With the capricious spring weather swinging from blazing sun to abundant rain, it must be time for Fertile Ground, Portland’s festival of new works, which will be sprouting with dozens of shows all over town this year April 4-19. Back for its second in-person season after two years of virtual performances and a hiatus in 2023, the annual festival of new theater, music, art, film and dance, which was started by the Portland Area Theatre Alliance in 2009, offers audiences as much variety as our weather.

To celebrate 2025’s diverse crop of shows, ArtsWatch talked to the producers of three promising productions: Conciliation, which portrays a group therapy session between the descendants of Holocaust survivors and Nazi perpetrators; Rogues, a show that uses both humor and realistic dialogue to probe the fraught life of caregivers; and Shelf Life, a one-woman musical play about delving into the past, one memento at a time.

Read about these shows below, and watch for more Fertile Ground coverage in the coming weeks.

Conciliation

Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, April 6.

“Many years ago I bought a Volvo,” David Fuks, the writer of the Fertile Ground production Conciliation and the child of two Holocaust survivors, wrote in an email. “My mother asked me if it was made in Germany. ‘No Ma, it was made in Sweden, they were neutral,’ I responded. At present, a significant number of my friends in the Jewish Community drive BMWs or Mercedes. Although I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, my wife and I both drive Toyotas.”

Fuks’ car story may have the timing and delivery of stand-up comedy, but his understanding of how the Holocaust has affected the descendants of both its survivors and the Nazi perpetrators – and his wish to explore the possibilities of conciliation – are heartfelt.

Last year, Fuks presented a staged reading of another play, True Life – A Shooter’s Story, which followed an abused youth, at the ages of 13 and 17, and then again at 28, when he’s serving a life sentence for mass murder. The idea for the story, Fuks said, sprung from a conversation with his friend Dr. Orin Bolstad, who talked about interventions where offenders and family members of murder victims met with a therapist to offer the possibility of confession and repentance.

Similarly, Conciliation portrays a therapy session in Germany where descendants of Nazi perpetrators and descendants of Holocaust victims meet to potentially find some kind of understanding.

In an email exchange, Fuks told ArtsWatch about his new play and his hopes for a more peaceful world. The interview has been edited for clarity: 

How did the idea for Conciliation come to you?

Burkhard Bilger, a reporter affiliated with The New Yorker, wrote a book, Fatherland, about his grandfather who had been convicted as a Nazi war criminal. As he was researching for this project, he encountered a therapist who was using body-sculpting and role-playing to help descendants of Nazis in Berlin to develop coping skills and understanding of their family’s past. This therapeutic technique, an innovation of Virginia Satir (one of the parents of American family therapy) creates opportunities for catharsis and therapeutic results.

I had an opportunity to discuss this technique with a friend who is a therapist within the American Jewish community. She shared that she used this technique with Jewish patients. “I often ask my clients to role-play a Passover Seder as we work on intergenerational issues,” she told me.

The possibility of bringing descendants of Holocaust survivors and descendants of Nazis together to do this work intrigued me. Thus Conciliation was conceived.

Both True Life and Conciliation focus on the necessity of facing the truth of the past before society can move forward. How hopeful are you that we can do this despite the current rise in antisemitism in our country?

Being a Jewish kid, you discover antisemitism very early. For close to 2,000 years Jews have experienced every variety of this awful behavior. Pope Urban supported religious antisemitism during the crusades. This lasted until John XXIII convened Vatican II in the early 1960s. During the age of enlightenment when Jews were allowed to become citizens in Europe, racial antisemitism was created and was later used by the Nazis as a horrific justification for genocide. Now, political antisemitism is occurring as a response to shocking circumstances in the Middle East. 

As a child of Holocaust survivors, I choose hope over fear. Conciliation is not a fantasy, it is a goal. Germany has chosen forthright honesty about its past and has become an exemplar of atonement and political decency. It is my sincere hope that the USA will return to a path of honest reckoning and finding the values that come with this work. I also hope that Jews in Israel and their Arab neighbors can find a much-needed path towards peace.

You’ve said your dad once told you to learn how to “act normal.” Do you see connections between your own artistic persistence and your parents’ ability to live through the horror of the Holocaust?

Learning to “act normal” has never been my long suit. My dad demanded that I learn to fight back whether I won or lost. He and my mother also demanded that I understand that I am a child of slaves … that I am as common as clay … that I have a responsibility to serve the community. My work as an author and playwright seeks to balance a mixture of love, humor and conflict. My worldview is built on a desire to bring comfort to those who need it and to make those who are privileged with too much comfort feel uncomfortable enough to change.

