Witch, Jen Silverman’s “devilishly humorous” play based on an early 17th century Faustian drama, is running at Profile Theatre now through November 2, which means you still have a handful of opportunities to catch Lauren Modica-Soloway onstage for only the second time since the conclusion of her five-year hiatus from acting.

“So much happened for me, as so much happened for all of us post-2020,” she says. “I got married, I anchored myself in Portland after years of traveling and living elsewhere for work. I was humbled by an injury. I came back from that injury. I started saying ‘yes’ again.”

Saying yes to Witch (see Linda Ferguson’s ArtsWatch review here) meant committing to a production calendar that would spirit cast and crew from first table read to opening night in less than a month, a process that Modica-Soloway calls “a beautiful, hard, lovely, gratitude-filled lift.”

With it came the opportunity for her to slip into the skin of the gruff, acerbic Elizabeth, whom she describes as “a Character, capital C.” As the titular witch of Witch, Elizabeth has adapted to a lifetime of persecution by mostly withdrawing from society. She lives alone on the outskirts of her village, and the only guest she receives for most of the play is the Devil, with whom she forges an unlikely kinship.

Embodying such a wounded, unapologetically misanthropic character is an emotionally labor-intensive demand and, to Modica-Soloway, an invigorating exercise in empathy. “I don’t mind if the audience doesn’t like a character,” she says. “But I do always hope to help them understand that character, to see their fullness and humanity, the grief and the defensiveness and all the viscera that has gone into making that character who they are, long before I ever stepped into their shoes.”

Elizabeth is as abrasive as Modica-Soloway is convivial, as unalike her interpreter as character and actor can be, and within this gap lies ample space for artistic expansion.

“As someone with Dwarfism, I recognize that I am stared at and commented on just for grabbing my own half-and-half, or pumping my own gas,” says Modica-Soloway. “That kind of constant, tangible commentary on you, your body, your life, your actions, can do a number on even the most aligned individual. I fight this by just trying my hardest to be a living, breathing New Seasons customer alongside the rest of them. Elizabeth, however, has no issues making folks even more uncomfortable with her presence. I find that awe-inspiring, and a daunting dare.”

Sponsor

For Modica-Soloway, the dare is a major source of a role’s allure, and what makes a project worthy of her investment. “For me, it’s about whether or not the role is a challenge, an exploration, and a growth opportunity. If I’m scared — not reluctant, not exhausted by the thought of doing so — to say yes, then I know it’s a big ol’ yes.”

Another attractant? The people she works with. Front of mind as she reflects on the last few weeks are her collaborators onstage and off, whom she readily singles out for recognition.

“Folks are just so good,” she says enthusiastically. “Their work is just so good. Jess [Jessica Tidd] has this crystalline purity of emotion and can break your heart and make you laugh in the same monologue. Charles [Grant] is lightness, innocence and carnal desire all in one. Logan [Bailey] is a simmering vessel of charisma and fear. George [Mount] is the kind of performer we all hope we develop into throughout our careers. And Josh Weinstein is that full-body, all-heart performer that makes you feel like jumping on the merry-go-round with him every time. Being out there with them every night, under the gorgeous lights that Blanca [Forzan] designed, on the set that Peter [Ksander] dreamed up, with the most intentional and perfect props that Olivia [Vavroch] refined and curated, surrounded by Rory’s [Rory Stitt’s] soundscape and Ahmed [Santos] and Laurie’s [Laurie Robertson’s] fantastical costume design — you couldn’t ask for more. And [director] Josh Hecht and [stage manager] Cassie Greer have led us with such kindness and care. When everyone has bought in, when everyone cares, what a gift that is.”

That the timing of this production coincided so fortuitously with Modica-Soloway’s return to the stage is its own kind of gift. In an email she sent me shortly before Witch‘s opening, she confided, “I would not have been able to be this vulnerable onstage pre-2025. I still don’t know if I’ll be able to. But I’m thrilled by the challenge.”

Thrilled by it and, at the risk of straying into the territory of review, surpassing the occasion with the thorough application of her formidable talents: her magnetizing stage presence, note-perfect comic timing, and lush and sonorous speaking voice — all are on full, magnificent display. As of Tuesday morning, Profile Theatre has added a Sunday matinee to Witch‘s remaining run along with a warning that there will be no further extension, and so I stress: Go while you can. Go.

