Years ago, knowing several of my friends were on the precipice of what was shaping up to be a truly hellish tech week, I decided to send a message of solidarity by making a sign for their stage manager to display at the theater entrance — my take on the “Hang in there!” cat poster beloved of school guidance counselors everywhere.

It said, in the most ominous blackletter typeface my word processor had to offer:

“ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.”

I lifted the line from Inferno, the first installment of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. The 14th-century epic poem, chronicling Dante’s trek through Hell guided by the Roman poet Virgil, also provides the source material for Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble (PETE)’s newest offering: Aw, Hell, opening Saturday, June 28, and continuing through July 12 at Reed College’s Performing Arts Building.

Given the subject matter, it feels fitting that I’m paying PETE a visit during what would elsewhere be called tech week (sometimes colloquially known, no kidding, as “hell week”).

When I arrive, Reed’s studio theater bears all the hallmarks of the tech-week limbo state. The set, consisting of seven red-curtained doorways surrounding a white spotlit circle, stands half-completed. Cabling snakes over the folding tables temporarily installed in the house.

Young designers peck away at laptops, craft props and costumes, and sing along to Enya’s Orinoco Flow — an improbable soundtrack for a journey through the underworld unless, perhaps, you grew up in the ’90s and have some particularly wretched associations with the Pure Moods collection. Actors pad around the stage in identical, improbable get-ups consisting of a wig cap, tube socks, and the beige trench coat of the archetypal flasher — the uniform of Aw, Hell‘s multiple Virgils.

Director Jacob Coleman warns me that there will be some migration at the top of the show: The audience will convene outside of the theater, and the Virgils will lead us all on a tour of the backstage area before conducting us to our seats. Sure enough, before long stage manager Kristina Mast pipes up, “Our Virgils are just about ready, so if we wanna go make our way to the lobby …”

We relocate to the atrium of Reed’s performing arts building, which is appointed with its own small stage and a column of amphitheater-style seating. There, Coleman spends a few minutes raising logistical questions (what’s the best way to herd an audience of up to ninety people to their seats?), and he and the rest of the creative team brainstorm the answers together. Then he distributes a few new pages of text to the Virgils: There have been some line changes. Would the cast like to try them tonight? I get the sense that “no” wouldn’t be an unacceptable answer, but of course they’re game. One of the Virgils, PETE co-artistic director Rebecca Lingafelter, gets the ball rolling:

“Every moment of every day you’ve lived thus far is nothing more than the detritus of depressing delusion, rigorous mathematical architectures of punishment, the possibility that even in the darkness of your life’s journey you can begin again. But before we begin, does anybody have any pants? Why are you laughing? I have experienced an embarrassment of divine excitement, and my pants started to get a little crusty!”

I wince at the visual. Did Dylan Hankins write this? I wonder. (He did not. That glory lies with company member Chris Gonzalez. We’ll come back to him.)

The Virgils coax us from our seats and prepare us to reenter the theater. The first leg of our journey is reminiscent of every Halloween haunted house I’ve ever visited. The audience is divided into groups and our entrances are staggered, affording those at the head of the line the time they need to explore without a traffic jam forming. Before leading us inside, my group’s Virgil lays down some ground rules: No sinning, no laughing, and no touching. The cast, she clarifies, are permitted to touch us, but we may not touch them back. Additionally, she advises us:

1. You’re lost.

2. It’s your fault.

3. There is, nevertheless, “a buttcrack of hope.”

Did I mention that Aw, Hell is a clown show?

As we enter the backstage hallway, we’re greeted by a soundtrack of tormented screams. One by one, Virgil opens a series of doors corresponding to various circles of Hell. There is nothing behind most of them, but not to worry. The Blood Pool, we’re assured, is coming along, as is the Desert to which all usurers and venture capitalists will be condemned for eternity. The Windy Place — modeled after Dante’s second circle, reserved for “carnal malefactors” — is represented by an electric fan. Finally, we’re led through a hellmouth, an entryway cheerfully marked out by Christmas lights, and instructed to take our seats in the house.

The action soon fizzles as the cast awaits further instruction: Should we continue? Hold? We can’t have more than one Virgil onstage at a time, can we? The swell of questions gives way to another impromptu group discussion, this one about the unfinished circles of Hell and how best to render them. The Desert, someone suggests, could be as simple as sand spilling out from under the door and into the hallway. Or what if, cast member Emily Newton proposes, “desert” is a misspelling of “dessert,” and the door opens to reveal a cart laden with pastries?

