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The show Things I Hide From Dad is coming back to the Chapel Theatre in Milwaukie on March 13 for a one-night-only reckoning with religion, sexual awakening, and Kenny G.
“Saxophone music is the sexiest music there is,” says Travis Abels, the show’s writer and star. “I just didn’t realize it at the time.”
Abels is the one hiding in Things I Hide From Dad, an autobiographical solo show about his childhood growing up in Fort Wayne, Ind., as the son of a pastor in the Worldwide Church of God, a doomsday cult started in Eugene in the 1930s. When Abels hit adolescence and started pining for a girl with a wild laugh named Paisley, his sexual thoughts came with a double dose of regular religious shame and the possibility that he might trigger a nuclear apocalypse. That’s a lot to carry for a healthy, modern American boy, and it leads to increased tension with his family and church.
“I had split myself in two halves: one version for who I was at home and one for who I was outside of home,” Abels says in a phone interview.
Meanwhile, he finds a stray Kenny G CD at the Christian music store and takes it home for his birthday. Throughout the show, the sweet strains of saxophone solos become a stand-in for impure thoughts, the stage lights turning red as Abels frantically tries to hide the music in his closet. (A VHS copy of Baywatch causes similar anguish. Abels is now 42, if you couldn’t time-stamp him from the pop-culture references to his childhood on your own.)
It’s hilarious and heartfelt and relatable—even to those who didn’t grow up in a Christian doomsday cult—and employs many of the skills Abels has developed as a seven-time winner of The Moth storytelling series.
Abels originally developed Things I Hide From Dad as a way to up his live storytelling game. He made a promise to himself to share a story that really scared him, so he told one about his mother walking in on him in flagrante delicto in his bedroom as a teenager. Despite his own discomfort while telling that story, the audience was lit up in a way he had never experienced onstage.
Then, he learned that British Columbia’s Vancouver Fringe Festival sought hourlong stories.
“That sounded terrifying so I thought, let me try that,” he says.
The show that became Things I Hide From Dad debuted at VFF in 2023 and has since played in Indianapolis, Denver, Orlando, Ashland and Portland. When it ran at the Chapel Theatre for a weekend last May, strong word-of-mouth (and lots of local connections: Abels has lived in Portland since 2012) sold out the short run.
This is all in addition to Abels’ day job as a creative director and editor for film and television trailers. He edited the trailers for Bridgerton, La La Land, Westworld and I, Tonya, just to name a few. His technical know-how comes into play in Things I Hide From Dad, particularly with the extensive sound effects Abels controls with a tiny remote in his hand throughout the show. Doors creak open and shut, a monster growls and snarls from his closet as the representation of Abels’ sexual repression, and waves splash as Abels runs into the ocean with Paisley.
The 75-minute show with no intermission is a physical feat for Abels. His body is taut with kinetic energy throughout the performance as he jumps, rolls and acts onstage with nary a moment to drink water. It’s all for a greater goal to advance his own storytelling and artistry, yes, but also to perhaps provide a place of reflection for his audience.
“My hope is that telling these types of stories might inspire whoever hears it to hug the parts of themselves that they feel shame around and embrace that a little bit more,” he says. “So that’s the impetus.”
SEE IT: Things I Hide From Dad at the Chapel Theatre, 4107 SE Harrison St., Milwaukie, 971-350-9675, chapeltheatremilwaukie.com. 8 pm Thursday, March 13. $15–$35.