Rather than make up for the story’s slack with spectacle, director Mary McDonald-Lewis embraces the play’s laid-back pace, allowing room for meaningful looks and pensive pauses that give viewers space to appreciate Shakespeare’s gag-heavy dialogue.
‘The Tempest’ is more sweet than stormy in Speculative Drama’s mellow version
Links
Roundup: Ten great restaurants and bars in Vancouver
Good things are happening in downtown Vancouver. Like Portland, our northern suburb let its once-vibrant center become a bleak desert of parking lots and pawn shops for decades after I-5 bisected the city. Major efforts at revival starting in the late 1990s filled in many of downtown’s vacant lots with condos, and organic growth has followed. While empty buildings still abound these days, the areas east and north of Esther Short Park are now home to excellent breweries, cafes, restaurants and bars. Here are a few that are worth crossing the Interstate Bridge for—traffic allowing, of course.
Review: The Thanksgiving Play
“The Thanksgiving Play,” a biting new comedy by the Sicangu Lakota playwright Larissa FastHorse, exposes the uselessness of good intentions. Its yoga-practicing, privilege-checking, farmers-market-shopping characters know that performing Native characters in “redface” is wrong, that the Thanksgiving narrative is “problematic,” that the history of the United States is one of oppression and subjugation, but they’re blind to the arrogance of their enterprise.
‘The Thanksgiving Play’ is a biting satire of white progressive posturing
Review: The Mermaid Hour
Given the awful violence all too often perpetrated against trans people, I watched the first half of “The Mermaid Hour” with a growing sense of dread. I needn’t have worried; this isn’t that sort of show. Though there are plenty of tears and self-questioning — when Pilar realizes the hormonal treatments Violet wants will make her sterile; when Violet is rejected by her gay best friend, Jacob (Kai Hynes); when Bird admits to missing the son he thought he had — everyone winds up pretty much OK.
‘The Mermaid Hour’ explores ups and downs of parenting a transgender child
Review: Between Riverside and Crazy
“I may look how I look, but that don’t mean I am how I look,” Lulu tells Walter as they share a joint on his balcony, and she speaks for everyone in the show. “Between Riverside and Crazy” rejects predictable narrative and neat morality. It celebrates self-liberation but acknowledges the harm one person’s freedom can inflict on others. It reflects the grime of real life but teeters on the edge of fantasy.
‘Between Riverside and Crazy’ looks at the cruel cost of moving on
Review: Macbeth
Beyond finding interesting parts for women in a play that otherwise has little room for them, Van Der Merwe’s erasure of gender shines a light on the Macbeth’s obsession with manliness: feeling like a man, fighting like a man, killing like a man, dying like a man. In “Macbeth,” as all too often in our own times, manhood is inextricably tied to violence.
Review: Kodachrome
In its bittersweet tone, as in many other respects, “Kodachrome” recalls Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” It is set in a small New England town — the real and very New-Englandy Colchester, Connecticut. And it’s driven by an all-seeing, third-wall-breaking narrator: The Photographer (Lena Kaminsky), a shutterbug whose luminous images of buildings and people have made her the unofficial recorder of local life.
In Portland Center Stage’s ‘Kodachrome,’ the focus is on love’s blurred lines
Review: Güero
Güero is much more than a sandwich shop — it’s a multisensory experience in which sandwiches are served. By day, Güero is light-filled and cheery; by night, it hums. On a recent weekday evening, pretty young couples traded rock-climbing stories over mezcal cocktails and oversized tortas in the warm, low light — subdued but not quite dim.
In which I spend a lot of time in Oregon City
When Olympia Provisions, Portland’s acclaimed sausage-maker, announced the second permanent location of its hotdog-joint spinoff, OP Wurst, in 2016, the decision was baffling to some. The first location, in downtown Portland’s Pine Street Market, was already a big hit, so an expansion made sense. But why Oregon City?
Why Oregon City’s downtown food scene has become so appealing
In which I tour the Eola Hills AVA by bicyle, finding good views, great tacos, and way too much Pinot.
In this mix of tradition and tumult, old vines and new, there’s still much to discover. Take the scrappy winemakers of the valley’s Eola-Amity Hills region, at play with lesser-known varietals like gamay and Melon de Bourgogne that thrive in these ancient volcanic basalt soils. Here, in the most southern of the Willamette Valley’s six sub-AVAs, find wide-open country roads—less known than the well-charted wine trails to the north—that make easy touring for off-the-map wine-tasters.