I had a terrible time choosing which Fertile Ground shows to see this year. I pored over the guide for 2025’s festival of new works over and over again, trying to coordinate the many productions that sounded interesting with a busy schedule of April theater-going. In the end, I chose four, missing dozens of intriguing pieces, including Theatre Diaspora’s Ten Minute Tapestry II, Alice Wilkinson’s Nightlatch, and Linestorm Playwrights’ Small Bites.

Somehow, though, the shows I attended in the festival, which opened April 4 and ended Sunday afternoon, April 20, seemed to be meant to go together. Not because they were similar, but because their very differences complemented each other so well. Whether it was the solo show Camp Fire Stories; or the rousing ensemble pieces, Unbound and Rogues; or the quieter but potent workshop production of 545, each production explored hard topics with some well-placed humor and even music, although Unbound was the only official musical in this group.

While the topic of 545 (the imprisonment of migrant children) was the most painful of the four shows, even it, like the other productions, offered some sense of hopefulness about humanity. After all, a group of people making art together and sharing their vision with others strikes me as a profoundly heartening act.

Maybe the lesson of this Fertile Ground, which was orchestrated by festival director Tamara Carroll, is that there are no wrong choices. Every production is enriching in its own way … a feeling that’s magnified when thinking about the individual shows as the wonderfully disparate parts of an artistically adventurous collection of new works.

Unbound: A Bookish Musical by erin rachel

The workshop performance of the warm and wonderful Unbound: A Bookish Musical on April 17 at 21ten Theatre was like a sunbath for the spirits. When a first-ever concert reading of a new play is this uplifting, it’s easy to imagine that a fully staged production would be transcendent.

Unbound, which was directed by erin rachel, who also wrote the book, music and lyrics, tells the story of the just-divorced Jane (Ashley Song), who returns to her hometown where she works in a beloved neighborhood bookstore. Here, the workers share a beaming passion for reading – and other joys in life – while also recognizing the pain of loneliness, grief and general lostness.

Rachel’s sublime music punctuates all these emotions. “I am broken, broken open,” and “Grief knows no enemy,” Lance (a compelling Brad Larsen) sings about the loss of his wife (Princess Kannah) just a year before. Appearing as a ghost, she responds with a soaring song that encourages him to see all the good around him.

 “Look around, look around, look around,” she later sings with a pulsing rhythm beneath one of his songs. Here and elsewhere, the show feels like a round, with layers of sound and lines from previous songs rising to the surface again and again.

Just being in such a tiny space (21ten’s 40-seat theater), which was filled with the talent and commitment of its performers throughout this 75-minute collection of excerpts from the full play, was a thrill. 

Among the artists was Daniel Buchanan, the show’s musical director, who accompanied both the spoken lines and the songs on the keyboard. He and the splendid cast learned their parts with just four rehearsals. 

Besides the busy Song, who recently appeared in Portland Center Stage’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the cast comes from an interesting range of backgrounds. Larsen’s bio said he was back onstage after a decades-long hiatus, and Anne Toledo is a family practice physician who was making her Portland theater debut here. Even with script in hand, Toledo’s purring voice as Ms. B, the owner of the bookstore, was a sly and comical delight.

On paper, the plot of Unbound resembles a Hallmark movie in which an unlikely group of people come together to try to save a struggling business, but its sincere depth of feeling surpasses this basic premise. To be immersed in the life of this play is to feel grounded once more in the idea that there is still much good in the world.

Rogues by Charlotte Higgins

Despite the fact that some truly awful things happen to the characters in Charlotte Higgins’ play Rogues, this show, like the others I saw, is oddly hopeful and even heartwarming. What’s more, it achieves all of this in an honest way that never tips too far into the sticky pool of sentimentality.

