screenwriter for To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men, Foote is no amateur. Look for Profile’s full-length, Tony-nominated production of Foote’s Dividing the Estate in May. The show is about a family in the 1980s with a bit of a cash strap due to the oil bust.

Last year, the Miracle Theatre Group put on The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, a wonderfully silly piece. This year, the self-titled “Northwest’s premiere Latino arts and culture organization” is bringing Portland audiences How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent. The description reads, “This biographical comedy is an excellent choice for students of Latin American literature, English as a second language, as well as social studies and even human development and psychology courses that examine family dynamics, acculturation, assimilation.” It will definitely rope in a few Portland State students.

If there is one thing that is missing in theater performance, it is that there are not enough well written plays about the apocalypse. Film, you got it. Literature? Full of it. Theater? Not so much. Thanks be to Theatre Vertigo though, whose production of Boom, about, well, the apocalypse, but also sex and fate—’cause you can’t have one without the other—and all the good stuff that makes this a hotly awaited performance of experimental and sassy theater.

But, by far, one of the most anticipated events in theater this year will be the entire season from Third Rail Repertory Theatre. A British farce, a David Mamet and an original work created solely for Third Rail, this season is sure to bring Third Rail into a status in the Portland theater world it deserves.  The Lying Kind by Anthony Neilson lets comedy be the crowd pleaser as its holiday opener. Mamet’s American Buffalo will surely wrangle Third Rails’ extraordinary male talent to the story of three robbers with a loot of rare coins. Finally, we have Craig Wright’s The Gray Sisters, giving the ladies a turn with an original work worthy of their prowess.