
“This is probably one of my safer plays. We don’t even get naked in this one.”
Dylan Hankins is referring to Faena, the newest entry in his emerging body of work as one of Portland theater’s most eclectic young artists, and his second full-scale production in collaboration with Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble.
A 2021 alum of PETE’s year- long Institute for Contemporary Performance program, the multi-hyphenate Hankins has been variously cultivating his reputation as a director, a deviser, an actor, a writer, and, significantly, a translator, with original works including S p r a w l and (de)composition. Now he’s combining all of those disciplines with Faena, which he wrote, directed, and acts in alongside a dedicated ensemble of multitalented multi-linguists.
In his introductory email to me, PETE co-artistic director Jacob Coleman characterized Hankins as a “polymath provocateur,” and after only a few minutes in his company I understand at least the “polymath” half of the designation.
Hankins’ interests are vast and varied, and over the course of an hour and change our conversation veers from his adoration of Björk (“I wish I could be that creatively inspired …”) to Sex and the City to our favorite horror movies to Melville’s Moby-Dick, which he acknowledges as an inspiration for Faena, which is playing a short run this weekend only — Friday through Sunday, Jan. 31-Feb. 2, at Northwest Portland’s CoHo Theatre.
When we first meet at Sisters Coffee Company, Hankins is carrying a book that upon closer inspection I realize is actually a paperback journal. Its cover is hand-embellished with a pen-and-ink drawing of a swan gripping a sword in its bill, wreathed by an intricate border of vines. Starting the new journal was an exercise in intention-setting, Hankins explains: “I promised myself that this would be the year I learned German.”
And with English, Spanish, and Japanese already under his belt, why not? For Hankins, learning a new language isn’t just an exercise in personal enrichment, it’s a form of recreation. “There must be something in the way my brain is wired that it fits to me,” he muses. “I love grammar. There’s something about it that’s very music to me.”
Language, I am soon to learn, has been a kind of compass rose for Hankins, who began learning Spanish in the first grade, and who found an entry point into a life in the arts while studying world languages at Lewis & Clark College. There, he took up theater as an extracurricular before enrolling in the study-abroad program that would take him to Spain, where the earliest seeds of Faena were sown.

The relationship between Hankins’ linguistic studies and his artistic endeavors seems to have been symbiotic from the very beginning. His first mainstage show at Lewis & Clark was a production of Antigone, which introduced him to Anne Carson and sparked his interest in translation. Since then he has gone on to translate two Spanish-language plays into English: Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernardo Alba for Shaking The Tree, and Tartessos: A Memorial (to/from) the Darkness, by Miguel Romero Esteo, which was his senior thesis.
Of the two playwrights, Hankins has an apparent preference for Romero Esteo, a key figure in Spain’s postwar theater movement known in his lifetime for satirically – and controversially – taking aim at what Hankins calls “an obsession with purity in Spanish culture.”
To illustrate this point, he describes a scene in which a germophobic marquesa “shoves corks up [some] geese’s asses, and at the end of the play they all explode with shit.” He contrasts this against what he calls “the Lorca-fication of Spanish theater,” a trend toward a kind of brooding dramatism that ignores a funnier, zanier sensibility that Hankins finds to be equally prominent in the Spanish theatrical canon – and more in line with his preferences: “I don’t want to do the whole melodrama, I want to do the esperpento. I don’t want to do the duende, I want to do the clown.”
It is here that Hankins’ “provocateur” side begins to reveal itself. If Faena isn’t a direct homage to Romero Esteo, it does seem to be infused with a kindred enthusiasm for skewering the typical theater audience’s sense of gentility. A content warning on PETE’s website advises that the play contains “adult language, loud gunshots, graphic depictions of animal and human violence, deviant sexuality, and scatological humor.”
Hankins is candid about his intentions: “I like pushing buttons. I like being kind of wrong and perverted.” Recalling his statement that Faena is one of his “safer” plays, I wonder what an un-safe Dylan Hankins play might look like, and he obligingly texts me a monologue depicting a cruising encounter behind some bushes. “I’m getting fucked in the ass by this guy, and I can’t stop saying fun facts to him.”
