As Portland’s sprawling 10-day festival of new performance prepares to hit the stage running, the creators of half a dozen fresh shows talk about what they’re doing and why.
The Portland theater company’s Youth Devising Residency program teaches young people stage skills and more. The show they created, “What Brings You Here?,” is at PSU March 7-9.
Bobby Bermea: Promising writer and recent high school grad Evan McCreary gets a weekend of readings at IFCC with talent and a little help from his older friends.
A bustling studio in close-in Southeast Portland is a magnet for makers of short films, music videos, commercials, and maybe even movies.
An Irish playwright and a Dublin director bring a contemporary play to Corrib Theatre about racial attitudes and the steps that white people “must take to clean up the mess they have made.”
Boosted by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, “The Hatchery” will help launch new theater works that emphasize music and movement.
Sure, it’s an entertaining action flick. But its connections to Christmas are surface stuff. Go ahead: Watch it, and have fun. But when it comes to the spirit of the holiday, it doesn’t fit the bill.
The Portland actor and friends are staging a one-night performance of a modern adaptation of Homer’s classic Greek tale before taking it back on the road – including to prisons.
Ajai Tripathi’s new play “Great White Gets Off,” seeded during the pandemic, looks at racial and power dynamics and the way they play into a romantic relationship.
Bobby Bermea: The talented actor Lester Purry, who’s created a bond with Portland Playhouse, is back in town and creating his own kind of skinflint in the Playhouse’s “A Christmas Carol.”
Actor and ArtsWatch columnist Bermea looks at the Portland theater company’s troubles and remembers the good times as he tries to sort out what’s gone wrong.
Ready for your (virtual) date with Death? ArtsWatch’s resident horror devotee scares up a few suggestions from fiction to podcasts to flicks, and explains the shuddering thrill of it all.
The Portland-based purveyors of “new weird horror” are building a mini-empire of shock and shivers, including the novelette double feature “Split Scream” released on Halloween.
As Halloween hastens toward us, Tenebrous Press throws a party for “Posthaste Manor,” Jolie Toomajan and Carson Winter’s “new weird horror” novel about a very haunted house.
The Reformers get into the Halloween spirit with a string of shows at Movie Madness inspired by ’80s slasher flicks.
About 60 films of the weird and macabre will spool out at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre in the 28th annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. Oh, the horror!
A new artistic director and a revived, walk-through “immersive installation piece” at Zidell Yards keeps the veteran devised-theater company moving forward.
The Portland actress takes on the multiple challenges of Samuel Beckett’s Winnie – in an old Victoria’s Secret at the Lloyd Center mall.
Apalategui’s “Downward Facing,” the show that just kept growing, takes its next big step in Fuse Theatre’s Atelier Festival.
Bobby Bermea talks with the Portland rising star of stage and song about her musical passion and her new album, “Happy Girl.”
Ernie Lijoi’s new musical, about the day the nuclear bomb DOESN’T drop, takes the spotlight at Fuse’s OUTwright Festival.
Mikki Gillette’s “American Girl,” premiering at Fuse, is based on the story of Vancouver, Wash., 17-year-old Nikki Kuhnhauser, who was murdered in 2019.
Spider-Man, Black Panther, X-Men, The Hulk, Eternity, The Thing and friends are hanging at Portland’s science museum through April 9. Bobby Bermea has a thing or two to say about that.
Since the upheavals of 2020 Portland and the nation have been in turmoil over race and more. A new play exploring the issues finds inspiration from a book of photographs from the 1950s.
“Read a book!” isn’t an insult. It’s a surprise, a pleasure, a punch in the gut, an eye-opening education, and a blessing.
Sure, it’s possible to make good art with a Christmas theme. So why, oh why, is so much of it pure schlock?
Talking with the new artistic director of the Irish theater Corrib about Dublin and contemporary playwrights and her twisting path to Portland.
Two of Oregon’s premier theater schools, Bridgetown Conservatory of Musical Theatre and The Actors Conservatory, are sharing space in the historic Tiffany Center.
From Oregon to New York to L.A. to a long successful stretch on Portland stages, the actor and director now finds herself in a new city, and working in a new medium.
A very young reader loved monster tales and the reflections of life he discovered in them. A furtive reading of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” sealed the deal.
The 1992 movie raised the stakes on horror films by casting a Black man as the villain and, like 1999’s Japanese “Audition,” giving a glimpse of the future.
A television host called The Bowman Body opened the creaking lid to an overflowing casket of horror films – and a fascinated boy discovered a lifelong passion.
Jack Pierce and the invention of a Hollywood horror classic, the makeup and design of Frankenstein’s monster. Happy Halloween.
Sure, Hamlet’s the hero, and gets all the praise. But why? asks the actor playing the prince’s put-upon counsel. Isn’t Polonius a reasonable and honest guy, just doing his job?
A sea change is happening in America’s rehearsal halls – and combat and intimacy choreographers are piloting the ship of theater into new waters.
After traveling cross-state to play Othello, a Portland actor bids a fond farewell to a brand new Shakespeare festival and its small town in the northeast corner of Oregon.
The Soul Restoration Center, begun by Darrell Grant and carried forward by Dr. S. Renee Mitchell, revives a key cultural space for Black Portlanders.
In far northeastern Oregon, the curtain’s rising on a brand new Shakespeare festival. A Portland actor revels in the adventure.
Bobby Bermea traces the growth and success of Portland’s innovative Queer theater festival, which hits its 10th anniversary during Pride Month.
A teller of tales and theater-artist-about-town digs into the “cauldron of creativity” of his happy place, the rehearsal room. And, oh: Got a story idea? Let him know.
After a Covid postponement and with a largely new cast, Fuse Theatre’s premiere of Mikki Gillette’s play transitions to the stage.
OMSI’s lavish exhibition, which closes Feb. 13, explores the travails and triumphs of the great leader’s fight for freedom.
PassinArt’s Pacific Northwest Multi-Cultural Festival serves a virtual feast of stories by and for artists of color.
A Portland comics artist takes on a monster project: a 200-page anthology with 18 artists in 6 countries.
Fertile Ground 2021: “The November Project,” which takes place in a bathroom, has roots in a life-turning crisis.
Fertile Ground 2021: Don Wilson Glenn and Damaris Webb take a spin through the first First Lady’s kitchen.
Starting small but thinking big, Stumptown Stages has made itself a leader in equity and diversity.
Portland police killed Quanice Hayes. His grandmother’s film gives back his voice and 8 other police victims’.
Oregon screenwriter Ashwini Prasad writes the book on telling true tales of the erased and marginalized.
Wondering why “Black Lives Matter” matters? The answer’s baked into the nation’s racial attitudes.
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