“Down the centuries of the snow-white world, came people singing, dancing, to drive the dark away.” 

– Susan Cooper, “The Shortest Day”

***

The Portland Revels have lasted for thirty years. In the nickel-and-dime world of theater, thirty years is a mighty long time. When Dick Lewis first pitched the idea of the Revels to a group of theater professionals, nonprofessionals, and everyday citizens back in 1994, Bill Clinton was president, Nelson Mandela was a global icon, the Dallas Cowboys were the reigning Super Bowl champs and the Notorious B.I.G. released his landmark album, Ready to Die.

In Portland, there were theater companies like Stark Raving and Tygre’s Heart Shakespeare and Portland Repertory Theatre. Since then, companies including Theatre Vertigo, Post5, Anon It Moves and defunkt have risen, flourished and gone away again.

Thirty years for a small theater is a lifetime. But for Portland Revels, this thirty-year anniversary is a moment of regeneration and renewal. Which is appropriate, because the renewal of light and life out of darkness is what the Portland Revels is all about. 

The Revels’ new show this year, Highland Hearth, is a momentous moment for many reasons for the theater company, most significantly because it’s the last show that will be helmed by artistic director Bruce Akpan Hostetler. After this show, Hostetler, the Revels’ first official artistic director, will be handing over the reins of the company to incoming AD, Fulbright scholar and Drama League Fellow Amanda McRaven. 

Highland Hearth — which opens Friday, Dec. 12, and continues at the Scottish Rite Center through Dec. 20 — is set in Scotland in 1640, and is based on an event that actually happened. At that time, the Scottish Parliament banned Yule celebrations because they were too Catholic.

“They felt like people were having too much fun,” says Hostetler. “They were having dances and parties, and the Scottish church, who was Puritanical and protestant, said no.” (Author’s note: What kind of dark place do you have to be in when the Catholic Church parties too hard for you?)

“The parliament literally said, ‘You cannot celebrate Yule, government offices have to stay open, the courts will still work,'” Hostetler continues. “So, we have a community that is about to celebrate Yule. In comes a government official who tells them, “’ou have to take these decorations down. You can’t sing these songs. You’re not allowed to celebrate. You have to stop this.’

“And the community has to decide, ‘What are we going to do? Are we gonna give up? Or are we going to find a way to have this celebration that we’ve been having for longer than anyone can remember?’”

The solution they come up with is also historically accurate — but to find out what it is, you should go see the show. 

Highland Hearth also marks the return of the Revels to the Scottish Rite Center, after a thirteen-year hiatus, which Lewis attributes to the work of Hostetler in persuading the Center to bring them back. Board chair Allison McGillivray attributes the return for an uptick in sales this year: “We’re seeing people who haven’t bought tickets in many years buy tickets again, because that place is so beloved by our community.”

If you’ve never been to a Portland Revels production, it’s not quite like any other theater event you’ll find in Portland, and that’s not hyperbole. There are certain principles that make a Revels show a Revels show — things that, at least nominally, you’d find in other theaters: music, singing, dancing, ritual, even audience participation. But those similarities are only ostensible. 

The Revels is a unique blend of theater professionals, nonprofessionals, and children. However, like PassinArt’s annual Black Nativity production, it’s the depth and breadth of the talent involved that make things click. “When I first applied for the job,” says newcomer McRaven, “I was surprised at the level of artistry, the incredible singing. I’m watching a video and I’m getting teary at how amazing the voices are.” 

Then there’s the cast, which can reach toward seventy (70!) people onstage, a whole lot of them children. Some of them have been performing with the Revels for decades. The cast is divided into a group of “families,” each with their own back-stories that they develop: stories that the audience probably will never learn about, but that create a rich inner life for the actors. The audience might not be aware that those stories are there, but they feel those connections. 

And there are the moments when all seventy people, plus however many hundreds of people are in the audience, all start singing together — and the moment at the end of the first act called the Lord of the Dance, when the actors onstage come offstage and dance in and among the audience members, who are dancing with them. 

