April may not be the cruelest month (there’s brisk competition for that dubious honor, and the barrage of callous cultural and political demolishments since Jan. 20 suggests that it may have become a permanent condition) but it’s certainly among the busiest months. My calendar’s been so jammed I need a side calendar to handle the spillover: If I’ve been going pretty much 24/7 (all right, I do manage some sleep and mealtimes, and even a little Young Sheldon on TV for kicks) I’ve missed far more cultural events than I’ve got to.

That includes almost all of this year’s Fertile Ground Festival of new works, which last year moved from its usual January time slot to April. The 2025 festival, in venues scattered across the Portland metropolitan area, opened April 4 and continued through the 20th: It was scheduled to run through the 19th, but a single show was added for the following day.

On the 19th I finally made it to the final performance of Sandra de Helen’s A Window into Tennessee, the only Fertile Ground show I caught this year. (Several other ArtsWatch writers were more attentive; you can see their stories here.)

I’d seen de Helen’s Extraordinary People, a gentle comedy about three sets of conjoined twins, at last year’s Fertile Ground, and liked it. A couple of its key players — director Louanne Moldovan and actor Michael J. Teufel, who was a twin in Extraordinary People — are key to A Window into Tennessee, too: Moldovan once again as director and Teufel as the show’s sole performer, playing the great and troubled playwright Tennessee Williams.

As different as the two plays are — the former a complex ensemble show, the latter a one-man show in which Teufel is mainly playing the playwright but represents a wide variety of other characters in Williams’ life as well — they have in common an allegiance to the words themselves: They live among the Theater of Language.

That, of course, is where Williams, author of such enduring hits as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, also resided: His great gift was his ability to create memorable characters through his mastery of lush and lively language. Teufel sinks into Williams’ character and cadence with a startlingly soft yet cutting vocalese, mixing sadness, regret, aspiration, memory and humor in his tone: His voice drips and drawls like a magnolia shedding blossoms in a spring rain.

De Helen weaves Williams’ own life, from his often troubled family relationships to his alcoholism and his mostly closeted homosexuality at a time when being out could be a career-breaker, into the fabric of his characters and his plays. His friend and fellow playwright William Inge, author of the likes of Picnic, Bus Stop, and the screenplay for Splendor in the Grass, and like Williams a heavy drinker and a mostly closeted gay man, pops up in De Helen’s script frequently.

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If there isn’t a lot of physical action in A Window into Tennessee — there’s a desk, and an invisible telephone that prompts mimed pickups and dialings, and Teufel alone onstage except for David Loftus, who sits to the side and calmly reads the stage directions to the packed-to-the-rafters audience in the 40-odd-seat 21ten Theatre — there’s a constant flow of emotional and verbal action. We see a middle-aged Tennessee and then an older Williams, both looking back on the twists and turns of their life, and the older Williams feeling trapped by the successes of his earlier works: De Helen’s script approaches the mysteries of the connections between the work that artists create and the lives that they lead.

A Window into Tennessee is a bit of a ramble, but a ramble with purpose. It isn’t the storyline that matters so much as the texture, which is rich with remembrance and can be compelling. Its Fertile Ground appearance is a step in a continuing process, and a highly promising one. It could be fascinating to see where it steps next.

Startling stories from there to here

Last Saturday afternoon I dropped in to the Rose City Book Pub, on Northeast Fremont Street in Portland, for good reason: Elizabeth Mehren, author of the book I Lived To Tell the World: Stories from Survivors of Holocaust, Genocide, and Atrocities of War, was there, giving a talk with a couple of the people she profiles in her book: Saron Khut, a Cambodian refugee and owner of Mekong Bistro, a gathering place in east Portland for Southeast Asian immigrants; and Emmanuel Turanturanye, a survivor of genocide in Rwanda.

A year ago Amanda Waldroupe talked about the book with Mehren, a former writer for The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, in this story for ArtsWatch. I Lived To Tell the World profiles more than a dozen refugees from Rwanda, Myanmar, Bosnia, Syria, and elsewhere who escaped war or famine or other catastrophes and resettled in Oregon, building new lives but not forgetting the ones they left behind.

These stories of overcoming harsh circumstances and surviving to start anew are both sobering and uplifting — and for those of us who haven’t been trapped in war zones or herded into refugee camps or escaped in small boats on perilous seas, they are important to hear and understand, especially now, when the U.S. government is on a dangerous anti-immigrant binge. These stories tell another truth: that so many of the people who come here from other places help build a stronger culture here.

