The Portland new-works festival is at a crossroads, seeking to ensure its future. Plus: a new/old face at Center Stage, hip-hop from Profile, “Mad” teens and more.
Portland’s annual festival of new works, which reinvented itself during the pandemic, will take a “strategic hiatus” in 2023 to reinvent again.
Eleanor O’Brien talks about how the new-works festival has sparked her sex-positive shows. Plus the festival’s Week 2 and the “Anastasia” tour.
Portland plunges into its festival of new works, and “other” theater from “Gatsby” to “Gloria” lights the lights.
ArtsWatch Weekly: Oregon Symphony picks a new leader; we begin a Black-music column; finale for Fertile Ground.
Covid changed the game for the new-performance festival. But going virtual was a renaissance, not a retreat.
Fertile Ground 2021: Sue Mach’s “Madonna of the Cat” fills in the 16-year gap in Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale.”
Fertile Ground 2021: In “Livin’ in the Light,” opera singer Onry seeks a space for a Black man to breathe.
Fertile Ground 2021: An overlooked character from “A Christmas Carol” gets his close-up in “Fezziwig’s Fortune.”
Fertile Ground 2021: “The November Project,” which takes place in a bathroom, has roots in a life-turning crisis.
ArtsWatch Weekly: Fertile Ground marches on, film fest updates, Hal Holbrook on jackasses & politics.
Fertile Ground: Mark LaPierre and Ian Anderson-Priddy’s zombie comic-book musical will make your pulse rush. If you have one.
February on the literary arts front is looking warm and cozy, surrounded by cups of hot chocolate and coffee, and seated in comfortable chairs.
Fertile Ground 2021: Joni Whitworth and Hannah Piper Burns find the mythic amid the reality of Covid-19.
Fertile Ground 2021: Lisa Collins’ “Be Careful What You Ask For” delves into a Portland killing and issues of race.
Fertile Ground 2021: Don Wilson Glenn and Damaris Webb take a spin through the first First Lady’s kitchen.
ArtsWatch Weekly: Portland’s festival of new performance goes online, finding the people in the picture, more.
A baking show and an augmented reality game at the Fertile Ground festival mix viewing with performing.
Portland’s annual festival of new works, running Jan. 28-Feb. 7, has become a garden of virtual theater.
The veteran broadcaster and writer brings her podcast “Stage & Studio” to ArtsWatch starting Feb. 23.
Fertile Ground, the final look back: scratching an “Itch,” diving into one-acts and other rabbit holes.
A working-class ‘Tightrope,’ combative plays, Southern rites: America goes to battle with itself.
Space squeeze, RACC reshuffle, Fertile Ground fever, nudes & Federales: a busy week.
Fresh voices, surprising ideas emerge at Fertile Ground – and the theater week stays busy elsewhere, too.
Portland’s festival of new works is a blur of hopeful creativity. Media night gives a hint of the pandemonium.
For the past ten years, Fertile Ground has been the most dynamic event of the Portland theater season. For eleven days the city is engulfed in theater that is by turns thrilling, preposterous, fantastic, raw, hilarious, scary, brutal, inconsistent, challenging, and courageous
“Conceived and organized by the Portland Area Theater Alliance, Fertile Ground is a new, 10-day, city-wide festival dedicated to the creation and promotion of original works for the theater. Home-grown and wide-ranging, it both reflects and nurtures the creativity, aesthetic diversity and
And lo, on the third day of the New Year, a great clamor fell upon the multitude, and the dread Pealing of the Four Minutes rang out, and the people scurried from line to line, taking their spots in the sun, pitching
On the last Saturday morning in January, as Portland was alight with the Fertile Ground Festival of New Plays and dozens of other significant cultural events, I gave a talk to a good-sized crowd at Terwilliger Plaza, titled “Portland Arts: Covering More
Welcome to the “meet your neighbor” edition of DanceWatch. Yup, that’s right, you are surrounded by a sea of amazing, talented artists, and they all seem to be popping up THIS weekend. And, the “neighborhood” may be much bigger than you think—at
Fertile Ground is springing up about us again, and Portland’s theatrical venues are filled with performances—dance, original drama, comedy, even a couple of premiere musicals, all there to delight audiences. And then there are the playreadings. The festival is heavy with new
“Ferdinand Magellan, the first to circumnavigate the globe, one of those early sea-farers, named everything after either his queen or himself. In very, very old maps, the kind with sea monsters at the bottom, of the period immediately following his circumnavigation of
I LOVE coffee, and I equally love coffee descriptions. They are full of wonderfully descriptive adjectives like dark, rich, smooth, and robust (to name a few), and describe hints of additional/other flavors that you might taste or smell in the coffee like
For YEARS, at multiple publications, I used to compile an overview of Fertile Ground titled “Fertile Ground Speaks for Itself,” wherein quips from the scripts submitted by their authors comprised the entire story, and I just formatted it. It is, after all,
It was 5:30 on a blustery Thursday evening – still rush hour in The City That Sometimes Works – and Nicole Lane was busy herding cats. Some of the media people were stuck in traffic and still on their way but they’d
Hello. The holidays are over and now plays can be about anything again. Next week brings Fertile Ground, brimming with homegrown theater offerings of every conceivable topic and timbre. There’ll be almost too much to mention then, so this week by comparison
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