The call time is 6:30 p.m. and some people arrive at that time, but others do not, slowly trickling in by dribs and drabs. No one is yelled at or shamed or frustrated or mad. The artists who have shown up in the small living room of this house start warming up, or trying on costume pieces culled from their personal wardrobes at home, or tuning their instruments (a keyboard, a saxophone, a cello and a banjo), amiably chatting, seemingly comfortable in the idea that rehearsal will start when it starts. After all the actors have arrived, rehearsal begins, gently, organically, like watching a flower bloom through time-lapse photography.

The theater company is The Broken Planetarium, and the rehearsal is for its latest show, The Greenbrier Ghost, which will run Oct. 3-13 at The Siren Theater in Portland. This method of making art is completely purposeful and integral to the overarching goals of the company: Building a creative safe haven for its artists, as warm and nurturing as a womb, is a fundamental goal. Like the rest of the Planetarium’s work, Ghost is an unconventional concoction of magic, music, sex, a loopy sense of humor, and the fiercely progressive politics of its founder and prime mover, Laura Christina Dunn. (Read ArtsWatch’s 2022 profile.)

Dunn is a genuine maverick. She doesn’t follow the rules, buy into the pretensions, or get swallowed up in the hypocrisies of conventional regional theater. A published poet whose poetry has appeared in journals such as Fugue, At Length, The Bear Deluxe, Zocalo Public Square and others, Dunn has been producing theater as the Broken Planetarium for more than a decade now, and though her collaborators have changed many times over the years, the baseline sensibility does not.

Dunn is to the left of liberal in her politics, both in the stories she chooses to tell and how she chooses to tell them. This underlying intention is present not just in her dramaturgy but also in the creative space she builds for her actors. The reason, for instance, the actors give each other notes is because The Greenbrier Ghost doesn’t have a director. Dunn doesn’t want one. She wants to create work without depending on a fabricated hierarchy to do it. Instead, the artists frame their notes for each other in the form of a question, or lead off with, “I wonder …”

“I learned that technique with my kids,” say Dunn. “They don’t respond well to commands. You have to phrase it in a way that makes them feel empowered.” And if the actor doesn’t feel they’re in an emotional place to receive notes that day, they can say that, too: “It’s not gonna land with them anyway if they’re not in a place to receive it.”

The Greenbrier Ghost’s songs are written primarily by Dunn, with a host of other artists taking part, some in the show, some not; her primary collaborator is Ray Austin, a musician and teacher who also teaches piano to Dunn’s kid.

For a lot of theater artists, much of this sounds like anarchy, and the more experienced they are in conventional theater the harder time they might have buying into the process. This is why, though Dunn likes and respects professional theater artists, she doesn’t necessarily seek them out. “I will explain to people the model of the company and they’ll be like, ‘Yeah, I love it! I’m so down!’ and then when it comes down to it, giving up the privilege and the power that you’ve had is a struggle. I understand that, but then I have to spend the whole rehearsal period trying to get people on board.”

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Speaking of boards, in the past Dunn has run into resistance even from her own board in realizing her vision. “They said, ‘We’re not doing that non-hierarchical thing,” recalls Dunn. “I even had one board member quit because she was like, ‘I’m not doing it without a director.’” But Dunn held on to her vision, moved that board out, and has surrounded herself with artists who are game to try this way of doing things, and the process for The Greenbrier Ghost has validated her faith. “It’s been a really positive healing experience,” says Dunn, “to make art with this cast and not have some made up hierarchy about who had more access to ideas and expression.”

There is an extent to where some hierarchy is inescapable, of course. Dunn is the founder of The Broken Planetarium and its one constant. She writes the scripts. “I need my weirdo self to have my own weirdo time with the script,” she says. “There are things that I’m attached to. But if I’m saying, ‘I want to keep that’ that’s not me being a director, that’s just me having an opinion. But I’m not the dictator of the script.” 

A fundamental guiding light is that she wants her collaborators to feel empowered to make decisions and take control. And they do. The script is nipped and tucked by the actors according to their gifts. Miranda Mattlin is the costume designer, but the cast all has input. Julie Hefner choreographed some of the songs, but she would adjust her choreography to suit her actors’ bodies, and other times the actors choreograph themselves. “We did it all together,” says Dunn. “Long nights of figuring out what’s cool and offering crazy ideas. Those were some of my favorite nights, choreographing together.”