Mehren’s book is published by Oregon State University Press in partnership with The Immigrant Story, the vital organization that tells the stories in several ways of new Oregonians who have come here from around the world. Mehren is a writer and editor for The Immigrant Story, and Sankar Raman, its founder and leader and himself an immigrant to Oregon from India, was at the Book Pub event, too.

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Coming up next, Raman said, is the fourth edition of I Am an American Live, May 24 at Beaverton’s Patricia Reser Center for the Arts. The evening will include storytellers from Vietnam, Nepal, Malaysia and Afghanistan, and music from South Asia by singer Shivani Joshi and an eight-member ensemble of instrumentalists.

And this Saturday, April 26, Portland’s New Year in the Park celebration of Southeast Asia’s cultures will gather at Glenhaven Park, 7900 N.E. Siskiyou St. It’ll run 10 a.m.-5 p.m., it’s free, and it will feature Southeast Asian food, music, dance, and more.

What Jim Lommasson carries

The tie-in with The Immigrant Story and Elizabeth Mehren continues, this time pulling in the exceptional Portland photographer Jim Lommasson, who frequently contributes to The Immigrant Story and has done several series on the things that immigrants and soldiers returning from war zones bring with them when they arrive in or come back to the United States.

In early March, ArtsWatch published Mehren’s story Poetry from the People: Street Roots vendors create rhyme and reason, about the Portland street newspaper vendors’ “School in the Sky” in which they meet weekly to study poetry and create some of their own.

Lommasson, who has been following the poetry gatherings regularly, took photos that were included in Mehren’s story, which also focuses on his exhibition What I Carry: A collaborative photo+writing storytelling project with Portland’s Street Community, in which he photographed items ranging from dolls to dry socks to dog companions that houseless Portlanders made sure to keep with them, and then asked the owners to write something about why these things were precious. The exhibit had a long run at Multnomah Central Library before closing March 15.

Now it’s back — or almost back. It’ll run May 1-31 at PLACE Galeria, 735 N.W. 18th Ave., Portland. If you missed it at the library or would like to see it again, here’s your chance.

“This project with the unsheltered members of our community aims to remind us of our shared humanity and that we are all one family,” Lommasson noted. “It’s been said that my What We Carried projects ‘humanize’ the refugee. But it’s not the refugee (or the homeless person) that needs to be humanized … it is us.”

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Return of the Log Lady

On April 14 ArtsWatch published Jim Flint’s story Catherine E. Coulson: ‘The Log Lady’ and so much more, published originally in ashland.news, the excellent Southern Oregon nonprofit online newspaper.  I Know Catherine, The Log Lady, a film about Coulson, the longtime Oregon Shakespeare Festival actor who also was beloved for her role as the “Log Lady” on the cult television series Twin Peaks, is a featured attraction at this year’s Ashland Independent Film Festival, which continues through April 27.

In yet another case of dragging March or April into May, the World Forestry Center in Portland has announced a new pop-up exhibition, What the Log Saw: Honoring the legacy of Catherine “The Log Lady” Coulson, in the forestry center’s Discovery Museum in Washington Park. It’ll run May 1-June 8.

Why so much interest in the Log Lady on both ends of the state?

“What the Log Saw explores the profound connection between Coulson’s fictional character and her real-life advocacy for our forests and wildfire prevention,” the World Forestry Center said in a press statement. “Visitors will have the opportunity to explore artifacts such as the iconic log, her signature glasses, photographs of Coulson on set, and other personal memorabilia. These items illuminate how Coulson transformed her character’s narrative into a passionate commitment to environmental conservation and community education.

“Catherine Coulson used her role as ‘The Log Lady’ to spark meaningful conversations about our forests beyond the screen,” said Alli Gannett, director of communications for World Forestry Center.”

Meanwhile, the documentary I Know Catherine, the Log Lady will play at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May, 14, at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland.

A night for Billie Holiday

In what’s become a welcome and well-established Portland tradition, Siren Nation is presenting its 18th annual Billie Holiday Tribute Night, an evening of music on Saturday, April 26, at Alberta Rose Theatre. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the show starts at 8.

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Holiday, the great jazz singer and, with songs such as Strange Fruit, sometime conscience of the nation, died in 1959 at age 44; she would have been 110 this month. Siren Nation’s tribute will feature performances by Marcia Hocker, Laura Stilwell, Rita Marquez, Anandi, Marilyn Keller, and Lenanne Sylvester Miller.