The big dogs of fall theater in Portland are barking down the lane, getting ready to spring on the scene. Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street — Stephen Sondheim’s best musical, to my mind, and feel free to argue; there are lots of candidates — flourishes his straight razor at Portland Center Stage beginning Sept. 29 (and returns shortly after for a second helping of meat pies in a separate production at Twilight Theater beginning Oct. 18).

Portland Playhouse opens the musical Amélie, based on the hit movie, Oct. 2, with Lauren Steele in the title role. Sara Catherine Holder returns to Broadway Rose Sept. 19 in her winning performance as one of country music’s greatest stars in the musical Always … Patsy Cline, with costar Sharon Maroney. And the latest Broadway-musical tour of perennial favorite Wicked cackles into town for a couple of weeks starting Oct. 16.

A couple of big dogs are already gnawing on bones in town. The Broadway tour of the high-flying musical adventure Peter Pan continues through Sunday, Sept. 1, at Keller Auditorium, with a revised book by playwright Larissa FastHorse (see Amber Kay Ball’s interview with FastHorse for Artswatch here).

And Cirque du Soleil’s circus-tent spectacular Kooza continues under the big top at Portland Exposition Center through Oct. 6. Portland audiences got a reminder Aug. 24 of the dangers inherent in those high-wire acts when Russian aerialist Mariia Konfektova fell from the aerial hoop and was injured. Konfektova was taken to a hospital but later posted on Instagram that “luckily I’m okay,” the Portland Tribune reported.

But you don’t have to wait for the big dogs. A good-sized pack of promising shows are set to open in Portland in the first couple of weeks of September, and we’ll get to them soon. First, though, this:

Artists Rep, Oregon Children’s Theatre: Rising again?

To put it mildly, the 2020s have not been kind to arts organizations across the nation. Pandemic shutdowns threw budgets into disarray, and a host of other factors, from rising costs to public fears of going into troubled downtowns to the fact that many people simply got out of the habit of going to performances or galleries, have left groups large and small in fragile positions.

In Portland, Artists Rep, in the midst of a years-long construction project that eventually saw it cancel a season and lay off a new artistic director who never got a chance to produce a show, is slowly pulling itself back together. It has a shortened season set to kick off in October with a show called The Event!, written by seven Oregon theater figures, which it describes as “a delightfully playful experience (maybe with a slight naughty twinkle) filled with surprising twists and turns.” Just being onstage again is an encouraging twist and turn.

And Oregon Children’s Theatre, which has a long and distinguished record of fine productions, world premieres, an adventurous teen acting company, and lots of classes for young people, has gone through its own troubles. It lost its home space (and after a long search found new quarters) and like many other groups is feeling a money squeeze. In June it announced a serious shortfall and kicked off a $150,000 fund drive. In late August it announced it had $38,000 to go. It’s not out of the woods, but it will produce a fall show, Cat Kid Comic Club: The Musical, based on Dav Pilkey’s books, in November. Meanwhile, you can check out donation possibilities here.

And now, on to all those new shows opening in the first half of September:

“R.U.R.”: A little timely sci-fi from 1921

“I go to the theater to be rattled,” veteran Portland director, composer, playwright, and teacher Matthew B. Zrebski says. “I don’t want to go to the theater to be in an echo chamber. I have no interest in that.”

And if the cage he’s rattling happens to be a century-old science-fiction drama by a Czech writer named Karel Čapek, well, it’s a cage worth a good shake or four. Zrebski is directing Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) for Lakewood Theatre, where it opens Sept. 13.

R.U.R. is remembered as the play that introduced the word “robot” to the world, although what Čapek meant by it was not the little lurching metal helper-machines we think of but fully fleshed, lab-created humanoids that could do hard work but presumably had no will of their own. Čapek’s robots were less R2D2 and more like the replicants of the classic sci-fi movie Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, in which you can’t tell the humans from the replicants without a scorecard, and maybe not even then.

With the rise of artificial intelligence and advances in genetic engineering, the world of R.U.R. suddenly seems almost too close for comfort — even a little, well, rattling. “This play asks all the questions we’re asking now,” says Zrebski, who is directing, adapting the script, and composing the musical score. “What happens when these creations take on an intelligence of their own?”

That is, what if the “robots” evolve, in the lab or on their own, into real thinking, feeling, emotional creatures? That’s the core question for the play’s main character, Helen, president of the Humanity League, who “cares about social justice,” Zrebski says, and wants to free the robots to have the rights that humans do. She quite abruptly marries the head of the company that creates the robots — an aspect of the play Zrebski says he had to grapple with to make sense in the plot — so she can work on liberation from the inside.

“It’s a bit of a Faustian bargain she makes,” Zrebski says. The play comments deeply on class, he believes, with the robots very much a lower, even a slave, class, created to liberate humans from manual work and make lots of money for the company that creates them. “There’s also a deeply spiritual thread in the play, around the idea of the soul, and of God.”

