It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon toward the end of the school year, when most students would rather be outside. But not the half-dozen members of Hillsboro Youth Performance Ensemble (HYPE), Bag&Baggage Productions’ new youth theater creative and professional development program. Along with B&B Artistic Director Nik Whitcomb and another company artist,  Mindy Mawhirter, who’s volunteered her afternoon to offer feedback, they’re congregating in the company’s otherwise empty Vault Theater for the first run through of their new production, Grizelda’s Day Off In Hell (Michigan), which will run for a single performance this Saturday, May 10 at 2 pm in The Vault.

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THE ART OF LEARNING: An Occasional Series

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The script is literally hot off the presses — Whitcomb is handing out just-printed copies of the latest version assembled by HYPE’s Education Associate, Grayson Ashford. Even though they frequently have to consult their scripts for their next line or move, that doesn’t prevent the students from giving it their all. Whether it’s caffeine kicking in or Whitcomb’s fun warm up exercises and games, they’re exuberant yet relaxed, enthusiastically offering and receiving suggestions and feedback, asking questions, experimenting with different approaches to line readings and blocking. 

Yet behind all the fun lies weeks of intensive education, as well as creation. This spring, this first HYPE cohort is learning all about how to make their own show and put it on stage, but also the myriad other skills and background knowledge it takes to make theater, from running a box office or a light board, to making a costume or prop, to planning a budget — or a season. It’s the kind of comprehensive arts education program even college drama majors would envy. 

Emerging Artists Program 

HYPE sprang from an earlier Bag&Baggage education initiative, the Emerging Artist Program, which aimed to bridge the gap between college theater training and actual professional theater, “developing each individual’s skills by working alongside world-class designers, administrators, directors, and other experts,” according to the program’s website. “EAs will not only learn a huge number of skills, they will also be key members of our staff and the B&B family.” 

Participants trained and worked for 20 hours per week over 10 months, both assisting in productions and learning from visiting artists and specialists. They received extensive acting training, worked in the scene and costume shops, designed sound and props, and served as assistant stage manager and dramaturg for at least one production. They also participated in the less glamorous yet essential aspects of theater, like running the box office, selling snacks, marketing (including promotion, video production, and social media), development, production and company management, and education efforts. And they learned the many facets of artistic direction, “including researching production history, developing season budgets, rehearsal preparation, and production planning.” 

The EAP participants created one show from scratch, Lorenc’s EA keystone project The Ballad of Aurelie the Bold  — just in time for the pandemic to squash any hopes of a live production. Like many other theaters, they pivoted to making a film, called Aurelie, of their story. That script was written by EA Elliot Lorenc, based on material devised by other EAs. 

Alas, the EA program was suspended after the pandemic shutdowns, and remains on hiatus. Happily, the story they created is now finally reaching a live audience on the Vault stage, directed by B&B resident artist Mandana Khoshnevisan and with a revised script, under the title of The Ballad of Iron Jo. And in a nice transition, several members of the new HYPE program are participating in it, along with members of its EA predecessor. (Learn more about the story in Linda Ferguson’s ArtsWatch interview feature with Lorenc here, and about the process of its creation in Caitlin Nolan’s ArtsWatch preview here. Grab yer tickets here.)

HYPE

When the pandemic receded, Bag&Baggage, a social impact theater company whose vision is to bring the people of Hillsboro together through live storytelling and community building events, again wanted to “go out into the community and use theater to make an impact beyond the stage,” says Grayson Ashford. While this included outreach to schools, retirement homes, and community centers, they also wanted to bring an education program in-house.

This year’s new Hillsboro Youth Performance Ensemble “is similar in structure to the Emerging Artists program in that it is a workforce development program,” Whitcomb explains, “but instead of recent grads or early career folks, it is for teens age 13-18 in Washington County.” B&B put out the word to county schools and wound up with a pilot year contingent of “eight immensely talented and driven young artists,” Ashford says. They kept the group relatively small to “make sure everyone gets hands-on experience and also that it stays affordable, so we can afford to pay them.”

That’s right, pay. Whitcomb emphasizes that HYPE isn’t just an unpaid internship, which have been criticized for years as exploitative and further privileging the privileged. “We at Bag&Baggage believe people should be paid for their time, resources, and talent,” he says. “As we’re navigating the shifting world of theater, it’s important that we’re thinking about workforce development.”

Thanks to grant funding, this year’s participants are compensated $500 for their six months of work as professional theater artists.  “We’ve stressed to the students that even though they’re young, they’re artists, and artistic labor has worth,” Ashford declares. “They deserve to be paid.”

The program includes several major components.

• Practical immersion training in students’ choice of tracks — not just performance, but also design, tech, and administrative activities. One day they might be learning how to run a light board, another participating in a directing workshop, and the next week taking lessons in costume design or stage combat.

• Mentorship from B&B resident artists, staff, and guest artists. “We wanted to do a combination of hands-on workshops and bringing in industry professionals in the theater world, so students get to talk to them, and get a good idea of what it’s actually like to work in theater,” Whitcomb explains. “They learn what kinds of jobs are available besides acting and directing, from costumers to stage managers. There’s a whole workshop on just marketing yourself as an actor, starting with how to put together a resume and headshot.”