This fusion of comedy with sexuality, of the cosmopolitan with the crass, is perhaps characteristic of Hankins’ work. “High art tends to be inaccessible, and I don’t vibe with that. I want to make art that’s like low art and high art together. The profane and the religious. How do we combine them?”
Faena is the result of his most recent effort to answer his own question, and the story of its genesis, like the play itself, begins with the matador.
At this juncture it might be helpful to clarify a few terms. While the word matador is often used interchangeably with bullfighter or torero, they aren’t one and the same. The matador is the principle bullfighter tasked with killing the bull during the fight’s denouement, after it’s been subdued by the picadors and the banderilleros. He is recognizable by his traje de luces or “suit of lights,” which consists of tight-fitting satin pants and an opulently embroidered jacket, plus a distinctive black velvet hat or montera, and of course a muleta: the red cape used to provoke the bull into charging toward its own death.
(Contrary to popular belief, it is the motion of the muleta rather than the color red that riles the bull. Red is just the optimal pigment for concealing bloodstains, a common occupational hazard in the business of bullfighting.) Most importantly, he carries an estoque, or sword, which is strategically concealed behind the muleta until the moment is right.
Traditionally a bullfight consists of three acts, or tercios, each with its own main character. In the first act, the tercio de vara, the picadors enter on horseback to stab the bull with their lances, both aggravating and weakening it. In the second act, the tercio de banderillas, the banderilleros jab colorful darts into the bull’s neck and shoulders, lowering its head in preparation for the matador’s killing thrust. Last comes the tercio de muerte – also known as the faena – when the matador finally appears, making a few artful passes with his cape before reaching for his sword and stabbing the bull between the shoulder blades, eliciting applause and shouts of “¡Ole!” from the audience. Among the lavish costumes, the three-act dramatic arc, and the genuinely life-or-death stakes, it’s impossible not to pick up on the grisly theatricality of it all.

During his time abroad, Hankins found himself captivated by the culture of bullfighting, and particularly by the figure of the matador. “I fell in love with the aesthetics of it,” Hankins says. “The flamboyance, the eroticism and violence and wrongness.” Later, after reading Moby-Dick, “I realized I [wanted] to do something about that human-animal relationship.” The timing of this revelation coincided with Hankins’ completion of his translation of The House of Bernardo Alba, and the influences of the two source materials converged. “My brain was in Spain at that moment.”
Stylistically, Faena owes its influence to the Spanish tradition of esperpento, a genre of tragicomedy that Hankins characterizes as “super grotesque and wild and clowny.” Its earliest incarnation was a one-act in which the adversarial relationship between a matador and a bull is upended when the two depart the bullring to go on a lunch date. They hit it off, and their connection leads to an interspecies sexual encounter. Once they return to the ring, the matador and the bull find that their newfound intimacy has irreversibly altered their relationship. They are unable to kill each other.
“The play is no longer anything like that,” Hankins says. The two principle characters were preserved: a virile, swaggering matador named Víctor (Paulina Jaeger-Rosete) and a bull named Floripondio (Rocco Weyer). But in the current version the central organizing principle is sentido – literally “feeling” – which in bullfighting parlance refers to the bull’s awareness of the matador’s deception, and its willingness to take part in the ruse.
“People have this idea that when you’re a bullfighter you’re hypnotizing the bull, and the bull plays along and it leads to their death. The point is that the matador is going along with this whole thing that leads to his own destruction,” Hankins explains. “I think we as human beings do that. We are being hypnotized by modern-day society in so many different ways. Through social media, through politics, through the way that society is structured, through patriarchy. We are kind of comfortable with following the dance of life even though it is incredibly deadly, to our souls or to ourselves or to our bodies in a very literal sense.”
With material that is as conceptually weighty as it is lexically demanding (the play is performed entirely in Castilian Spanish, with live English interpretation), it was essential that Hankins have the right cast. Fortunately, through his work at ICP he has acquired a stable of loyal collaborators, all of them selected for their fluency in Spanish and their ease with the intimacy the text calls for, and many of them serving as inspirations for the characters they play.