Prior to the pandemic, Modica-Soloway was a staple of local and regional stages, recognizable for her work with Artists Repertory Theatre, Profile Theatre, Portland Center Stage, Theatre Vertigo, and defunkt theatre, among others. In Ashland she became a mainstay of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where she was employed as a company member for four seasons. By all appearances, she spent the run-up to 2020 living the working actor’s dream — a kind of occupational paradox that manages to be both totally mundane and frustratingly elusive. Here the hallmarks of success aren’t fame or fortune, but the more prosaic fantasies of having healthcare unencumbered by federal income limits and simply knowing there’s a next job lined up for you. By those metrics, Modica-Soloway had hit her stride.

But as every theater professional knows, even the relative stability afforded by union representation is still highly conditional and vulnerable to disruption, and never was this precarity more self-evident than in early 2020.

Sponsor

“When Covid shutdowns began, we’d just opened A Midsummer Night’s Dream at OSF,” recalls Modica-Soloway. “We […] opened the festival and our show on a Friday, had a couple days off, and then performed our Tuesday matinee. By the time we walked offstage, whispers and rumors had solidified into a two-week pause.” Those two weeks soon became six weeks, then six months, then an indefinite suspension of all live performance — and an uncertain future for Modica-Soloway, her Ashland colleagues, and countless artists worldwide.

“We gave up so much of our ‘normal’ lives for those contracts that the majority of us, especially with the lockdown and public health guidelines in place at the time, had no place to go besides our company housing,” Modica-Soloway says. She speaks gratefully of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which permitted its acting company to remain in their accommodations for months after the shutdown, buying them some time to determine their next steps.

Modica-Soloway’s next steps took her back to her birthplace of Portland. “I stayed [in Ashland] until July, then returned home to my childhood bedroom and thought, ‘That’s it’.”

It wasn’t. Not really. But it did mark an abrupt detour that led Modica-Soloway away from acting and toward other artistic endeavors — and to a reconnection with parts of human experience typically beyond the reach of the itinerant working actor. “Personally, a lot of beautiful things happened during the pandemic,” she says. “Marriage, buying a home, my sisters and their families moving back to Portland, and settling back into rhythms that make up one’s actual whole entire life.”

While the new domestic roots she put down took hold and flourished, Modica-Soloway filled her professional calendar with voiceover work, guest appearances with the Oregon Symphony, growing her coaching and consultancy practice, directing Portland Playhouse apprentices, and taking a first foray into playwriting.

Here it’s worth noting that while Modica-Soloway had never penned a play before, she’s written both fiction and nonfiction for most of her life, and at one time she entertained a career in journalism. Even a cursory look at her Facebook page demonstrates that she’s a canny, evocative wordsmith, and this background combined with years of acting credits helped her to score a residency with the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center, plus grants from the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the City of Portland.

With the support of these organizations, Modica-Soloway spent three years writing You Should be Honored, which debuted in 2022 at the IFCC studio. The play focused on a woman who quits acting to pursue a career in theater marketing, and in so doing finds herself at the center of a debate about whether she’s deserving of the position.

Sponsor

Although You Should Be Honored is not an autobiographical work in the textbook sense, it is, as Modica- Soloway puts it, “based on lived and witnessed experiences.” Its first seeds were sown before the pandemic, as the American theater industry was beginning to navigate the incipient sea change around institutional inequality, and the concomitant demands for more equitable season programming, pay, and leadership opportunities for historically marginalized theater professionals.

“At the time,” Modica-Soloway recalls, “everyone was wrestling with EDI [equity, diversity, and inclusion] — righting wrongs and typecasting and limited opportunities for folks — and there was so much anger, bewilderment, and bitterness in the air, coming from every direction.”

As the establishment reckoned with questions of privilege and inclusivity, and with the squall of reactions elicited by newly shifting norms, Modica-Soloway became a sort of processing site for her colleagues’ anxieties, which sometimes took the form of well-meaning condescension, and other times, unpainted hostility. Her presence in the rehearsal room as a visibly minoritized person was assumed to represent the fulfillment of a quota rather than the natural continuation of a longstanding career.

In summary: “A lot of people who’d been working really hard for a long time with little to no thought given to them (I should probably say ‘us’) [were] suddenly being told that we had it incredibly easy, and in the same breath that we were the downfall of theatrical standards and had somehow ‘stolen’ our place.”