In a different theater, a conversation like this one happening at this point in the production calendar could signal a catastrophic breakdown in planning or communication. But for PETE, it’s standard operating procedure. This, in company parlance, is “total rehearsal,” a half-sibling of tech.

Most theater artists, I’d venture, have a bit of a love-hate relationship with tech. It’s the point at which a show begins to take on a shaky resemblance to its eventual final form, which is exhilarating. For actors it signals the approach of previews and the promise of fresh eyes — a welcome break from routine after weeks of rehearsing the same stale material for an audience of each other.

But the hours are grueling, the slow process of refinement often tedious, and the atmosphere at times ripe for combustion. During tech it’s not uncommon for tempers to flare, egos to overflow, and any work that has heretofore been half-assed to expose its whole ass for all to see. Take, for example, a scenic designer I once worked with who didn’t so much drop the ball as punt it over the horizon, producing a set so distractingly ugly that it had to be repainted in full, in turn forcing our irate lighting designer to rebuild his entire light plot to accommodate the brand-new color palettes.

This is precisely the sort of tech week fiasco PETE’s total rehearsal approach is meant to avoid, explains Coleman. “What can sometimes happen in tech is that we made this thing in the rehearsal room, we made these plans, they come together, they’re mismatched.” At that point, with only days left until opening and a multitude of competing priorities, there’s seldom enough time left for much more than damage control. Total rehearsal, in contrast, supports a more symbiotic relationship between the storytelling of actors and designers, with each element given the latitude to inform the others in real time.

What does this mean in practice?

“We haven’t finished staging or making the show, and the designers haven’t finished their design.” It’s a collaborative model that requires, in Coleman’s words, “the bravery to show up with things half-finished.”

As a former stage manager, total rehearsal sounds to me like the stuff of panic attacks, and yet the sometimes palpable stress I associate with tech is notably absent. The vibe is mellow, companionable. Suggestions are made freely, without apprehension or apology, and seemingly without expectation that anybody limit their remarks to their specific artistic domain. Instead, my impression is that everyone’s input is welcome and valued, their judgment trusted. Looking around the room, I don’t clock any burning fuses or see anyone scanning for the emotional trip wires that might trigger a directorial tantrum.

Coleman is the ostensible leader, but had he not been my point person when we scheduled this visit I doubt I’d identify him as such at a glance, and I mean that in the most complimentary possible way. PETE’s work is ensemble-driven, and by all appearances that ensemble walks their talk, with a shared understanding that they’re all on the same team, all working toward the same goal and making equally vital contributions.

It shouldn’t sound positively utopian, but the ideals of ensemble theater — horizontal organizational structure, collective collaboration, mutual ownership of the work — while easy to dream, can be much, much harder to implement in real life, where the best of intentions can run afoul of artistic egos, conflicting ambitions, and personal rivalries. What, I ask writer Chris Gonzalez, makes it work for PETE?

Without hesitation he replies, “Ridiculous amounts of trust.”

The stage manager calls a ten-minute break, whereupon I immediately get lost on my way to the bathroom and take the opportunity to snoop around the props table. It’s laid out with an assortment of items that includes a whoopee cushion, an inflatable saxophone, a flyswatter, and a baby doll head speared on the end of a pool noodle, among other oddities. How, I wonder, does one get from 14th-century epic poetry to, uh, whatever’s going on here?

According to Rebecca Lingafelter, the first glimmers of Aw, Hell came from a class she taught a decade ago at Lewis & Clark College, where the late Philip Cuomo — then the executive director of PETE’s Institute for Contemporary Performance — was a guest artist. “The idea has sort of always been part of the company,” she says. But it remained on the back burner until this year, when [gestures broadly at everything].

“We wanted to laugh in the midst of Hell,” Lingafelter jokes.

To prepare for what they knew would be a complex devising process, Coleman and Gonzalez did a yearlong deep dive into Dante’s Inferno, even taking an online course about the source material. “Jacob did way more,” Gonzalez is quick to observe. Next came an intensive phase of workshopping, writing, and incorporating the discoveries made in rehearsal into a preliminary version of the script.

Sometimes Gonzalez would come in with “piles of text” for the cast to play with, an exercise in actorly self-determination. “I make stuff, they take what they like and self-select and self-edit.”

“And if you don’t like any of it,” he adds, “what do you like?”

