Lorraine Bahr and Sean Skvarka struggle to keep The Swan afloat.

While most actors and directors in Portland are content to entertain each other by playing dress-up as artists, Miranda July is out conquering the world. The 27-year-old maven of indie film and performance art continues to rack up accolades from New York to Vienna.

July is a one-person avant-garde movement, single-handedly lending Portland a scrap of credibility as an arts center. Among her varied and impressive credentials: performance recordings released by Olympia's Kill Rock Stars Records; a "lady-made" video series she produces under the name Joanie4Jackie (a.k.a. Big Miss Moviola); her own films (the haunting The Amateurist and Nest of Tens); and her multidisciplinary live performances.

After the success of her last PICA-commissioned performance piece, Love Diamond (which made novelist Paul Auster a fan of the young Portlander), July launches Swan Tool, a piece co-commissioned by PICA and the Netherlands' International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Like Love Diamond, Swan Tool is a multimedia "live movie," thrusting July into the middle of an anomic geography of nowhere. July's themes are displacement and anxiety. Though the subtext in the raw-nerved voices of her characters rail against these states, one senses that July's people would find numb detachment an even greater hell. No evening comes etherized upon a table in July's landscape.

Comparisons, strained at best, have been made between July's work and Laurie Anderson's over the years. Though the two artists share common themes, Anderson offers ironically cool commentaries on modern life. July sees the world's madness with often mantic (and always Munchian) clarity. Anderson shrugs while July blinders a welling scream.

Swan Tool is performed in a diagonally split-screened box, where two different cinematic realities exist simultaneously. Does the lower screen's film serve as pictographic subtext/subtitles for the action above? Which screen is really offering reality? Trapped between the two worlds is July, playing her own private puppeteer.

July calls Swan Tool the "story of my life right now, rather than an exploration of my past." Whereas Love Diamond was assembled from a fund of impressions and memories, Swan Tool is July's most formal narrative to date. July's alter ego is a woman who works for an insurance company and cannot decide whether to live or die. In one desperate moment, she buries herself in a Glad Bag in her garden (there's a strain of claustrophilia that runs through July's work). Yet however bleak the terrain, July unfailingly finds areas of transcendence.

Swan Tool's premiere in Rotterdam this past month was a great success for the young artist. She then traveled with her musical collaborator, Zac Love, to Vienna and then on to two sold-out performances at London's Institute of Contemporary Art. Backed by strong critical reaction, the piece has been booked for performance for the next year and a half, and July can now turn some time toward new projects. It's important to catch this artist's work while Portland can still lay claim to her.

Transcendence of a different kind is found in Sowelu Theater's production of Elizabeth Egloff's The Swan, directed by Judy Goff. It's a Leda-like tale of a Midwestern woman, Dora, who discovers a new definition of commitment in the form of a swan-man who crashes through her plate-glass window.

Though there is a germ of an interesting play here, Egloff is a poor writer to try carrying it off. Her primary problem is that she mistrusts seriousness, a common complaint about most American playwrights at present. For such a story to work, we should be able to sympathize with Dora's inability to find true love, and the isolated life she leads on the plains (a perfect model could have been Lillian Gish's Letty in Victor Seastroms' The Wind). But Egloff seems to possess an unexamined hostility for this plain working woman. What Dora lacks is dignity, the very quality absent from most of Egloff's work. Without it, Dora's emotional journey has little resonance, and what could have been a touching portrayal of a woman's self-discovery becomes a sitcom doused with magical realism.

It's to Lorraine Bahr's credit that we feel anything for Dora at all. Bahr continues to serve as an example of what the level of acting could be in Portland. There are a few actors here who can fully inhabit a character, effacing their own identities in the process. But Bahr is rare in that she can also communicate the space in which her characters exist as a natural extension of those characters. No backdrop of splashed dun and ochre can match Bahr's evocation of the vast flatness that surrounds Dora. That said, this is not Bahr at her best. A few of her choices seem predictable to those familiar with her work, and her handling of Dora's final monologue seems safe and pat. Again, Egloff's script is primarily at fault, though Bahr and her fellow actors also had to contend with shoddy tech work on lights and sound--problems that have, apparently, been corrected.

Egloff's audition for television writing is most successful with the character of Kevin, Dora's married swain. Joe Stoddard seems to be trying his level best with the poor material, but still gives a performance that's little better than one-note. Yet redemption is possible, for Egloff strikes a true poetic note with the Swan. Here, Sean Skvarka gives an extraordinary and dangerous performance, finding an intricate physical vocabulary to express the Swan's emotions and desires. In the beautifully intimate moments that Skvarka and Bahr share, one sees how potent this drama could have been in the hands of a mature writer. If Egloff ever decided to build on such moments and began to write honestly, her talent might not appear so fly-by-night.