For Dunn, whose stated goal is “to be the bridge between people who do this professionally and people who never do theater but have wanted to,” this process is deliberate. That might be either because of opportunity or ability; Dunn doesn’t make a distinction. “Everybody has the right to expression. I want everyone involved.”

Dunn, who’s not formally trained in theater or music and is passionate about both, carries a massive outsider’s chip on her shoulder. She’s not shy about expressing her antipathy for what she calls the “gatekeepers” of theater. “’You have to have studied it,” she says, “’And you have to do it perfectly.’ It’s this capitalist idea that only certain people who get paid for it are allowed to make art. Everyone has the right to expression. The gatekeeping is so harmful, because art is what saves so many of our lives. I don’t know how to get through anything without making something about it.”

She comes by that outsider’s mentality honestly. As a child, she felt off cut off from the art world even though internally she felt that was her calling. “I wasn’t able to take music lessons as a kid. I didn’t have access to that. I always did theater in high school and I loved it. But I wasn’t allowed to study that. Arts were not supported in my family. But I always had this thing in me that really wanted to make art.  ven if I turned on music in the car my dad would turn it off. I’d be like, ‘Don’t you like music?’ and he’d be like, ‘I’d rather have my thoughts.’”

Dunn laughs about this story now, but you can tell it’s serious business for her. Breaking down barriers, shaking up protocols, making art that’s impactful and has integrity, all while taking care of the artists doing the making – that’s serious business for her. Reimagining how art is made is serious business for her. “I think the system we normally use does a lot of harm,” she says. “I just want to try this method. When people feel safe is when they’re at their most creative. They can think outside the box. They can take risks.”

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Dunn needs her artists to feel safe, because her subject matter is not. The same board that tried to steer Dunn away from her non-hierarchical model also tried to steer her away from dealing with domestic violence. Their reasoning, she says, was that someone had felt that was a harmful topic for theater. “They asked me,” says Dunn, “‘Is this therapy or theatre?’” Luckily, another collaborator stepped in and said that if they didn’t want Dunn to write about domestic violence, that should be Dunn’s cue to “write the fuck out of domestic violence,” recalls Dunn, laughing.

The Broken Planetarium usually deals with hot-button topics that Dunn feels strongly about, and The Greenbier Ghost is no different. The ghost in question is a woman who was killed by her spouse, but Dunn refuses to relegate her simply to the role of victim.

“When I write about domestic violence,” says Dunn, “I’m not writing the normal narrative of, ‘there’s the victim and there’s the monster.’ I’m going to interrupt that. I’m going to say that this is perpetuated by the culture that we live in.”

Indeed, the Greenbier ghost (a dynamic Cassandra Pangelinan) might be the central ghost of the play. But as the show’s charismatic MC (Katy Payne), herself a ghost, puts it, “A ghost is someone who won’t let the past go until it is reconciled. America hates that shit. … America is a haunted house where we relive the past, so we don’t have to look at it” says the charismatic MC (Katy Payne), herself a ghost. And that is the central tenet of the play.

Dunn, as a rule, is not one for nuance: She prefers to kill her boogeymen with poetic fire. It’s that lyrical aptitude and her knock-kneed humor that keep her messages from feeling heavy-handed. And, as is typical of Broken Planetarium, the show is chock-full of musical numbers, blasted with full-throat gusto by her passionate cast — a cast of people you might not know as your typical Portland theater-scene performers (save for Pangelinan, whom you may have seen with Triangle Productions! Broadway Rose, or Stumptown Stages), but who attack their parts with fervor and skill.

And when you’re watching that passion, listening to it, feeling it, you begin to have some inkling of what Dunn is talking about. The model of what we think of as professional theater has been in a tailspin since the pandemic, a cataclysmic event that exposed all the cracks. And although theater will never die as long as there are humans around, it makes sense to wonder what its future will look like. When you’re watching a Broken Planetarium show, you might be forgiven for wondering if this is it.

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The Broken Planetarium’s “The Greenbrier Ghost” opens Thursday, Oct. 3, and continues through Oct. 13 at The Siren Theater, 3913 N. Mississippi Ave., Portland. Ticket and schedule information here.