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The PLAY'S the Thing
Last week, Jan Powell, the founder and artistic director of Tygres Heart Shakespeare Company, announced that she was stepping down to devote herself to other projects. The suddenness of this move surprised some, though Powell assured colleagues and the press that she'd been planning this decision for some time and had only been waiting for the proper moment. That moment came recently, Powell maintains, when she saw that the company she has led for eight years had a secure financial base and had also achieved a high level of artistic accomplishment. It's true that corporate sponsorship and private donations have increased in the last years, creating a generous coffer for the company to draw from. But there have also been dark mutterings about the diminishing quality of Tygres Heart's productions for some time, even from grant committees. In the new reconfiguration at Tygres Heart, Chris Cooper has been named managing director. The tasks of the artistic director have been divided between company members Jacque Drew and Doug Miller. Drew, a founding member of the company, and Miller both bring experience and seriousness to the position. Anyone who has seen their work on stage will know them to be consummate professionals. Their development of the Educational Outreach Tour has been an unqualified success. The current season will continue as planned, with Jon Kretzu's eagerly awaited As You Like It, as well as Powell's production of Merchant of Venice, which premières in April. Drew and Miller are currently planning their first season as artistic directors.
--Steffen Silvis
Homegrown for the Holidays
There are many reasons a book is one of the most popular holiday gifts to give: It's relatively inexpensive, it's not difficult to find, it's easy to match to the recipient's special interest and it's a snap to wrap. Each holiday season has its bestsellers, and '97 is no different. Katie Radditz of Looking Glass Bookstore reports that Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (Atlantic Monthly) and Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster) top Santa's fiction and non-fiction lists for good little readers. The paperback version of Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West (Touchstone) by Stephen E. Ambrose is also an affordable hit at $16. But those who just want some seasonal reading to help them get into the holiday spirit may be interested in Holiday Tales, a homegrown collection of short stories. The Spalding Writers met in 1993 when all eight took Andrea Carlisle's Oregon Writers Workshop fiction-writing class. After the class ended, the aspiring scribes continued to meet twice a month at Grady Britton Advertising in Portland's Spalding Building. This month, they decided to take their act public and persuaded Looking Glass Bookstore to schedule a holiday reading. Using the '90s solution to the problem of being unpublished, the group produced a book of stories to hand out at the event. The result is Holiday Tales, a sweet collection of fiction that makes a perfect $8 stocking stuffer. Self-publication isn't such a bad idea for holiday stories; Richard Paul Evans has had a book on the New York Times bestseller list every December since his self-published piece of rot, The Christmas Box, hit the big time. The Spalding Writers--Margaret Chula, Jason Enders, Gerri Hayes, Jane Mozena, Emma Oliver, Jane Marie Todd, Kathleen Worley and Chris Young--will introduce Holiday Tales at Looking Glass Bookstore (318 SW Taylor St., 227-4760), 7 pm Tuesday, Dec. 16. --Susan Wickstrom
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G'donion, Mate
You haven't really lived until you've attempted to consume an overgrown Walla Walla onion that's been slightly slit, dipped in batter and thrown into the deep fryer, still whole. The Blooming Onion is the trademark "Aussie-tizer" at the Outback Steakhouse (11146 SW Barnes Road, 643-8007), a chain that recently opened its first Portland-area location in Beaverton. (The chain plans to open several more in the coming years and is hoping for a downtown location.) According to a regional manager, "Australia isn't particularly known for great steak." So why the Down Under theme? Turns out the kangaroos and little koalas floating around have more to do with the popularity of Crocodile Dundee when the chain started than with Aussie food. But, for a place that throws its shrimp on the barbie, Outback is surprisingly good. Unlike at many Portland steak houses, the prices are reasonable, sirloin comes with complementary side dishes and the waitresses are always willing to show you their boomerangs.
--Brooke DeNisco |
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Real History
Living in Portland, it's hard not to see the world as a land developer would. Look at the neglected commercial corridor along North Mississippi and Albina avenues. Look how fancy Northeast Broadway and "funky" Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard triangulate an emergent, arty neighborhood along the industrial waterfront. Where might the next Zupan's go? For those not so sure that a new building is necessarily a good building, a show hanging at the Maul (1534 NE Alberta St., 331-1594) through Dec. 14 deals with community history at a moment when Portland's definition of itself seems to be under considerable review. Organized by Icky Ciccone, the show is an effort by the punk-rock club and its constituency to reflect on their own impact on a neighborhood no one really invited them into. Opening night of the History Show featured an array of music, slides, videos, speeches and shadow-puppet shows. In one memorable sequence, a woman read from a 1968 column in the Oregon Journal describing a protest against a city ordinance that banned wading in fountains. By chance, the orator's father happened to film the event, and after the reading, the crowd was treated to a home movie showing what had been described. Not only did the sequence reveal the funny overdocumentation of a small event, but it also taught a big lesson in how randomly the world's memory can work. On display in the Maul's back room, an array of hand-crafted reports, most combining pictures and words, delves into frivolous and serious pockets of the past. Sort of a show and tell by local scene-sters, the reports are related to one another only by proximity. One eloquent report details INS abuses at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and East Burnside Street's "labor corner." Another inscrutably graphs the migration of punks around the country. Another tells the colorful history of a certain flea. As the TV tells us how "global" everything is--how linked we are to this and that, and how accessible anything anywhere is to those with a powerful enough computer--the History Show reveals a way of seeing that is sharply at odds with Microsoft, Nike et al: It reminds us how ignorant we are of the world standing right there, around us.
--Jon Raymond |
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