Is there anything else you’d like audiences to know about your Conciliation?

I am very proud to be a member of the community that makes the Fertile Ground Festival possible. The creativity, diversity and fun of being engaged in this community is a delight. The Portland Area Theatre Alliance and Fertile Ground help to define Portland at its best.

See the 70-minute staged reading of “Conciliation,” plus a 25-minute talkback on April 6 at The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE) 724 NW Davis St., Portland. Find tickets here.

Rogues

21ten Theatre, April 5, 6, & 8.

Five women, from ages 17 to 70+, are invited by Father Tom, an Episcopal priest, to gather in his beleaguered church basement. That’s the premise of Rogues, a play by Charlotte Higgins about an unlikely and raucous support group for caregivers where harrowing truths are faced and friendships are formed.

In a phone conversation, Sharonlee Mclean, a nine-time Drammy-Award winning actor who is producing the Fertile Ground staged reading of Rogues, said she was inspired to bring the play to Oregon because it addresses questions such as “Who takes care of the people who are giving help?” 

According to a 2023 Grant Makers in Health article, “More than 53 million Americans – 21 percent of the U.S. population – are caregivers for loved ones who are older adults or adults living with chronic, disabling, or serious health conditions.”

As Mclean said, it’s an issue that will affect everyone at some point. “There’s so much to relate to [in Rogues] because you know every audience member is going to be experiencing ‘Oh my god, that’s me; oh my god, that will be me; oh my god, that was me.’”

Father Tom’s church, she said, is in trouble, but the group makes a commitment to support and listen to each other, making it a place that allows “people to be their authentic lives for an hour or so.”

While the story slowly heats up, the play also features a generous helping of humor. “Charlotte’s humor is the thing. She writes really dark, and so you have to find the joy and funny in her work,” said Mclean. “These women are eccentric, they are sassy, they are rude, they are funny women.”

Mclean notes that the play’s humor also serves a deeper purpose: It reveals the characters’ humanity. “You see them getting through what they have to do when they’re not in the basement. … In real life, it’s not so funny, but down in the basement, it’s funny.”

Higgins, who began writing the play during COVID, based its story on her own experience as a caregiver, and she dedicated it to her wife, Irene, who died of Parkinson’s disease. Because Higgins is also an LGBTQ+ advocate, Mclean believes her work makes a valuable contribution to Oregon’s theater scene. “She really speaks to the arts in Oregon,” said Mclean. “I’ve also been concerned about diversity, ageism, that kind of thing, and she represents to me a person who can fill that void that’s going on right now. …[T]here are still some great writers over 50 years old.”

Besides Mclean, who plays Gertie in the play, a role she originated in a Sacramento production last year, the all-ages cast, directed by Lori Russo, includes Jane Geesman, Crystal Muñoz, Brooke Calcagno, Garland Lyons, and Louanne Moldovan, Mclean’s good friend in real life.

Moldovan, who is an actor, writer, and director as well as the artistic director of Cygnet Productions and a 2004 Oregon Book Award winner for Drama, said in a phone conversation that her character, Margaret, starts off as an observer in the group and eventually finds an intimate joy that’s missing in her life at home.

“She can come to this place and feel safe and discover there are others who are suffering in their own respective ways – not that she’s self-pitying. There’s another world out there, so she’s not alone in the sense of being in a miserable marriage and having a miserable partner.”

While Moldovan’s life differs greatly from Margaret’s, she feels a deep kinship with her character. “When I auditioned for [Rogues], it shocked me how readily the emotion came.”

Like Margaret, Moldovan has become mired in the life of caregiving in recent years as she coordinates the care of three adult family members who live in California, an all-consuming job that keeps her awake at night and makes it hard to keep up with her own life. “There’s so much to do all the time. Everything is a mess.” Moldovan said. “If you saw my office, you’d never believe I’m a Virgo. I’m a lapsed Virgo,” she laughed. “It’s never-ending.”

“I’m immersed in the whole notion of caregiving, and that’s what this play is about. These women who are caregiving their husbands or their partners – or their father, in one case – and all the terrible intricate complications that can occur – I get it.”

Moldovan, who went back to school a few years ago to earn her degree in gerontology, has always been disturbed by how our society dismisses elderly people. “That is unforgiving, and I don’t have any answers to it.” This grief, she points out, is exacerbated by the necessity of working within a broken system, or, as she calls it, “the ugly intransigent bureaucracy that we must deal with in the health-careless system as it relates to caregiving and family members in need.”