As the cast devised new material, he folded it into the script, and this reciprocal process of generation and revision persisted throughout the rehearsal period. “Again and again and again, right up until opening night. Refining and refining and refining itself,” Gonzalez says. “The thing about this work is that the writing happens so fast, there’s no time to edit it. The collective intelligence of the group is what edits it. I don’t take any sort of credit as a playwright in this process.”

Gonzalez and I are having this conversation in a backstage corner where, I hoped, it might be a bit easier for us to hear each other over the pandemonium onstage. But throughout our conversation, Right Said Fred’s I‘m Too Sexy is blaring from the house, punctuated by screams of laughter, and occasionally just screams. I’m itching to know what we’re missing. When we reenter, Amber Whitehall is center stage. She appears to be in the middle of an infernal striptease, having shed a grotesque-looking morph suit to reveal a second, even more upsetting suit underneath.

In another vignette, Emily Newton, clad in an Elizabethan ruff and a Rod Stewart wig, presides over an invisible courtroom as Minos, judge of the underworld. Her judicial bench is a music stand, and in lieu of a gavel she carries the flyswatter I saw on the props table earlier.

“Bring in the first sinner!” she commands, and Cristi Miles, attired in a rainbow-fringed smock and monster-feet slippers, enters carrying a cloth dummy with a featureless Styrofoam head. Its name? Bob Hoskins. Its charge? “Terrible acting.” Miles puppeteers the dummy as it tearfully pleads its case, but Minos is implacable. The dummy is pronounced guilty, and Miles hurls it bodily offstage on a count of three.

Throughout, Newton experiments with different physical comedy bits, such as fumbling an armload of books and collapsing her music stand. It’s a move she plays off so drily that at first I’m unsure whether it was intentional, but by the fourth repetition I’m wise to the joke. At one point the ensemble goes all in on gaming out the optimal way for her to mop up a puddle of water. Can Minos clean the mess without breaking dramaturgical rules? It’s decided that he can, so Newton removes her ruff and sets to work. The mop she’s using has had its string head replaced with a weft of blonde synthetic hair. It isn’t very absorbent, and as Newton drags it through the spill it becomes more and more tangled, the strands clumping wetly together.

A groan rises through the house, and Newton acknowledges it with a knowing grin: “This is disgusting, isn’t it?” Yes. Yes, it is.

Next the ensemble helps Roo Welsh workshop the funniest way to ejaculate Silly String from an aerosol can shoved down the front of his pants. The first blast nails him right in the glasses, eliciting shrieks of laughter from the room. After a few more experimental squirts the can’s contents are running low, and each subsequent emission is a little weaker and sadder than the one before it.

“Can there be a play of shaking it onstage?” someone offers. Welsh turns his back to the audience to suggestively shake the depleted can, and the next time he presses the nozzle he’s rewarded with a robust arc of goo. A confetti popper is briefly introduced into the mix. He pulls the string, discharging a little shower of rainbow streamers at crotch level. Should it be confetti instead? No, the room concludes, Silly String is funnier.

This methodical calibration of the show’s many clownish moments is a consistent feature of its design. “Clown requires clarity,” says Gonzalez. “When you have a massive source text like Inferno, how do you make it clear? To be funny? What is the role of text in a clown show? Also, what the fuck is a clown show of Inferno? It’s such a complicated and maximal thing.”

To answer these questions, PETE enlisted the expertise of Sascha Blocker (credited on PETE’s website as the show’s “clown dramaturg”), who worked with the ensemble to develop a shared vocabulary of clowning, experimenting with different techniques and styles until they zeroed in those best suited to Aw, Hell‘s specific sensibilities.

“I just give a lot of credit to both Sascha and to Emily, but also to the ensemble for taking the training that they got from those two people and taking the text that I’ve given and finding the clown together,” Gonzalez says.

Along with the clown, the ensemble must also find an ending, and Gonzalez is candid with me that they haven’t — at least, not as of last Monday, when I visited. I admittedly lack the constitution for devised theater, and in Gonzalez’s position I would be groping for a paper bag to breathe into, but he’s unbothered.

“By opening you land at or around a conclusion,” he says. “You don’t know what it’s going to be. That’s where the trust comes in. But we also know that we’ve been in that situation before and it’s been amazing. Someone’s going to crack it.”

And knowing this cast, it’ll probably be a buttcrack.

***

Also see Beyond Bozo & Other Clowns, Linda Ferguson’s June 17 DramaWatch column, in which she talks with CoHo Clown Cohort co-leaders Sascha Blocker and Emily Newton about bringing their skills to PETE’s Aw, Hell.