• Participating in the production of a B&B show. In this season’s closing Bag&Baggage production, The Ballad of Iron Jo, one student is in the run crew, another helped create props, others contributed recorded background vocals for various songs. “We’re finding all sorts of ways to connect them directly to the work we do on stage,” Whitcomb says. “They’re getting the experience of working alongside professional theater artists.”

• Devising and staging their own show, like this year’s Iron Jo. The source material for the show was an old folk tale, The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife, which the students have freely and playfully adapted with a sly, feminist Gen Alpha vibe that differs from the original filmed production.

Devising Grizelda

“Now we’re handing over a whole production, Grizelda’s Day Off In Hell (Michigan), from beginning to end, to the students,” Ashford says. “I sent them out into the world and told them, ‘I want all of you to become experts on some folklore, myth, legend, and fairy tales’” from various cultures.

Each student presented their chosen tale to the rest and Ashford assigned them to write short monologues — “test pieces for those stories,” he says. Then, using ranked choice voting, they decided which story they wanted to tell: an old folk tale called “The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife.”

The students collectively figured out how to approach staging the story, how to structure the narrative, and the rest of the dialogue and action, which Ashford helped turn into a script. The students then designed the production and play the roles on stage, with one member serving as director. 

The process of creation has clearly helped the students bond. At that first rehearsal, even though they only met a few weeks ago when the program began, the HYPErs fall easily into relaxed back and forth about their feelings, opinions, childhood stories, pulling up playlists of favorite bands on their phones. (Oddly, today it’s an old band, Green Day, which was making hits before they were born.) Turns out, they already have something in common: they’re funny, smart, self deprecating, not shy — theater kids. 

“Are you aware that autism’s a thing?” one says to another in mid-conversation.

“Yeah, all my best friends are autistic.”

“I have ADHD!” the first student grins.

“Me too!”

They high five. 

After rehearsal, the student participants I talked to raved about their experience in the program so far. Hillsboro High School senior Dax Landre especially appreciated the quick camaraderie the group developed in only a few weeks of working together. They’d heard of each other via regional theater competitions and local performances. “We had an instant bond between each other, even though we didn’t know each other,” Landre says. “Getting to work with such a small group, you can bond, instead of a bigger program in school where little cliques can form. We haven’t had that here. Socially, it’s helped me feel that I can reach out to people more.”

Landre also praised HYPE’s creative atmosphere. “The staff here is most organized,” she added. “They have a good vision of what they want the program to be like. They make it easy for us to create without worrying about all the other things you have to deal with” in a typical school production.

“Grayson has done a good job at creating a really fun environment that everyone feels comfortable in,” says Glencoe High junior Megan Stirling. “People in HYPE are all so understanding, and you’re allowed to mess up and not be looked down upon. I feel like everyone is friends.” 

“Definitely!” Logan Pounders chips in. “I’m gonna be sad when this is over.” 

“I know!” Stirling replies. “I hope they do it again next year.”

Theater is a collective artistic endeavor, and HYPE provides an inviting setting that encourages everyone to contribute to the devised production. “We all have similar ideas, and we also all have different ideas, and we’re all putting them together to make this cool one act,” says Pounders. “Seeing how that there’s not any judgment here, that nobody else’s ideas have been turned down, I’m like, ‘OK, then I’m gonna put out my ideas out there too, and maybe they’ll accept them,’” even though the Beaverton Arts & Communication Magnet Academy (ACMA) freshman is among the younger members of the cohort. For example, he came up with the idea to split the devil into two characters.

“Fundamentally, all of us at the end of the day are theater kids,” says Stirling, who also participates in school band and choir. “We’re all here to be better and learn something new, and a part of learning is to make mistakes. That’s the best way you do learn.”

Stirling wrote the show’s major monologue, delivered by the character Grizelda. “If you’d told me before [HYPE] that I’d have written something like this, I’d have laughed at you,” she says. “HYPE has been a big confidence booster. It’s made me more confident in my ability to tell a story. Theater at its core is all about telling a story that has an impact on other people. I love the performing arts because I love evoking emotions in other people.”

Lasting Benefits

HYPE’s benefits extend beyond the program, even beyond theater itself. Although Landre has acted in three school shows and stage managed another, and appeared onstage in local community theater productions, “I’d never worked with devised theater before,” she explains, referring to the collaborative creation process used in the group’s original production. “I’ve been learning what goes into collaborating without directing. And now I’m taking those lessons and bringing them back to my scene work at Hill High. I’m on the theater council and it’s taught me a lot of skills I can use in leadership positions.”

Logan Pounders also sees lasting benefits. He’s also in band and filmmaking, and the next time he directs a film or a show, his experience in collaborative creation in HYPE “is going to help me communicate better with actors,” he says. “Seeing what it’s like to be a director, I’m more comfortable saying, ‘Hey guys, let’s try this.’”

Pounders has also been treading stages since early childhood, but “in the first couple weeks, we had a lot of guests who told us about stage managing, costumes, directing, promotion, marketing yourself,” he reports. “I’d never really seen that side of theater. It’s fun to do all sides of theater, and nice to do all of it with people who are also in the same place as I am.” 

