A Poet Faces a Personal Apocalypse in Shaking the Tree Theatre’s “We Wrote This With You in Mind”

“You were a lot worse four weeks ago,” a nameless woman (Kayla Hanson) tells a nameless man (Kai Hynes) in Shaking the Tree Theatre’s We Wrote This With You in Mind. If that’s true, four weeks ago must have been a time of apocalyptic misery.

Sequestered in a home that looks like a poet’s war zone, the man seems to be drowning in a sea of crumpled papers: wadded-up scraps of poems he’s scribbled and discarded among the rest of his trash, including an empty paint can and an overturned chair.

It’s unsettling to behold this chaotic milieu. Designed by Alex Meyer, the graffiti-coated set—”WE’RE HAVING NIGHTMARES AGAIN” is emblazoned on the bland wallpaper—suggests a graveyard where creativity and passion suffocate amid the ruins of unrealized dreams.

Penned by Portland playwright Ken Yoshikawa, We Wrote This With You in Mind faces its audience with antagonistic flair, daring you to be baffled by its complexity and overwhelmed by its intensity. At once maddening and beguiling, the tale is animated by its insistence that we meet Yoshikawa’s writing on its own terms, which shift like swiftly turning tides.

We Wrote This begins with the man cooking rice for the woman, a childhood friend. Chatting and eating, they chew over past triumphs—like the woman singing and pouring Sprite over a school bully’s head—betraying hardly a hint of the psychedelic shenanigans to come.

Much of their talk revolves around the man: the lingering (if elliptical) traumas of his upbringing, his inability to write a poem he doesn’t immediately chuck in the trash (i.e., on the floor). Yet his troubles transcend inner demons and artistic stasis, as a monstrous-looking shadow heralding the woman’s arrival in his home suggests.

In dreamy interludes where the man’s eyes roll back in his head, he spouts dialogue that is equal parts poetry, prophecy and pure nonsense. These scenes call to mind a séance or a satanic ritual, with the woman guiding her friend as he accesses either the deadly or the divine.

While Hanson is a vibrant presence, the woman is less a character than a confidante, coach and spirit guide. Unlike the man, she directs the narrative’s course without defining it, raising the question of whether the play is trying to comment on gender stereotypes or embody them.

Only a fool would presume to comprehend We Wrote This after a single viewing; Yoshikawa delights in dodging through genres, themes and spiritual planes, rarely waiting to see whether we’ll give chase. It’s telling that when the man says he dreamt that God stopped believing in him, the woman asks, “You don’t even believe in God, do you?”

You could call that evasiveness for its own sake. But even when We Wrote This seems more like a tangle of gestating concepts than a coherent story, its visual sweep and hushed humanity are invigorating, even entrancing.

That’s largely thanks to director Rebby Yuer Foster, who artfully stages not only the play’s more flamboyant scenes—including a sort of dance number drenched in blood-red light—but moments of precious closeness, like when the ding of the rice cooker unites the man and the woman in a moment of wordless intimacy.

We Wrote This unfurls like a spiritual sequel to Shaking the Tree’s 2023 take on Max Yu’s In a Different Reality She’s Clawing at the Walls. Not only was that play equally expansive/claustrophobic, but it too was directed by Foster, the company’s associate artistic director.

Taken as a trippy whole, We Wrote This and In a Different Reality show Foster fine-tuning a signature brand within the ecosystem of Shaking the Tree: surrealist sagas that ooze existential rage and despair, but find solace in imperfect platonic relationships, like the mysterious one at the heart of We Wrote This.

It’s impossible to say if the woman is a flesh-and-blood visitor or a spectral presence summoned by the man, a modern-day Ariadne to guide him through the maze of his own psyche. “Every day, we hang out here, working on your problems,” she says with a sneaky smile.

Perhaps she’s helping him. Or perhaps he’s helping himself.

SEE IT: We Wrote This With You in Mind plays at Shaking the Tree Theatre, 823 SE Grant St., 503-235-0635, shaking-the-tree.com. 7:30 pm Thursday–Saturday, 5 pm Sunday, through March 2 (ASL-interpreted show Feb. 25). $10-$45.