The cumulative toll of continually butting up against so much entrenched bias dovetailed with circumstance (first the pandemic, then a significant back injury) such that even after live theater began its slow, post-pandemic return, Modica-Soloway needed more time to reevaluate her place in it. “Until 2024, I did no theatrical work. I kept performing — readings, guest appearances with the Oregon Symphony, lots of writing and teaching. But I didn’t trust myself not to bring a lot of the pain, sadness, and betrayal I felt with theater into the room or the work. I didn’t feel like it belonged there, for one, but deeper down I didn’t feel like I belonged there.”

Making sense of so many painful and complicated emotions — her own, and those displaced onto her by aggrieved fellow artists — perhaps inevitably became its own generative process, which in time took the form of You Should Be Honored. The show, she explains, was a distillation of not only her feelings concerning her life in the theater, but the entire landscape of the industry. And on this topic, Modica-Soloway has much to say.

“So many of us have pragmatically, quietly, just stepped back,” she laments. “Not just into filler jobs to bridge gaps between projects, but permanently because of the facts of what it costs to be a person in 2025. Everywhere we look, theaters are in crisis and needing to trim, shutter, or make otherwise devastating decisions just to keep the lights on. Performers are making public pleas on social media, posting GoFundMe links. The field is in dire shape, and while it is so heartening and important to see institutions saved, I think the next step, once they are stabilized, is figuring out how to support the performers and crew who need to make an actual living in this city.”

Sponsor

As it now stands, here in Portland it is impossible to make a living as an actor — and only as an actor —without traveling for most of the year, or taking a vow of poverty. And while Modica-Soloway is firm in her assertion that she isn’t owed such a living, she’s equally adamant that we confront the underlying conditions that have made it unattainable.

“I do think it is critical that we acknowledge that folks have retired or stepped back because the cost of living has far exceeded what theaters are able to pay,” Modica-Soloway says. “It is critical that we are honest, that we look around and say, ‘How can we reestablish an ecosystem that supports them and the work that they do with us?'”

How, indeed? Theater companies nationwide have been left scrambling to make up for the shortfall caused by President Trump’s demolition of the National Endowment for the Arts, but the economic instability endemic to American theater didn’t begin with the current administration, and it won’t be remedied solely with the reinstatement of government subsidies only ever intended to be supplemental. The traditional funding model on which most theaters depend has been long in decline due to reductions in corporate sponsorship, private donations, and season subscription sales, combined with rising operating costs — and thus far, no successor has emerged to replace it.

Modica-Soloway doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but she seems hopeful for a collective realignment of our values. “No single theater, donor, grant, or institution can buoy the entire community of professional theater workers in our city,” she says. “But I do think we can shift the mindset that in order to continue helping companies and institutions survive, we need to make sure everyone involved in the shows our community and audiences deserve is paid as generously and fairly as possible for the work.”

Though Modica-Soloway speaks lovingly and with sincere gratitude for the opportunities that find her, one is never left with the impression that she sees her own field through rose-colored glasses. As a mid- career actor she’s keenly aware of the theater’s inadequacies and indignities, and her criticisms are finely pointed arrows, all zinging toward a fairer, more humane vision of what it could be. In her day- to-day life she seeks practical ways of giving life to that vision by mentoring youth, sharing her collected wisdom with newcomers and up-and-comers, and having frank conversations with homegrown actors weighing the pros and cons of seeking work outside of town.

“I was lucky to have some generous people share with me their experiences over the years, and it helped define the kind of road I wanted to build for myself,” she says. Characteristically, she names names: “Linda Alper, Robin Nordli, Gary Norman, Vana O’Brien, Sara Bruner, Craig Cackowski, Christine Nielsen. These were people who had lives of all different stripes; careers that seemed to balance so beautifully with their personal lives; and the way they held themselves in the room and the process, their generosity of spirit. I feel deep gratitude for what they’ve shared, and what I have held on to from those conversations. It’s only right to keep the circle going.”

With the closure of Witch drawing near, will Modica-Soloway keep going? It seems clear that this production has reinspired her along with reaffirming her status as one of Portland’s top talents. Does that mean we can expect more to come — acting, writing, or otherwise?

Sponsor

“Oh, man, who knows,” she says. “Hopefully, probably, definitely. Determinedly.”

***

Profile Theatre’s production of Witch is playing in the Ellen Bye Studio at Portland Center Stage’s Armory, 128 N.W. 11^th Ave., through Nov. 2. Final performances are at 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday, Oct. 30-31; 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 1; and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 2. Ticket information here.