Does seeing the non-glamorous side of theater make him more or less likely to pursue it as a career?

“One hundred percent more likely!” Pounders replies. “It’s honestly exciting to see all these people put in all this work to create entertainment for other people, and I love that.”

Megan Stirling agrees. “I went into this knowing I wanted to do theater as a career. I feel like this has just helped me feel more confident in that choice. It’s given me options of different routes I could take, because there’s no one way to make it in theater.”

Whitcomb says HYPE has also benefited B&B, and not just from the students’ work product. “It’s given our resident artists company more purpose,” he explains. “It’s enriching their experiences, because now we have RA’s able to lead workshops and mentor younger artists.”

In addition to the HYPE program, B&B also offers a technical internship program for high school students, where they act as full members of the production crew: running the light board or working backstage as run crew, right alongside the professional stage managers and production team members. 

Looking Forward

Cultivating the next generation of theater artists in HYPE is only one way that Bag&Baggage has looked forward in its 20^th anniversary season. Every show was a premiere, whether for Oregon or the world, and every one of them maintained the high artistic standards established by the company’s visionary founder, Scott Palmer, whom Whitcomb succeeded in 2023, continuing the company’s status as Hillsboro’s premier arts institution. (Read Marty Hughley’s ArtsWatch profile.) From the opening show, Anna Ouyang Moensch’s poignant, surprising two-hander, Birds of North America, through Zack Peercy’s charming holiday spectacle, Hard Boiled Eggnog, and Sarah Lynn Brown’s impish, Shakespeare-adjacent double feature, Beginnings & Endings, B&B’s current season displayed a distinctly 21^st century sensibility and broadly accessible entertainment value.

The company also hosted still another premiere, Native Theater Project’s Diné Nishłį (I Am A Sacred Being) or, A Boarding School Play, and partnered with Broadway Rose Theater for a reading of Whitcomb’s own new musical Is You Is.

“This season, I wanted to make a commitment to expanding the canon of American theater and telling new stories,” Whitcomb explains. “We were really intentionally set on expanding the canon — not just doing new plays but standing the canon on its head.”

The company’s just announced 2025-2026 season continues its emphasis on new voices, with Palmer’s new Beauregard at Manassas to contemporary adaptations of O Henry’s The Gifts of the Magi and Antigone by Jesse Bernstein and Oregon writer Beth Piatote respectively. The season does sport one classic, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. And The Vault will also host productions by Hillsboro’s Stages Youth Performing Arts Academy and a multimedia show with Third Angle New Music.

Whitcomb admits that the audience reaction to the new fare was  “a mixed bag. Everyone that came to see the work, loved it,” he says. “Some came three or four times. But it’s hard to sell new theater, to build an audience around things they don’t know. I understand that as a consumer myself — I get it. Sometimes when people think of new work, they imagine a really bad production in a church basement. It can be hard to imagine people out there making new work with the high quality we do.”

It’s even harder when they haven’t heard of the playwrights, none of whom hail from theater capitals. But it was important to Whitcomb, a Nebraska native who’s worked in New York, but who also actively searches for new voices in nontraditional, often suburban spaces, to showcase a new generation of emerging playwrights. 

“I was producing playwrights that aren’t being produced and should be produced,” he says. “I could have chosen new plays from familiar names. But it was important to me that I was really expanding the canon by finding playwrights who aren’t included in playwright conversations and probably should be, who are writing things that are accessible, nuanced and connecting with audiences, and to show them how people are responding. I’ve been in the trenches with those folks. I’ve supported those artists and they’ve supported me. I’ve seen them on their journey and they’ve seen me in mine. As someone from Omaha, I’ve never been set on working only in New York. I need to work in communities outside the mainstream.” 

That’s why Whitcomb — and before him, Palmer (also an outsider who grew up in Hillsboro before going on to national and international directing stints) — make such an ideal fit for Hillsboro, which even as one of Oregon’s largest cities remains to some extent in Portland’s shadow. Since its inception, Bag&Baggage has represented a bet: that a suburban theater company (albeit in an urban downtown setting) could produce and build an audience for artistically ambitious, extremely audience-friendly theater on the level of top big-city companies. At its best, B&B has done that, and Whitcomb’s vision promises to continue that excellence. Whether it can sustain an audience for that vision is the ongoing question. The quality of the new work Bag&Baggage has been making for two decades now,  and its investment in next-gen theater makers through HYPE, is lighting the way toward high-caliber theater that resonates with broader communities beyond Broadway –  either New York’s or Portland’s.  

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See HYPE’s original devised showcase production of Grizelda’s Day Off In Hell (Michigan) at 2 pm Saturday, May 10 at The Vault Theatre, 350 E. Main St., Hillsboro, just steps away from the Max Blue Line and several bus lines. Tickets. 

Then grab a bite at one of the several dozen restaurants and indoor food carts within a few steps of The Vault, and come back at 7 pm for the penultimate performance of Bag&Baggage’s family friendly The Ballad of Iron Jo, which closes on Sunday, May 11. Tickets here.

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