Despite the considerable populations of Beaverton, Hillsboro and other Washington County towns, it’s been rare to find plays written by Oregonians staged west of the Tualatin Mountains.

That’s changing, thanks in part to the rebooted Fertile Ground Festival of New Works’ recent emphasis on neighborhood hubs. That initiative opened the door to West Side theater companies producing the homegrown plays that Fertile Ground, which this year opened on April 4 and continues through April 19, has always seeded. 

And West Side companies have accepted the invitation, thanks to the recent arrival of several new and energetic West Side artistic directors: Amanda Clark at Beaverton’s Spark Plug Theatre Collective, Harrison Butler at Hillsboro Artists Regional Theatre (HART) this year, and Nik Whitcomb at Hillsboro’s Bag&Baggage Productions. (Read last week’s ArtsWatch story about Spark Plug here, my 2024 ArtsWatch profile of Butler here, and Marty Hughley’s 2023 ArtsWatch profile of Whitcomb here.)

They’re using the Fertile Ground Festival to help jump-start production of original theater works by local playwrights. This year’s festival includes more new West Side shows than ever before.

Expansive Field

Despite Fertile Ground’s parent organization being called the Portland Area Theatre Alliance, and Fertile Ground still dubbed a “City-Wide Festival of New Works,” “PATA tries to have a much more expansive, regional focus,” festival director Tamara Carroll says. “We have member companies in Hillsboro, Sherwood, Vancouver — and all of these companies or individual members should be able to access PATA programs,” including Fertile Ground.

Any theater company in the region is eligible and welcome to participate in the festival. “I don’t believe PATA has any sort of official geographic boundaries in terms of who can be a member company, or who could participate in Fertile Ground,” Carroll says. “It works great as a sort of hub and spoke model.“

This year, Carroll notes, theater fans as far away from Pioneer Courthouse Square as Forest Grove, Clackamas and Oregon City have Fertile Ground events happening just 10 minutes away. “That means folks who enjoy theater but don’t live super-close to Portland realize that they’ve got theater happening right in their backyard.”

In fact, some of those new audiences aren’t just coming from the regional hubs’ surrounding area but also from even farther afield. As we noted in the first story in this two-part series about the rise of homegrown theater on the West Side of Portland’s metro area, Spark Plug’s participation in last year’s festival seems to have alerted audiences on the east side of what Portland-centric denizens call the West Hills to the plucky company’s intriguing programming, because more ticket buyers this year are listing addresses there.

Seizing Opportunity 

HART artistic director Harrison Butler hopes “the same kind of thing is going to happen here. HART hasn’t been known for new works recently, and we’re hoping to change that and build that audience for them.”

When Bag & Baggage productions, which had produced several shows at Fertile Ground last year, opted out this year, its neighbor just a few blocks down Main Street “saw an opportunity to be Hillsboro’s representative in the festival this year,” he says. 

Butler, who is also vice president of Portland Area Theatre Alliance, the invaluable nonprofit organization that produces the Fertile Ground Festival and much else, decided to try to find a way to squeeze FG into the company’s spring season. Although both HART and Bag&Baggage have occasionally participated in Fertile Ground before, Butler envisioned a much bigger slate of FG shows than HART, or any other West Side theater, had ever offered. 

For this year’s Fertile Ground, HART scored several grants and other support (from Hillsboro Community Foundation, the city’s Cultural Arts District, Washington County Cultural Coalition) that enabled HART to hire enough staff to produce its own mini-festival within Fertile Ground: eight short plays, a pilot episode of a theatrical spoof of a classic TV series, and a sneak peak of a work in progress — a staged reading of a full-length play in progress  by a Hillsboro author, April Aasheim, whose world premiere production will highlight HART’s next season. 

Will West Siders show up for new works? “HART already has a built-in, loyal audience that comes to whatever we put on,” Butler says. “We hope that spreads to our community and beyond so we can get people to come in regionally. We made our tickets real cheap. We just want people to come and see the new work. That’s why we’re doing a couple of our readings multiple nights.”

HART had to surmount one more challenge: it had already scheduled the final show of its season, Calendar Girls, to open the same weekend as Fertile Ground kicked off.

The ever-resourceful Butler’s solution: “Let’s do it in repertory,” meaning the theater’s single stage would have to be alternately re-set to accommodate both projects. Fortunately, the Fertile Ground staged readings require minimal props, and the Calendar Girls set is fairly movable, and concealable with curtains during the staged readings. 

The arrangement is  another return to roots. “The ‘R’ in HART’s original name stood for ‘repertory,’ and was then changed to ‘regional’ because we wanted to be a regional draw,” Butler explains. 

