ACT A LADY

[February 7th, 2007] There's a fun little show playing at Portland Center Stage: Seattle playwright Jordan Harrison's Act a Lady is set in a small Midwestern town circa 1927, where the local Elks have brought in a foreign, feminist director to help them put on a French melodrama—in drag—for the entertainment and edification of the local children. It's all in good fun, despite the protests of the leading man's accordion-playing wife, but the three actors get maybe a little too involved in their characters, and on opening night things start to get a bit odd.

It's a charming production, with effective, minimalist design that lets Jeff Cone's outrageous costumes shine. The cast of Portland actors do a commendable job of getting the most out of Harrison's very funny script without straying into the gratuitous slapstick that plagues many comedies at PCS. Ebbe Roe Smith is in especially fine form, flexing his expressive muscle as man, maiden, viscount and phantom, leaving the audience gasping for breath.

Act a Lady isn't particularly effective in helping us to reach a new understanding of gender roles, if indeed that is what Harrison was trying to do. The transformational power of drag and the malleability of self-identity is ground we've been over before, so scenes in which the men in drag come face to face—literally—with their masculine personas come across as bland and ineffective. Where Harrison does succeed is in praising the joys of theater, both as an escape from our dreary everyday lives and as a transcendent art form that can win the heart of even the most stolid puritan.

The show also represents the triumph of Just Add Water West (JAW/West)—Portland Center Stage's annual festival of new plays—and Literary Director Mead Hunter's endeavor to make Portland a haven for young playwrights and new works. With the opening this Friday of Adam Bock's The Thugs, all four of the plays workshopped at the '05 festival, including last year's Celebrity Row and Third Rail's currently running Number Three, will have had their world or regional premieres in Portland. Both Bock and Harrison will be participating in the Sundance Institute's Playwright's Retreat, and JAW is gaining a national reputation for attracting some of the best writers in the country.

This is the sort of localist theater—a play by a Seattle playwright, developed in Portland and performed by excellent Portland actors—that goes over very well in this town, and has the potential to make Portland Center Stage the great company it has always wanted to be. —BEN WATERHOUSE.