Besides caring for her family in California, Moldovan works two part-time jobs and is directing another Fertile Ground production, A Window into Tennessee, which will also be presented at 21ten Theatre. The one-man show by Sandra de Helen stars Michael J. Teufel as Tennessee Williams, who acts – and drinks – extravagantly to mask his private pain. As busy as she is, Moldovan is a fan of de Helen’s work and said that taking on this extra project was “an easy ‘yes’.”

Likewise, she considers being part of Rogues to be a gift. “There is relief and release in having the opportunity to do this piece and play this character, because it’s a way of allowing these feelings to have a vehicle.”

Mclean agrees. While she avoids talking about her own past experiences with caregiving (she said she’d rather focus on what she calls “the acting schmacting” part of the project), for her, one of the values of Higgins’ comic, but unflinching, work is that it lets the actors “play the imaginary to tell the truth.”

The staged reading of “Rogues” will be at 21ten Theatre, 2110 SE 10th Ave., Portland. Find Tickets and schedules here.

Shelf Life

21ten Theatre, April 5 & 6.

Directed by Brooke Totman, Rebecca Berger-Howe’s play Shelf Life, in which she also stars, follows a woman who delves into her past dreams of becoming a pop superstar as she opens the boxes of her childhood mementos that have been stored in her parents’ attic.

In an email exchange, Berger-Howe told ArtsWatch about her show, which she said is a “lighthearted and silly” reprieve from our dark times. The interview has been edited for clarity.

It sounds like Shelf Life is based on your experience. 

It is! The idea for Shelf Life came out of me rediscovering my childhood mementos in the attic of the last house my dad and I lived in together. This was back in my hometown. I was 11 when my parents divorced and because of that, a lot of my childhood stuff got lost in the shuffle. Finding all of it brought back so many memories that it inspired me to write a show about it!

What emotions came up when you were looking through the boxes in real life? Was there something surprising or significant you found?

There were a lot of emotions when I first started going through those boxes. I was at a point in my life where I wasn’t sure what I was doing, and I think finding all of those memories really helped remind me who I was. It also brought up a lot of painful memories of being a kid who wanted to be a performer but gave up once they got older.

Something I remember finding, and I’m upset I got rid of, was a letter I wrote to myself from Bible camp. It talked about how I hoped that I was reading my Bible every day and praying multiple times a day. My favorite line was “I hope that I’m keeping my relationship with God above everything else.” I explore this idea a little in my show, but I remember reading that and being so creeped out with how indoctrinated I was.

What songs/singers/bands did you love as a child, and what kind of performance fantasies did you have?

I was obsessed with NSYNC, Hannah Montana, Cheetah Girls, and Shania Twain. I loved country music, which gets its own moment in the script since it was such a big part of my childhood.

I wanted to be a pop star so bad! I would create performances in my room and pretend like I was singing on a big stage. I also had a karaoke machine as a kid, so my friends would come over and we would pretend we were the Cheetah Girls or big stars and cheer each other on.

What were some of the landmines of puberty for you?

My biggest one was learning how to take care of myself when I first started my period. It wasn’t an exciting thing for me. I feel like for a lot of girls, it’s this huge milestone that they and their parents are almost celebrating. My experience was far from that. I was so embarrassed when it first happened that I didn’t tell anyone, but I had no idea what to do about it. I didn’t have a lot of guidance from my parents, and I went to a Catholic school so there was no support there, either. It was just an overall poor experience for me.

Do you think it’s possible to conquer Catholic guilt, or is it something you’re always grappling with?

When I found all of my childhood stuff, it brought up a lot of painful memories associated with religion. It got to a point where I spent 6 months deconstructing my faith. I don’t think Catholic guilt is something that goes away, but I do think there are ways to cope with it. I’m not religious anymore but I still struggle with feeling guilty over things that I shouldn’t because of that previous belief.

Is there anything else you’d like audiences to know about you or the show?

The world is scary right now, so I wanted to create something that brought a little light. There is music throughout the show. I decided early on that I wanted to include snippets of some favorite songs I had as a kid. When I started this process, I discovered my love for songwriting. I ended up writing an original song that I perform at the end of the show that I’m really excited about. I hope that audiences leave feeling a sense of joy, nostalgia, and inspiration to maybe pursue passions they had as a kid.

See the fully staged world premiere of “Shelf Life” at 21ten Theatre, 2110 SE 10th Ave., Portland. Find tickets and schedules here.