Part of the success of the April 6 staged reading at 21ten Theatre was Lori Russo’s dynamic direction. To introduce the play, she quickly but vividly described its setting so that the audience could picture a dilapidated church basement with a portrait of Mother Theresa on the wall. Russo’s obvious zest for the material was infectious, and prepared us for a powerful experience that combined Higgins’ unflinching look at the lives of caregivers with the considerable talents of Russo’s outstanding cast.

Separately, these actors are all forces of nature. If you’ve seen Jane Geesman, Brooke Calcagno, Sharonlee Mclean, Louanne Moldovan, Crystal Muñoz or Garland Lyons perform individually, then you might be able to imagine the electricity of them being all onstage together. 

The play focuses on five women, from ages 17 to 70+, who have nothing in common aside from being invited by Father Tom (Lyons), an unconventional Episcopal priest, to gather in his beleaguered church basement for a caregiver support group. Among the women is Gertie, played by Mclean, who also produced this Fertile Ground production.

Her Gertie is a sweet mothering woman who moves with quick little steps and is always slightly leaning forward as if to hurry to wherever she’s needed. So eager is she to be helpful, I found myself worrying that she could lose her balance at any moment.

Some of the other women roll their eyes at Gertie’s anxiousness to please – especially the surly Cole (Muñoz), a teenager who folds her arms and slumps in her chair, looking as if she’d like to slug somebody. The show gradually reveals, however, the internal steel that Gertie must summon just  to survive each day.

Still, Gertie’s persistent positivity grates on everybody. When Bobbie (Calcagno, back with a vengeance after a hiatus from acting) says she’d like to kill her husband, who still sneaks cigarettes even though he’s suffering from emphysema, Gertie is quick to say, “Oh, you don’t mean that.”

Clearly Bobbie, who’s been pushed beyond her limits, does mean it, but Gertie’s response proves how hard it can be to let go of our own experiences and to accept other people’s lives as valid.

As one audience member aptly commented after the show, “That’s a lot of play.” It’s true that Higgins has woven many threads throughout her script, but she does it so skillfully that the result is a finely textured whole.

One of the things I admired most about her writing was how she meaningfully incorporated a storyline about cancer. Here, the disease is no cheap device to stir our emotions. Instead, Higgins uses pain to deepen the audience’s relationship with her characters, while in turn, the characters develop as a group and as human beings.  

545 by Francisco Garcia

As I was on the way to an emotionally wrenching workshop/reading of Francisco Garcia’s new play 545 on April 5, the passing MAX trains were packed with people carrying handmade Hands Off protest signs.

This was an eerily appropriate sight, considering that the play, which was directed by Sammy Rat Rios and presented by LineStorm Playwrights at Artists Repertory Theatre, was inspired by the migrant children who were separated from their parents as part of the first Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy.

By putting names and faces on two fictional children held near the border between Texas and Mexico, 545 turns a news story that’s such a grand-scale horror it’s almost an abstraction into a visceral and personal experience we can’t ignore. Even with scripts on music stands, minimal blocking, and no sound effects or scenery, Garcia’s current iteration of the play hits home.

The story features two sisters, Luli and Oli, played by real-life sisters Lulu and Mila Kashiwabara, who are being kept in a cage in a holding facility. In this bleak setting, the girls are equally afraid of the gruff guards who watch over them and a girl among their group who’s a bully. Worst of all, Oli, who is 11, and Luli, who is 14, have no way of knowing if they’ll ever see their mother, Nayeli (the actors’ real mother, Eleanor Amorós) again.

The story was originally commissioned by Portland Playhouse during the pandemic and made into a short film starring the Kashiwabara sisters. In a talkback after the reading, Mila said she was only nine years old when the film was made. Now, four and a half years later, she better understands the plight of her character. Lulu agrees. It’s an important story, she says, because it helps us see how real people are affected by Trump’s policies.

As an artist, Garcia feels a responsibility to bring such stories to life. When he began filling out the characters for the play, he asked Amorós and her daughters about their relationship and wove in their experience to create a believable big sister-little sister dynamic in the new script. He also valued having Rios as a director this time around, because they offered a new pair of eyes and could offer fresh feedback.