Broader Vision 

Although HART had once sponsored a one-act new work festival called Page to Stage, community theaters like HART generally aren’t known for nourishing or even staging brand new works by local playwrights, instead concentrating on a “specific type of play for the HART audience — family-friendly, not leaning too hard on difficult subjects,” he says. “But we do like to push the boundary.”

For Butler, this year’s emphasis on original, homegrown plays represents a return to his roots. In graduate school at the University of Texas, he participated in the school’s renowned Cohen New Works Festival — the same program Carroll was involved in a few years later.

“I was immersed in working on tons of projects, all brand-new plays,” he recalls. “That’s where I learned a collaborative method to create and produce new works.” That method involves working closely with writers to develop plays over time, not just host a single staging — “a celebration of a continuously ongoing process,” the Cohen website notes, “the creation of new work.”

HART’s new emphasis on homegrown theater extends beyond this year’s Fertile Ground shows.

“It’s part of an initiative to get new works to HART that highlight the talent we have here in Hillsboro,” Butler explains. “I would love to do a new work for our Main Stage season every year. I would bring Page to Stage back if we had the bandwidth,” Butler says. “It’s a good way to find a play that’s able to be developed further. It’s not easy. But by doing festivals, workshops, classes, working with writers, we want to mine the talent that’s out there, and see what ideas and groups of people can make projects. If we get Page to Stage going again, that one-act festival can lead to a Fertile Ground reading of a full-length version, in preparation to workshop it for a full production. It’s all part of a developmental process.”

Synergistic Relationships

That’s exactly what the festival wants to happen, says Fertile Ground director Carroll: “My hope is that participating in Fertile Ground will encourage West Side companies to develop more new work by Oregon playwrights, and to grow audiences for them in Washington County.”

The Fertile Ground Festival may have provided the spark to ignite a burgeoning homegrown theater scene on the West Side, but the participating companies there, and throughout the region, also benefit the festival, its audiences, and the metro region’s original-theater scene.

“When companies like Lakewood, or HART, or Fuse, or ART, or CoHo wholeheartedly contribute and participate, it is in a way an act of generosity,” Carroll told ArtsWatch. “These companies lift the festival up — they lend their credibility, their longevity, the familiarity and trust local theatergoers have with their venues, their performers — all of it. Their participation is such a gift, and they are a huge part of what allows Fertile Ground to be this platform that can also lift up so many first-time producers.”

The credibility and trust the participating theaters have built with their audiences over the years is the reason Carroll instituted Fertile Ground’s recent neighborhood hubs model. As explained in our story last year about the festival’s reboot, established theaters throughout the region can leverage those well-earned connections to bring existing audiences to new homegrown plays.

“I think institutions like Bag&Baggage and HART have really high-quality relationships with their community,” Carroll explains, “and there is a mutual trust that actually makes it more possible to bring in new work, which makes it possible for these companies to put up work by local artists without worrying whether that playwright will have enough name recognition to draw an audience. They can take more risks without having to worry about their audience not showing up. As far as I can tell, all it takes is a desire to invest in new work, which both [Bag&Baggage Producing Artistic Director] Nik [Whitcomb] and Harrison [Butler] clearly have.”

As Fertile Ground has extended its reach farther out into the Portland metro region, might it overstretch?

“Honestly, I’d like to see more companies participating, or more folks deciding they want to produce in the area,” Carroll insists. “I think the Reser Center [in Beaverton] could be an amazing Festival hub. And there are companies like [Forest Grove’s] Theatre in the Grove that could get involved. ”

Expanding the festival’s ambit could also provide opportunities for multiple performances of successful new original works around the region. What if, Carroll muses, “maybe more Fertile Ground shows perform in different venues throughout the Festival — like different venues are stations, and clusters of shows just rotate around to various venues, so that someone who lives in Beaverton and someone who lives in Milwaukie could both go to their local theater down the street and see the same 10 shows throughout the festival. I just think that would be another fun way for people all over the region to feel like they’re part of the same festival. I actually think it would be great if there were Fertile Ground events happening all around the region.”

With creativity and energy like that, at both the festival and in West Side theater companies, Oregon’s Fertile Ground may just keep growing wider.

***

HART’s Fertile Ground shows continue with an evening of new works (Sally Stember’s The Spumoni Sisters and The Warming Hut, Mark Saunders’s No Ham, No Fowl and Linda Maxon’s Life Agent at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 16, plus Out of Love, a quartet of short plays by James Van Eaton, at 2 p.m. Saturday, April 19. All shows are at Hillsboro Artists’ Regional Theatre, 185 S.E. Washington St. Hillsboro, just steps away from the Max Blue Line and several bus lines. Tickets here.