Performance It’s a big year for the annual Fertile Ground festival. The 11-day bender of locally produced new works of theater and dance turns 5 this year, and once again the lineup overwhelms. The number o   More

Arts & Books Leave the kiddos at home—Girls’ Guide: Dominatrix for Dummies is not for the prudish or the faint-of-heart. Eleanor O’Brien’s solo show, which details her experiences training (well, attempting to train) to become a professional dominatrix, features semi-nudity, simulated masturbation, graphic descriptions of sordid sexual fetishes and jokes about ropes, whips and nipple clamps. O’Brien ...   More

Arts & Books As I sat in the chilly warehouse space last night and waited for …ballet? to begin, I eavesdropped on the conversation next to me. Two women and one man were heatedly–though cordially–discussing their picks and pans of the Fertile Ground festival, the 10-day spree of new works of local theater and dance. Merely listening in on their conversation was exhausting. Fertile Ground’s offerings are overwhelming ...   More

News Portland Center Stage announced layoffs yesterday, including an unknown number of 1.5 positions in the box office, one in IT and, most notably, the entire two-person literary management department. Literary Manager Mead Hunter and his assistant, Megan Kate Ward, are both out the door. This is bad news for a company that prides itself as an incubator for new work through the annual JAW playwrights ...   More

News "I was blessed with the gift of excessive volume," declares soprano wannabe Florence Foster Jenkins. The portly New York City classical music warbler was also cursed with the gift of, shall we say, unintentional microtonality, as well as a breezy indifference to rhythm, timbre, pitch and other nuances of singing. Yet she somehow managed to maintain a thirty year recital career performing—or ...   More

News Last night's 30th Anniversary Drammy Awards was, as usual, a rowdy, largely inebriated affair, though (thank heavens!) shorter than last year. Attendants at the annual ceremony recognizing "outstanding achievement in Portland theater" wore outlandish costumes, most everyone appeared to have a good time, and no one from Artists Repertory Theatre bothered to show up to collect the company's four awards. ...   More

News Sure, last night's Tony Awards showcased the many talents of Neil Patrick Harris and accidental bludgeoning of Bret Michaels, but tonight Portland's own Drammy Awards bring the glitz home with the comedic stylings of MCs Maureen Porter and Philip Cuomo (pictured). The Drammys, which began in 1979 in the pages of this newspaper as the unfortunately named Willies, recognize outstanding achievement ...   More

News The Telling Project, a organized by fiction writer Jonathan Wei, asked veterans and their families to tell their stories in over 80 hours of interviews. Those stories provided the basis of Telling, a stage play performed by eight of those same veterans. Originally conducted and performed in Eugene, the Project produced a Portland version in May, which I did not see. I did hear very positive things ...   More

News Martin McDonagh, the writer of bloody, foulmouthed, hilariously nihilist plays so popular that Portland theaters have produced five of his six plays in the last nine years, has announced that his next work will be titled A Behanding in Spokane. The press release, as quoted on New York magazine's Vulture blog, reads, "Take a man searching for his missing hand, two con artists out to make a few hundred ...   More

News Wondering what to do with yourself this weekend? We have the answers. FRIDAY 6 pm: Catch the Portland Cello Project and Oregon Ballet Theatre at Washington Park [MUSIC/DANCE] The always-awesome cello ensemble and the recently bailed-out dance company perform a free show in the Rose Garden Amphitheater for the closing weekend of the Washington Park Summer Festival. Washington Park Rose Garden ...   More