The cast of five juggle twelve roles, with Hankins, who plays the narrator, bringing the grand total to thirteen. Talking about his castmates elicits a warmth and enthusiasm surpassing even his affinity for Björk, whom Hankins refers to at one point as his queen. For all his talents, he doesn’t try to pretend to be a one-man band. It’s evident that he holds his colleagues in high esteem, and I’ve gathered from my discussions with some of them that this goes both ways. When I repeat Coleman’s “polymath provocateur” remark to him, Hankins seems genuinely humbled. “‘Polymath,’ wow. Damn. Jacob, I didn’t know you liked me so much!”
Along with its cast, the structure and premise of Faena have changed dramatically since its first iteration, but Hankins is quick to note that its themes remain largely the same. “I feel like one of the strongest themes of this play is also a critique of cultural relativism. ‘Who am I to talk about whether a thing this other culture does is wrong?’ But at the same time, is there objective reality in the world? What if your own subjectivity tells you that a thing is wrong?”

While Hankins doesn’t retreat from the philosophical, he feels no inclination to instruct his audience on what or how to think. Above all else, he just wants them to enjoy themselves.
“Brecht said you have to entertain and educate people,” he says. “I’d like people to take away just a little bit of an idea of what it’s like in the world of bullfighting, [but] I’m not interested in making a moral judgment. I don’t want anybody ever to feel like they’re being talked down to. My show’s a little didactic but I want it to be fun. It goes back to the esperpento: We can comment on these things without falling into the trap of drama. We need to have fun. And with all of these things that are happening in the world right now …” He trails off.
It feels grimly apropos that while writing this article, I paused to thumb through Instagram and came across a post from Out Magazine about the Smithsonian’s mishandling of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). The famous installation, which depicts Gonzalez-Torres’ partner Ross Laycock, consists of a 175-pound pile of cellophane-wrapped candies, their mass representing Laycock’s ideal weight before dying of an AIDS-related illness. Spectators are invited to take a piece, and over time, as the pile dwindles and is replenished, the effigy of Laycock dies and is resurrected in perpetuity.
The installation is on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., but the informational placards accompanying it conspicuously omit any reference to the AIDS crisis and its influence on Gonzalez-Torres’ work. The candy has been staged in a path on the floor rather than in a pile, and the number 175 is said to represent “an ideal weight,” rather than Laycock’s weight prior to the onset of his illness.
One assumes that this erasure of Gonzalez-Torres’ intent is supposed to make his work more palatable to a gallery audience who might find the subject of AIDS – and its inextricable association with queerness – to be too confronting, or in too poor taste. The capitulation to archaic community norms, real or presumed, is an inexcusable curatorial failure, and it’s also part of a much larger, longer pattern of sanitizing queer art for straight audiences. Reading about it, my mind returns to a remark Hankins made during our interview, critiquing the preponderance of mass-media queer storylines as “these sexless, genitalless trompe l’oeils.”
Queer art has historically been a popular culture-war battleground among conservative lawmakers and pundits, and attacks on queer artists have frequently been a bellwether heralding more widespread and tyrannical forms of censorship. Indecency and obscenity are the favorite ideological workhorses here, as their vagueness makes them infinitely malleable and encompassing. In a moment when our federal government is busily working to criminalize gender nonconformity, to implement laws designed to imperil the lives of trans people, and to roll back DEI initiatives, we are likely to see a renewed, far- reaching effort to characterize the artistic representation of queer life – and, by extension, queer life itself – as obscene.
In such a climate, I’m hopeful for more artists like Dylan Hankins, those who celebrate the full panorama of the human experience; who sift through the irreverent, the raunchy, the bloody, and the bizarre in search of the sublime; who pluck the fig leaf of seemliness from stifling, dehumanizing convention; who tear away the fluttering cape that conceals the sword.
“People tend to think that depicting is endorsing,” Hankins observes. “I want to depict it all.”
Olé to that.
Very interesting article about an intriguing artist. PETE is always introducing audiences to exciting new work. Thanks to Caitlin Nolin for the interview and thoughtful perspective.