Astoria, Part 2

Same set as part 1 (which is good, seeing how they're intermingling the two this month) and the same cast, with the mostly the same characters (them as is still alive), still swapping costumes and accents to play all of the parts.  This half was concerned with building the fort and establishing trading posts (with Hunt straggling in from the overland journey, eventually).  Even more went wrong in this half than in the first part, and in the end the remaining partners gave up and sold Astoria to the British Northwest Company.  The final straw was the War of 1812, which left Fort Astoria isolated and undefended.  And, incidentally, almost entirely manned by British subjects.

Astor counted the enterprise as an utter failure.  And in one sense it was, with his trade empire collapsing, and dozens of men, a large percentage of those sent out, dead from accidents or murder.  But.   The company that had been sent east to contact Astor stumbled across an easy passage over the Rockies.  That paved the way for the Oregon Trail.  That filled this region with Americans, and pushed the Russians and British out.

Fertile Ground, Day #11

Revelations

I'd expected a reading - one that I could sketch at.  But it was a staged reading, with the lights low and me elbow to elbow with the rest of the audience.  So I didn't document this one.

The setting was a corporate board room where God's underlings were in a meeting to discuss 'the ultimate solution' of how to deal with the pesky humans who had overrun the earth.  A couple of archangels, a representative of the Four Horsemen, John (there only because he had written the Book of Rev..., er, uh, Memorandum 665), and headed by the Seraphim.  Played by a single woman.  I don't think it was a collective.  I got the impression that the playwright thought that seraphim was a singular noun.




Just This One

The setting was a bar, with a band, on the night before the band leader was to go to prison.  A vehicle for the music of Paul deLay, with his (fictionalized) life sketched out between songs.  Unfortunately, the lead didn't have the acting chops to carry the performance.  It didn't help that his voice was also the weakest in the production.  The rest of the musicians were top-notch though, with a superb blues harpist, and three woman that I didn't get to hear enough of.

Sketching at PAM

I did a bust in the classical section, using brushes and (synthetic) paint.  And then wandered off to try and find the Native American section.  I never did, but along the way I found a good view down at the melting crayon things in the sculpture garden.  So I did them, reverting back to pen and ink and colored pencil.

Fertile Ground, Day #10

Just one play today, as the scheduled reading at noon was cancelled (due to flu).  And I couldn't find anything else in the afternoon within walking distance that still had tickets.

Philip's Glass Menagerie, at CoHo

An adaption of The Glass Menagerie, in pantomime, performed by clowns.  Quite funny, actually.

Fertile Ground, Day #9

Gone
A reading at Artists Rep.

Yet another dysfunctional family.  With the twist that this is a apparently happy blended family.  And it takes awhile for the cracks to appear.

The Doctor and the Devil

I wedged myself in the far corner of the last row, hoping to be able to sketch during the play.  But a half-dozen people came in and filled up the row beside me, and I gave up on that idea.

No playwright for this one.  It was a collaborative effort, with the actors (and director) not working from a script, but assembling the play from thin air in the course of rehearsal.    This made for a series of strange but beautiful disjointed scenes.  But not a coherent whole.

Fertile Ground, Day #8

How The Light Gets In



The playwright owned that this one was far from finished.  And, yes, I can see that it needs to be shaped a bit more before it can be staged.  But it was a good way to try out the dialog in front of an audience.  And the dialog was remarkably funny, considering that the main protagonist had breast cancer.







Voodoo Snowball



The man at the door was startled when I gave my name, because it was the same as the playwright's.  I rolled over all of my dad's relatives in my mind, to see if I could fit him in, but came up with nothing - going back to my great-grandfather, in Canada.



But, just to be sure, I studied his profile.  He's got a prominent nose, but a straight one, without the crow's beak hook that gave my long-dead ancestor his name.  So I doubt that we're related.




This one was standard fare about a dysfunctional family.  And also not nearly done.

Fertile Ground, Day #7

Out of the Blue

A family drama, about two families, both of them broken and mourning.  And with a connection that could join them together.

Fertile Ground, Day #6

Two readings today, Alaska, a monologue by a kid on an impromptu tour bus in Seward, and Strangest Yellow, a near monologue by a woman trying to recover from a miscarriage and the break-up of her marriage, by starting a vlog.  Only a near monologue, because she keeps getting interrupted by the ghost of her dead unborn baby, played by a man three times her size.  And I'm wondering: how the heck could they stage that?

Fertile Ground, Day #5

Petite Dames


Set on a plantation in Louisiana in late 1865.  A plantation that, in some unexplained fashion, had ended up as a refuge for slaves who had escaped from their owners and had hidden there until emancipation.  And were now charting out their new lives, now that they could come out of hiding.

