Don’t look now, but some fellow named Joshua appears to have grabbed the theatrical bullhorn and ordered the trumpets to blare, causing the Fourth Wall — you know, that invisible barrier that keeps the audience safely on one side of a show and the performers securely on the other — to come tumbling down.

With an almost-wink and an ingratiating collaborative nod, the lead actor in Milagro Theatre’s world-premiere political farce keeps pointing at people in the seats and asking for advice on what she should do next (or, classroom-style, asking for a show of hands).

At intervals in the telling of his tale the solo star at Clackamas Rep calls out a series of numbers — “six” or “nine” or maybe “thirty-two” — and people in the crowd shout out an answer in response. Sometimes the star will even bring an audience member onto the stage for a brief exchange.

And for its third go-round with Home/Land, its interactive performance about being displaced and houseless, Hand2Mouth Theatre not only doesn’t keep the audience at bay, it abandons the theater altogether, leading the crowd through a three-quarter-mile, open-air trek at Zidell Yards along the southwest Portland riverside.

Let’s take a look at those first two shows — Milagro’s tongue-twistingly titled The Hispanic Latino/Latina/LatinX/Latine Vote, and Clackamas Rep’s Every Brilliant Thing — and see what’s up. The plays are very different, and also, in interesting ways, a lot alike. They’re comedies with serious undertones: Each deals with matters that are both very large and very small, and in both the small things act as something like humanizing antidotes for the large. Together, the two plays make a good theatrical team.

“Vote”: Milagro’s world-premiere satiric political comedy

Yes, there’s a reason for that extra-long title that seems to stretch from the Canadian border to the southern tips of Chile and Argentina. Bernard Cubría’s The Hispanic Latino/Latina/LatinX/Latine Vote, a “rolling world premiere” as part of the National New Play Network that is getting its first roll at Portland’s Milagro Theatre through Sept. 22, is a political farce that latches onto a core question in the U.S. cultural and political approach to citizens whose roots are in the countries of Central and South America and the Caribbean: Why do we think of people from such varied backgrounds as parts of a single bloc?

More specifically, why do U.S. political parties draw up strategies to win “the Hispanic vote” (or “the Black vote”) as if it were something monolithic, with the unspoken (and sometimes spoken) view that if only your candidate can discover the right things to say, those voters will swing en masse to your side of the political spectrum?

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The Hispanic … Vote steers its course straight toward the crossroads of public and private when Kaj (Philip J. Bern), a senior strategist for The Party (the opposing party is called simply “The Other Party”), approaches college prof Paola (Tricia Castañeda-Guevera) with a fistful of money and an offer to hire her to help set strategy for swinging the Hispanic vote his way.

Paola isn’t precisely tickled by the prospect, but as it happens she’s undergoing IVF, in vitro fertilization, in an effort to have a baby, and the process is expensive. And so she agrees, and finds herself part of Kaj’s team, urging nuance when what the others want is a slam-bang overall strategy that’ll line up the votes.

The play has a farcical undertone that under Lawrence Siulagi’s direction takes on more than a dash of comic exaggeration, especially in Bern’s performance as Kaj, who can seem almost like a character in commedia dell’arte or a Molière comedy: The audience learns early that whatever else this play might be, it’s also fun.

As Paola, Castañeda-Guevera neatly counterbalances the buffoonery with a genuine congeniality and a character grounded in practicality and common sense. Her frequent asides and direct addresses to the audience come off as warm and inclusive, inviting the crowd to become a part of the story: Her approach charmingly shatters the Fourth Wall and wins the audience over to her side, as if together they were in on some amusing secret.

Siulagi’s likable cast also includes Emily Hyde and Melissa Bibliowicz as members of Kaj’s team, Lefoster Williams as the team’s only Black member, and Edward Lyons Jr. in a series of funny quick-hit performances as prospective LatinX (or name your preferred word) voters being interviewed by Paola, and as her IVF doctor.

What The Hispanic … Vote does not do is take sides in the current national election campaign, which feels a bit odd considering that this is one of the most divisive presidential races in the nation’s history, and certain issues, such as immigration policy, do have an important effect on large groups. Kaj is right that certain broad sweeps of belief mean something: Policies, and the ability to spell them out, are important. Paola is right that individuals shouldn’t be considered mere members of an often artificially drawn interest group, ethnic or otherwise: People have their own experiences, and their own beliefs, and the political system overlooks such human particulars at its own peril.