For their part, Rios said it was a sacred experience to be involved with the production, as well as a dream to work with the three actors, because of their real-life chemistry. As the youngest, Oli impishly presses Luli to talk with her and also to play a clapping game they learned from their mother, despite the danger of sparking the guards’ ire. “This isn’t a place for games,” Luli warns her in typical big-sister fashion.

Rios pointed out that while Luli feels a responsibility to protect the younger Oli, the sisters take turns watching over each other whenever the sorrow of being separated from their mother becomes overwhelming.

For Garcia, adding the character of the mother to the play was a delicate decision, because she’s not actually present with her girls and can only be a memory to them. In the reading, Nayeli stood behind her daughters, and at times she sang or spoke lines of dialogue that overlapped with the girls’ voices, suggesting the way imagination helps sustain us when we’re suffering. At the same time, the scenes are a potent reminder that Nayeli can’t physically comfort the two girls.

On my way home, I contemplated what a fully staged production of 545 would look like. I imagined the sound of cage doors closing, the footsteps of guards, and the crying of other imprisoned girls. The themes of memory could also be implied with creative movement and projected visuals of  a wide-open park, where the butterflies that Luli and Oli like to imagine are circling the sky.  

Camp Fire Stores by Murri Lazaroff-Babin

Camp Fire Stories, a solo show written and performed by the mulitalented Murri Lazaroff-Babin, starts with him casually asking the audience, “What do you think about when you think about home?”

“Lilacs,” was one answer at the April 19 matinee performance at CoHo Theatre, followed by “endless suburbs,” “swimming pools,” and “my dog, Ruby – she was a Dalmatian.”

Setting up a folding chair and a small desk lamp with an extension cord, Lazaroff-Babin said home makes him think of smoke, chatting rooster crows, illegal grows and adults with no more than seven teeth.

From here, he began to tell the story of the rural Northern California community of Concow, where he grew up, and how it was destroyed by the 2018 wildfire known as the Camp Fire. 

Stating that it was the deadliest California wildfire to date, Lazaroff-Babin said the Camp Fire  took 85 lives. At this point, a red light glowed on the pile of dry autumn leaves at his feet, suggesting it could suddenly burst into flames. The fire, he added, raged so quickly it was comparable to all of Portland being wiped out in just four hours.

Blending these bald facts with expressive movement, Lazaroff-Babin then dropped to his knees, raised his clasped hands above his head, and moved his fingers so that they flickered like the tips of flames as his voice rose with emotion, creating an absorbing story of his conflicted feelings about his lost home, which encompass both grief and some level of embarrassment.

The characters from this community continually come to life as Lazaroff-Babin changes his voice and posture to become vivid personalities from his past. One is the aptly named Slimy Richardson, who softly tells of his obsession with watching his favorite soap, One Life to Live. Another is the growly-voiced Narcissistic Larry, who provides young Murri an earthy education with his crude jokes.

Best of all was young Murri himself, with his goofy laugh, inability to pronounce his Rs, and enthusiasm for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and a “very extra special” California Live Oak Tree that had wide, low branches that were good for climbing. 

Throughout the hour show, Lazaroff-Babin, who said he had been eager to leave home, and his younger self take turns telling the story from their different perspectives. Neatly moving between the two personas with a few spinning steps, he embodied both the questioning adult Murri and the boy who unabashedly loves his home, his friends, and the odd characters he comes across. In this way, the story isn’t just about losing a house; it’s also about trying to find the child he once was.

Lazaroff-Babin started working on the show in 2022 when he was taking a solo performance class and started to create different characters. Today, the play feels complete, with effective lighting, music and Lazaroff-Babin’s captivating performance and impressive range. I can only imagine that a fully staged production would be nothing short of spellbinding.