The play was charitable towards whites, which was kind.  But not totally believable.  I know that it's unfair to compare the time just before reconstruction with the time that came after it, but I have problems accepting that a white person in Louisiana in 1865 would accept interracial marriage, or honestly consider that a black person might be his equal.

Matter is Mother

Set on a garbage-strewn beach at a ritzy time-share resort.  A series of vignettes in which the monologist became, in turn, a beer-guzzling dad, a resort maid, a realtor, a tourist, a small child, a soulless materialist inside the belly of the beast, and, finally, the beast herself - the Ur-Mother, who spawned all life, and now spends all of her time gobbling down all of the garbage that we dump in the ocean, as well as all of the worst parts of ourselves.

Fertile Ground, Day #4

Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov
Northwest Classical Theatre Collaborative

This one was a bit of a stretch for a festival that's intended for new works.  But it is, at least, a new adaption, if only because the director couldn't find an existing translation that wasn't hopelessly old-fashioned, and so commissioned (wrote?) his own.

The language may have been new(ish), but the plot was unchanged.  No happy endings here.  And by the end I was emotionally drained.

Cellar Door Roasters

A meet-up with other sketchers at a coffee shop near Ladd's Addition.


It had an intriguing machine - a coffee roaster, set up next to the door so that it could vent out the window.  I did two different views of it, one in color and one in black and white.

(There was a curtained doorway in one corner, which led to the stairway to the second floor apartments.  So the residents of the building have round-the-clock access to the coffee shop.

Fertile Ground, Day #3

 Portland’s Mini Musical Festival


Not so much a play, as a musical.  Or rather, a string of mini-musicals.  Spawning from reality TV, work friends, attempted suicide, high-school sweethearts.  I got an impression of a class assignment, where the teacher had pulled random situations out of a hat and had handed them out to his music composition students, saying: "Here, make a musical out of this."

They were all interesting.  Some were old-fashioned conventional musicals, while others were pushing the envelop a bit.

Kennedy School

We met in the Courtyard Restaurant.  I did one quick sketch on my phone while
waiting for my order,



and then wandered about the wings of the old school, looking for things to sketch.  A movie theater (in the former auditorium?), meeting rooms and hotel suites (in former classrooms), bars, an espresso stand, a gift shop, an outdoor heated pool.  There was a courtyard, but you had to go back through the restaurant to get to it.  And, for all the windows, the halls were remarkably dark.  I finally settled on a view across the courtyard to the windows of the restaurant (in the old cafeteria, maybe).




For the throw-down, we met in one of the bars.  Which hadn't opened until noon, which was good, as I could have spent hours sketching the ironwork in it.

Fertile Ground, Day #2

A reading of Grand Junction at Artists Rep at noon.

A full-length play that felt completed.  Abusive men, sibling rivalry and second chances all round.















Then, in the evening, a trek across the river to Milagro Theatre, for Bi-, an adaptation of Flatland.

Our seats were assigned, and I ended up front and center, with no way to sneak a sketch in during the show.  So I did one of a fellow audience member, as she checked her phone before the show began.

Fertile Ground, Day 1

True Love and Other Noncommunicable Diseases

A monologue, with video accompaniment (But remember, "Movies are fake.").  A memoir about love and movies and cancer.

I got in a couple of views of the monologist, and a couple of the audience members.  I would have liked to have worked on hands, but they kept moving.


The High Captain

A farce, about the crew of a wrecked oil tanker marooned on a desert island.  Their captain has drunk himself to death and is now nothing more than a skeleton, and the remaining crew is too busy getting high on gas fumes to deal with actually surviving.  Or getting rescued.  But they have managed to create a government.  Several layers of government, with the attendant committees, and forms, and holidays.  They have a national anthem, in which they all, including the skeleton, dance (and the skeleton provides percussion).  And they hold an election.  And elect, democratically, a despot.



Camellia blossoms

On a tree at the Chinese Garden

Play

This was a co-production of Corrib and NW Children's theaters.  They'd made a point of telling everyone that this wasn't just for children, and the audience seemed to have taken it to heart.  Because I only saw one single solitary child there, plumped down on the row of cushions in front of the seats.

The Fields, again

Deb organized an impromptu sketchcrawl to take advance of a sunny Saturday in January.  Except that it took a while for the sun to get high enough to light upon the ground.   While we were waiting for that, Vicky sat down to sketch some roses.  Roses!  In January!

And I sat down and sketched her sketching them.

When the sun arrived I wandered out into it, and sat down next to one of the giant hardware snails.   It was a provisional sun, strong enough to throw shadows and bring out highlights, but not strong enough to give me any warmth.

Finally, I backed off across the street and sketched the Fremont Bridge, and the last remaining Centennial Mills building.

Vespers

Lessons and Carols, with Rutter's Dancing Day.

Between the getting up for the prayers and hymns, and sitting down for the readings and carols, I snuck some sketching in.