Milagro is the first stop on the premiere schedule for Cubría’s appealing play, and gets it while election season’s hot. Other productions will follow at Stages, in Houston; TuYo, in San Diego; and Foseca Theatre, in Indianapolis.

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Looking for the good: “Brilliant Things” at Clackamas Rep

Every Brilliant Thing, a one-man play by Duncan Macmillan with input from its original solo performer, Jonny Donahue, is an intriguing and strangely joyous blend of dark and light, the light being created to dispel the dark, and sometimes succeeding. It has laughter — quite a bit of it — and an undertow of pain and disappointment, and in the end, a measured hope and warmth.

At Clackamas Rep, where the show continues through Sept. 29, Jayson Shanafelt is the solo performer, except that in a way he’s not. He has a roomful of collaborators chipping in, shouting out lines, interacting with him, moving the story along — a story that revolves around a list of things that give pleasure: little brilliant things that provide purpose and light and perhaps, even, love.

You can tell something’s out of the ordinary as the audience is arriving and settling into the seats in what designer Christopher D. Whitten has transformed into a theater-in-the-round. Instead of waiting quietly backstage Shanafelt is out on the floor milling about with the crowd, chatting briefly, handing several members of the audience little cards that have numbers and a few words on them. When you hear me call out a number, he tells them, speak the words on the card, loud enough so everyone can hear them. A kind of theatrical conspiracy of collaboration and surprise is in the making.

What are the numbers and words about? When the play begins Shanafelt is a boy, seven years old, who’s just been told by his father that his mother’s “done something stupid” and landed in the hospital. It was, in fact, a suicide attempt, a darkness borne of a deep and lasting depression that inevitably had an effect on the boy, too. That’s when the list began: seven things, to start with, that brought happiness and made life worth living. The first thing on the list? Ice cream.

Along the way we meet Dad, and a reassuring sock puppet, and Sam, the girl from the library, and learn about life in high school and college and afterwards, and a list that grows and grows and is put away and forgotten and then picked up again; and Shanafelt, directed by David Smith-English, is our guide through it all, telling the tale mostly with wry humor but not skimping on the dark parts, yet somehow taking us through and above them. It’s a warmly compelling performance, precise and yet loose and active, taking in the whole room, improvising now and again, paying attention to the crowd and keeping it with him. It’s a benevolent performance, even when Shanafelt’s character flails and makes mistakes, and it wraps the audience in the fragile hopefulness of its story.

Not everything turns out well, but that’s life. Big, sometimes deeply sad things happen, but it’s the little things that matter. The little things that bring light and hope and perhaps even joy to the darkness, making life not just durable but worthwhile, and even an adventure.

Throughout the play, the number of good things on the list grows and grows, and the members of the audience shout them out, and as the list gets fatter the numbers begin of necessity to leapfrog: After all, the show’s less than an hour and a half long. My own number comes up at a nearly astronomical 999,997, and upon hearing Shanafelt call it out I pronounce, with what I imagine to be a round tone of clarity, two words: “The Alphabet.”

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I’m pleased with my assignment. I embrace the alphabet. I use it daily. I’m aware of both its possibilities and its limitations. In its English form it has 26 letters, making a few more sounds. It provides structure and meaning, and yet is only a map; an abstract of a vastly more complex and infinite reality. To be useful its letters and sounds must combine with other letters and sounds to create beauty rather than gibberish. Used wisely it diminishes loneliness and brings people together. It breaks down barriers and bridges gaps. It connects. And isn’t that precisely what our list-maker — and the list-maker inside each of us — desires? It is a brilliant thing.

At CoHo, a month of clowning around

Carrying on a tradition started by the late great Philip Cuomo, over the just-passed weekend CoHo Productions kicked off the 2024 CoHo Clown Festival, which will continue making merry through Oct. 4. The festival specializes in physical comedy, and professional funny people will be showing up from here, there, and pretty much everywhere. Get all the thigh-slapping details by clicking the link.