As the latter days of August arrive, so does a trio of theatrical visitors settling into Portland for stops on tour. Perhaps most spectacularly, and sticking around town the longest, is Kooza, from those specialists in gymnastic artistry and high-wire bedazzlement Cirque du Soleil.
The elaborately costumed aerialists, acrobats, clowns, musicians and the like will be entertaining audiences under a Big Top at the Portland Exposition Center from Wednesday, Aug. 21, through Oct. 6, giving you lots of chances to catch the act and, if you like, catch it again.
Cirque shows are feasts for the eyes, bringing old-fashioned circus skills into the contemporary world with humor, style, dazzle and derring-do. There’s nothing small about a Cirque show: It’s meant to overwhelm you, in a good way. And its performers excel at both artistry and athleticism (a bit like the break-dancers at the Olympics), packing more than a few thrills and chills into the act.
Yes, it’s mostly spectacle — but spectacle with a keen artistic spin. And like all Cirque shows, Kooza comes with a story of sorts, too. It is, Cirque declares, “an innovative journey viewed through the perspective of The Innocent, an endearing yet naïve clown looking for his place in the world. A mystery item is delivered to The Innocent one day when he is flying his kite.” Transferred miraculously “to a bizarre but exotic world,” he’s kept under “the watchful eye of an enigmatic trickster with remarkable abilities” — including, one assumes, some eye-popping aerial moves.
C.S. Lewis enters the house
On a much more intimate level, actor and writer Max McLean settles into downtown Portland’s Newmark Theatre for a pair of shows about the novelist, essayist, and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. In his solo show C.S. Lewis On Stage: Further Up & Further In, McLean impersonates Lewis — perhaps best-known for his Chronicles of Narnia children’s tales — in a kind of fireside chat, sitting in an easy chair with a cup of tea at hand.
Lewis, who was born in 1898 and died Nov. 22, 1963 — the same day as President John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World — was an Oxford don (he later also taught at Cambridge) and member of the literary group the Inklings with his good friend J.R.R. Tolkein, auther of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Produced by Fellowship for Performing Arts, McLean’s play emphasizes Lewis’s Christian worldview. “Lewis greets the audience,” Elizabeth Hamilton writes in a laudatory review for the National Catholic Reporter, “then dives straight into pondering the origins of the universe. … The play aims to tell the story of how Lewis went from a respected but little-known scholar at Oxford University to one of the most beloved Christian thinkers of the 20th century. If that storyline is a bit thin, the play more than makes up for it by the uncanny performance of McLean as Lewis and the absolute delight of hearing Lewis’ words performed onstage.”
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Further Up & Further In performs at 4 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 24, and 3 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 25, at the Newmark Theatre.
Flying high with Peter and the Pirates
The newest national tour of the high-flying musical Peter Pan lands at Portland’s Keller Auditorium for eight performances Tuesday, Aug. 27 through Sunday, Sept. 1, and it arrives not just with swordplay and fairy dust but also with a welcome cultural twist: The roles of Tiger Lily and her tribe of Indians have been updated from their submissive roles in J.M Barrie’s original 1904 play and carried over to the 1954 Jerome Robbins Broadway musical, upon which this new touring production is based.
Larissa FastHorse, the Sicangu Lakota Nation playwright whose very good satiric work The Thanksgiving Play premiered at Portland’s Artists Rep in 2018, revised the script from the Robbins version, making the scenes in the Darling home contemporary rather than Edwardian and, most crucially, updating the Native and gender roles.
As Gemma Wilson wrote in The Seattle Times, “Gone are the harmful Native stereotypes and underused, undeveloped female characters of the 1954 version. Intact is the vibrant, whimsical story of pirates and crocodiles, of fairies and flying, of the intrinsic magic and inherent loss that comes with childhood and growing up.”
ArtsWatch will have more coverage of FastHorse and the “new” boy who never grows old.
