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Three songs after the Kent State shootings, a man unbuttons the front of his costume to expose a massive, star-spangled phallus. Like the legendary 1970s-'90s Portland theater that inspired it, Triangle Productions' Storefront Revue: The Babes Are Back is a constant, rainbow-hued provocation. But the backstory is more serious.
As the play begins, Portland State University exiles the company because its founders, Anne Gerety and Tom Hill, refused to cross student picket lines to teach their theater courses at the university.
After rebranding as Storefront, they reopened as an independent theater in what's now the Widmer brewery building on North Russell Street—"the black part of town," as Gerety puts it in the play, which revisits 20 years of insane, and sometimes inane, Storefront productions. The script was pieced together by Triangle founder Don Horn from stacks of old Storefront scripts and scenes he wrote himself about the company's history.
"Independent" is a gross understatement for Storefront's plays, which stage a nude, black lead in Spartacus and profane PTA moms in Angry Housewives.
Triangle's spectacularized dramedy is just as enterprising, but not as deep as its backstory would suggest. One moment the ensemble cast is protesting in the South Park Blocks, then one actress shares a blowjob story backstage, and then three actors dress as technicolor dinosaurs for a children's show about fossil fuels.
Smartly produced, Triangle's stage is split in two for this play. One half is Storefront's stage. Behind a gray curtain that bisects the stage, audiences get a voyeur's peek at the AIDS-afflicted, drama-riddled Storefront company.
Horn's historical sections are a necessary, grounding foil to the play's outrageous musical numbers, but they feel tacked-on. Storefront Revue's company is a blob of unnamed "ensemble" actors without individual identities, and its biopic scenes aren't long enough to dull the fun, but they're too clipped to make the audience care.
Storefront Revue: The Babes Are Back is best as a bedazzled "greatest hits" production. An actor, dressed in what can only be described as an iconic rape-van costume, throws candy into the audience while the cast sings, "No, no, don't get in his car." In another overblown act, two Italian divas exchange blows while wearing tiny black slips and tassels for underarm hair. When one sits and splits her legs, another well-placed tassel is the scene's punch line, and it hits home.
Even through a black-lit strip tease and the ditty âEat Your Fucking Cornflakes,â Storefront Revue never lets us forget its history.
The production comes full circle, ending with the theater's dissolution in 1991.
Ironically,
Storefront's end was the beginning of Triangle Productions. Horn took
over Storefront's iconic Burnside space with his fledgling theater
company, and he kept the relics he found in its basement. One actress
dances in an original french fry-patterned leotard with hamburgers on
her buns, and another's chocolate onesie still has the 20-year-old
plastic cherries on its nipples. If you nitpick, you'll see Storefront Revue's flaws, but who's looking that closely at a khaki-balled, patriotic phallus with tinsel for pubic hair?
SEE IT: Storefront Revue: The Babes Are Back is at the Sanctuary at Sandy Plaza, 1785 NE Sandy Blvd., 239-5919. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays through May 30. $15.
WWeek 2015