Fire-Themed Plays Rip Through JAW New Play Festival

Portland Center Stage’s 25th annual event is especially poignant at the start of Oregon’s wildfire season.

JAW 2022 Espacio Flamenco at the 2022 JAW New Play Festival (Courtesy of Portland Center Stage at the Armory)
By Rachel Saslow

As the Durkee Fire in Eastern Oregon rages and that familiar summer climate change despair kicks in, why not process your emotions with some live theater? Two of the four plays in Portland Center Stage’s JAW New Play Festival this weekend happen to be eerily prescient with fire themes.

Julia Izumi’s Re-Enactment of the Imagined Trial of Daisy the Cow, Who Allegedly Caused the Great Chicago Fire is an examination of the criminal justice system in the context of the 1871 Chicago Fire that killed about 300 people and destroyed more than 3 square miles of the city.

And check out the synopsis of Fires, Ohio: “As a climate crisis threatens a small Ohio college town, the mopey grown children and second wife of a sort-of-mediocre professor must choose: stay and smolder, or leave and burn.”

California playwright Beth Hyland began writing Fires, Ohio in 2019 as a loose adaptation of Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov.

“At the time I was like, oh, depending on how long it takes me to finish this play, it might not be relevant anymore when it’s programmed,” Hyland says. “Sadly, that absolutely is not true.”

Fires, Ohio was the 2023 recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Prize and the Mark Twain Award for Comic Playwriting. (Yes, comic. The synopsis continues: “When a visiting scholar comes to stay for a few days, love and hatred flare and jeopardize the family’s fragile equilibrium. Chekhovian and totally modern, Fires, Ohio brings an old story into our painfully funny present.”)

JAW will be a chance for Hyland and the other playwrights have been in Portland all week rehearsing with directors and actors to get their new plays ready for a “music stand reading” in front of an audience.

Other plays in this year’s lineup include Good Person by Brett Robinson and The Sunnyview Elementary Art Show by Rob Smith, plus a selection of short plays written by teens from local high schools, commissioned specifically for JAW.

This is the 25th year of JAW and all of the events are free. The festival will take place in the Armory and includes live music and dance performances through the JAW Press Play series.

GO: JAW New Play Festival at Portland Center Stage, Ellen Bye Studio, 128 NW 11th Ave., 503-445-3700, pcs.org/jaw. Friday–Sunday, July 26-28. Free.

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