And who decides whether a creature — natural or “created” — has a soul or a complex emotional life, anyway? It’s a question that’s been around at least as long as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and that is still argued in scientific and philosophical circles. “I’m really fascinated by the split in neuroscience on what consciousness is,” Zrebski says. “And if we don’t know what consciousness is, how do we know what’s alive?”

While Čapek’s R.U.R. is very forward-looking in many ways, in others, Zrebski discovered, it’s old and creaky and too long and very much of its own time. “What I thought was going to be a raking of the script became a whole adaptation,” he says. That included getting rid of a strong misogynistic streak and some racial attitudes “that did not feel like part of the story,” but part of the culture of the play’s times.

In general, Zrebski has streamlined the script, making it shorter, more active, and much more rapid-fire. “I wanted to highlight the robots more,” he says. “The robots in the original aren’t there very much. And I was extremely focused on the tempo and the rhythms — the musicality of the show. At its core, I’m approaching this as a psychological thriller.”

What’s it all come down to? Theater (and art in general) is much more about asking questions than delivering answers, Zrebski believes. And theater is very much about engaging its audience. In a way it’s a puzzle: a play. “I’m a detective,” he says. “That’s what I do. I’m investigating something. And the goal is to be as entertaining as it is provocative.”

“The Spanish/Latino/Latina/Latinx/Latine Vote”

Milagro, Portland’s Hispanic theater company and cultural center, has done several of National New Play Network’s Rolling World Premieres, in which several companies across the nation co-produce new plays and perform them in succession. The latest, which will play at Milagro Sept. 6-22, is The Hispanic/Latino/Latina/LatinX/Latine Vote, and playwright Bernardo Cubría will be in the audience opening night and will lead a playwriting workshop at Milagro Sept. 7.

Cubria’s play is something of a political satire, and something of a character play. Paola Aguilar, a university professor, is hired by a political party to help them understand how to get the Hispanic/Latino/Latina/Latinx/Latine vote. She takes the job reluctantly, because it pays well and she needs the money for her own, eventually disclosed, purposes. What’s this? Money and politics mixing it up together? Shocking!

“God’s Favorite” at PassinArt

You might recall the Book of Job, and God’s bet with Satan that Job would remain just and faithful even if Satan were to bury him under a host of plagues. In 1958 poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish took the bones of the story and created the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning verse play J.B.

And in 1974 Neil Simon turned this troubling tale into something of a comedy, God’s Favorite, which was not so much a favorite of the critics of the time but remains an intriguing piece of theater dealing, if sometimes awkwardly, with very big questions including the natures of God and humans. In this play Simon’s trademark schtick comedy is tinged with grief, making the story of Job a likely model: He wrote the play, Simon said, as a response to the death of his first wife, Martha Graham dancer Joan Baim, from cancer.

Now PassinArt: A Theatre Company, Portland’s longest-running Black company, is taking on the big questions — and the comedy as well as the grief — with its production of God’s Favorite Sept. 4-29 at the downtown Brunish Theatre of Portland’5 Centers for the Arts. The story’s updated to the Long Island mansion of a God-fearing tycoon and his family, who are visited unnervingly by a messenger from God — and, yes, the plagues soon rain down.

PassinArt calls the show “a family dramedy of faith and spiritual healing written by one of the most popular playwrights in the history of American theater—updated, enriched and perfectly seasoned by a multi-talented, multi-cultural cast.” Promisingly, it’s directed by the excellent William Earl Ray.

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In other PassinArt news, the company had its annual Sweet Taste of the Arts celebration Aug. 17, an evening of dining, entertainment, and fundraising, and honored three people with legacy awards: musician and entertainment producer Joe Bean Keller; community organizer and nonprofit leader Sharon Gary Smith; and the excellent and deeply missed actor and singer Anthony P. Armstrong, who was honored in memoriam. PassinArt raised $60,000 during the gala to help support its programs.

As the political season heats up, here’s “Ann”

When they met on the Triangle Productions! stage in 2018, Margie Boulé and Ann Richards were an ideal match: Boulé the Portland actor, singer, and former newspaper columnist and television host; Richards the legendarily feisty and outspoken governor of Texas from 1991 to 1995.

Now, with a new election season approaching the boiling point, the two are getting together again. Triangle brings back the one-woman show Ann Sept. 5-29, and it promises to be a refreshing break from the pugnacious yammering and posturing spilling out from the airwaves, online posts, and water coolers of America. Richards had a deep comic streak and a tough-minded common sense: She knew her mind and spoke it brashly, with wit and flair. Boulé captures that unusual political personality entertainingly.

“Every Brilliant Thing” at Clackamas Rep

Duncan Macmillan and original performer Jonny Donahoe’s Every Brilliant Thing, which opens Sept. 5 at Clackamas Rep, is an odd duck of a play — but then, the odd ducks are often the most interesting ones. It’s a solo show, and to my knowledge this will be the first time it’s been done in greater Portland since Isaac Lamb starred in it at Portland Center Stage in 2017. Clackamas Rep has another excellent actor, Jayson Shanafelt, who’s bound to give it his own spin.

