A wake will be be held for Portland playwright and photographer Steve Patterson at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 17, at Performance Works NW, 4625 S.E. 67th Ave., Portland.

Patterson, who died in May, was born in Spokane, Wash., and raised on a farm in Selma, Ore. He is survived by Deborah Lee, his wife of 28 years.

A gifted writer, he had plays produced over a four-decade span in theaters across the country, from Chicago to Los Angeles to Austin, Texas, and Tampa, Fla., as well as in Canada and New Zealand.

“He was funny. Smart. Messy. Ironic. Witty. Admittedly forgetful. Generous,” his obituary declared. “An appreciator of the absurd. Steve wrote over 50 plays, including Waiting on Sean Flynn, produced in three cities; and Liberation, his sole published work. As in these two plays and others, his dramas were often gritty, tough-minded plays about reporters covering war. They delved deep into politics, the relationships of the public, media, and propaganda, and sought to unflinchingly portray the human cost of armed conflict. He also mined the bizarre, creating dreamlike plays about hallucinatory or extreme states of experience, meant to take the audience on a journey into the unconscious, that which defies logic and can be known only through intuition, feeling, and imagery.”

This spring his play Ghostlighting was named a finalist, out of 188 considered, in New Plays Northwest, sponsored by Seattle’s ACT Theatre.

“The news that he’s gone came as a shock,” fellow Portland playwright Sarah Jean Accuardi wrote on Facebook. “When I heard, I wondered if there was another Steve Patterson, because surely it couldn’t be THAT one. I was just congratulating him on his play, Ghostlighting, being in the running for New Works Northwest. I had just read another insightful post he wrote about the current administration. I had just clicked ‘like’ on a picture of his dog. … I’m grateful for his kindness and for all the words and stories he left with us. We were lucky to have him in our family of Portland Playwrights.”

Steffen Silvis, former theater critic of Willamette Week, wrote on Facebook: “Steve was a thoughtful, talented writer, whose work didn’t always get the productions that he deserved, although, unlike the vast majority of other Portland playwrights, he did receive attention outside of the region and struck up a highly productive relationship with playwright Lisa Abbott in Chicago. Steve was someone who lived large, though never ostentatiously. The life of the mind was almost enough, although he was also wonderfully gregarious and generous.”

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And Abbott, now a Portlander, wrote, also on Facebook: “Over 30 years have passed since we first collaborated in Chicago. Every time I try to figure out how many plays we have worked on together I remember another one. I feel like a part of my soul has gone missing.

“Steve was not just a prolific writer, but an amazing photographer, self-taught guitarist, avid gardener and so much more. My favorite memories with him are usually caffeine fueled discussions about whatever play we were working on. A pipe loving outside smoker, the smell of pipe tobacco always brings me back to his garden, rain (of course rain, it was Portland) falling outside the awning, his flowers in full bloom.

“He wrote outside of realism, with more than a hint of poetry. He wrote about things that mattered and things that made him curious. He wrote fearlessly.”

Patterson’s obituary declares: “His first play premiered in an attic art loft in downtown Portland and featured two slide projectors, music, and interpretive dance. After adventures in New York in the early 1980s and New Orleans before returning to Portland in 1989, he made a research trip to Cuernavaca, Mexico (on behalf of his 1997 Portland Civic Theatre Guild Fellowship-winning play Turquoise and Obsidian). A couple dozen works later, his play Lost Wavelengths, won the 2008 Oregon Book Award for Drama. In 2023, his play Ghostlighting, had a successful run in Statesboro, Ga.

“Steve was a cofounder of Playwrights West, a member of the Dramatists Guild, and a member of Portland Center Stage’s PlayGroup playwriting workshop,” his obituary declares. “For 10 years, Steve also served as co-artistic director (with director Lisa L. Abbott) and producer of Pavement Productions, a Portland company he originated that specialized in solely staging new works.”