And every performance is bound to be different from the others, because although it is a solo show, the audience is an active partner, tossing out comments on cue and in general helping to set the show’s tone. In that sense, it’s a bit like standup comedy.

The performance begins in tragedy — with the actor telling us of the inconceivable death, when he was a boy of 7, of his dog, Sherlock Bones, and of his nervous mother’s later botched attempt to kill herself — and can transmute into something very like joy, as the actor determines to make an ever-expanding list of the things large and small that bring happiness in life, and the audience joins in. Every brilliant thing, added one by one. In a non-cloying and theatrically fascinating way, it’s a celebration of life, even with the knowledge of the opposite lurking in the background.

The return of Hand2Mouth’s “Home/Land”

Hand2Mouth Theatre’s Home/Land, an immersive theater work — or, as the company describes it, a “walk-through performance installation” — returns to Zidell Yards on the Southwest Portland waterfront Aug. 30-Sept. 14 for a third time. The performance deals with displacement and houselessness, and you should wear comfortable shoes, because there’s no slipping into a cozy theater seat: Audience members go on a three-quarter-mile trek through the installation, “on a journey through a fictional catastrophic event that brings audiences to a housing camp on the SW Waterfront at the historic Zidell Yards.”

Bobby Bermea wrote a year ago for ArtsWatch about Home/Land and Hand2Mouth’s then-new artistic director Michael Cavazos, quoting Cavazos about the walk-through show: “There’s a lot of history that’s being shared in these stories in a very beautiful way, so that audiences really get a sense of what the history of the land is and hopefully build some compassion for how to think about people who have been displaced.”

Mae West’s once-shunned “The Drag”

Here’s your chance to see the Mae West play that didn’t get produced on Broadway, because in 1927 it was just too hot to handle. The Drag, which West wrote under her pen name Jane Mast, opened strong out of town in New Jersey, reportedly pulling in $30,000 at its opening. But the critics, miffed by its content, roundly panned it, and the guardians of morality rained brimstone on its head: Although it was making good money, the show was canceled after its first two weeks.

Why? Because The Drag was about gay men, and drag culture, and that simply would not do. Broadway was frightened off: As Wikipedia notes, “The Society for the Prevention of Vice warned the producers that if the play continued, all Broadway productions that season would be scrutinized and censored.” Around that time some of West’s other plays were raided by New York police; West landed in the slammer for 10 days and was forced to pay a $500 fine.

The play touches on conversion therapy, and a marriage of convenience, and something of a murder mystery, and because it’s by West, it also has an overlay of comedy. North Portland’s Twilight Theater performs this historical curiosity Sept. 6-22.

“Tesla City Stories,” The Old Church Concert Hall

Are you in the studio? Or at home, dialing in on your tabletop Motorola? Actually, with Tesla City Stories, it’s a bit of both — a live-action vintage radio show, with vintage-costumed performers and big fat microphones and special effects onstage, performed next at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 13 at TOC Portland (the recently renamed The Old Church Concert Hall). This episode, Harpy Squadron, whisks you back to those pre-television days of World War II with “the female fighting force that flies for freedom,” plus a little comedy and romance.

“The Immigrant Story Live”

The invaluable group The Immigrant Story, which does what its title says — it provides platforms for the many immigrants who arrive in Oregon to tell the stories of where they came from and why and how they came here — tells those stories in writing, in music, in visual exhibitions, and in live storytelling events. The next Immigrant Story Live will be at 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 14, in the Cabell Center Theater at Catlin Gabel School, 8825 S.W. Barnes Road, Portland. It’s free and first come first served; doors open at 6:30 p.m.

Storytellers with roots in Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Japan, and Laos will share their stories, and the musical group Seffarine, which features Moroccan vocals, flamenco guitar, Arabic oud, and Persian kamancheh accompaniment, also will perform.

Cygnet Salon’s “Mother of the Maid”

The newish Cygnet Salon series of staged readings has been packing ’em in at the little 21ten Theatre (the former Shoebox Theatre) in Southeast Portland. Its first outing, Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot, sold out in June. So did July’s selection of readings from the books of John Steinbeck. August’s reading of Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay’s For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, featuring veteran luminaries Vana O’Brien and Michael Fisher-Welsh, sold out its first performance, so the company swiftly added a second, on Thursday, Aug. 29.

All of which is to suggest that if you want to catch September’s reading of Jane Anderson’s Mother of the Maid, a medieval/modern/feminist twist on the tale of Joan of Arc, it might be a very good idea to nail down your reservation early, which you can do here. The reading, which will be performed by Jerilyn Armstrong, Grant Byington, Michael Fisher-Welsh, Akitora Ishii, Ariel Puls, and Marilyn Stacey, will be at 7 p.m. Sept. 16 at 21ten.

Reshuffling “52 Pick-Up”

Also at 21ten, TJ Dawe and Rita Bozi’s play 52 Pick-Up is reshuffling the deck for a return engagement Sept. 5-15 following its successful run a year ago. You can read Marty Hughley’s report for ArtsWatch here about the original production.