A Portland Revels show will have colorful costumes, and possibly puppetry, and will likely transport you to a faraway place. Each Portland Mid-Winter Revels show ends with the poem “The Shortest Day,” written by Susan Cooper, being recited.

“Song, dance, laughter, story,” says Lewis, who has as much fire today about the Revels as he must have had thirty years ago. “These are the essential elements of the Revels that must always be there.” 

The Portland Revels is a branch of Revels celebrations that happen all over the country and date back to the 1970s, but draw on traditions from primarily northern Europe that go back hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years.

The modern iteration was first conceived by a man named Jack Langstaff, a singer, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1971. His group made a record and Lewis heard it, loved it, and thought he should bring it to Portland. In 1994, he did exactly that, starting with a small, “taster” version at Friendly House, that led, in 1995, to the first full production of the Portland Revels, at Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall. 

A lot can change in thirty years, and has — even for the Portland Revels, an institution founded on tradition, and very specific traditions, at that. For many years, the winter event was called the Christmas Revels.

“Revels Inc., the Cambridge Revels, initiated this idea to rethink whether it should be the Christmas Revels and whether the solstice, a largely northern European concept, should be the focus,” says Lewis. “It seemed to broaden the meaning for a larger variety of people to call it the Midwinter Revels, because that’s the time of year, and to emphasize more the renewal of life as the central concept.” 

 Bruce Hostetler is stepping away from the Revels after living through his own renewal-of-life event.

“In 2020 I got diagnosed with stage 4 multiple myeloma – bone marrow cancer,” he says. “After a couple of months, it was not responding to treatment. I basically realized that I love theater, I ‘ve been doing it in some way, shape or form my entire life, and with a limited amount of time left, that’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to spend time with my family.”

Eventually the cancer went into remission, but the perspective shift remained, and Hostetler let the Revels know that it was time for him to move on. 

Hostetler has been with the Revels for fourteen years. When he first came on, he took over from Gray Eubank, a former Portland theater great, who himself had been with the company for several years. Somewhen in that distant past, Hostetler had put his resume up on PDX Backstage, and Debby Garman, then executive director of the Revels, gave him a call.

Hostetler, who had worked some in opera and whose father was a choral director, took the gig, not expecting it to become a life’s pursuit. “And by the time I did it the second year,” he remembers, “it was like, ‘okay, you are the guy for as long as you want to keep doing this.’”

Although the position didn’t exist, Hostetler became the de facto artistic director because, he says, “Somebody had to be thinking about, what show are we going to do? Where are we going? Why?”

Finally, in 2016, Jenny Stadler, who was the executive director at the time, told Hostetler, “You’re doing work right now that you should be paid for.’” And a year later, he was named the official artistic director. 

Besides having directed the Revels fourteen times and having written some portion, if not all of the scripts, in 2019, Hostetler had the idea to expand the reach of the Revels and what they’re focused on. So, he began the Spring Revels program.

“I wanted the opportunity to tell other stories,” he says, “but I didn’t think I should always be the one to tell them.” The concept was basically that other cultures also celebrate the cycle of life through song and dance – how to bring them into the Portland Revels? 

In 2019, Hostetler brought in theater artists Robi Arce and Nelda Reyes to create their own show for the spring. The parameters they were given were simple. Whatever they made had to employ the usual Revels formula: song, dance, laughter, story.

That first foray into breaking out of the northern European box with a spring show from different traditions was successful enough that Hostetler knew he wanted to bring it back. The leadership body of the Portland Revels has always been supportive of the program, but there was the question — a legitimate one — of how that fit into the Revels and whether it should.

“Which was good,” says Hostetler, “because it made me have to answer, ‘Why is this here? What about this is Revels?’ It made me realize that there is this thing that Revels does, which is, it creates community in the space, in the moment, and I’m amazed by that when it happens in the midwinter show. I wanted to be able to try to do that with another culture and another community and bring the standard Revels audience into a different part of the city that they live in.”

This year the Spring Revels show will be a collaboration with Theatre Diaspora, Oregon’s only AANHPI (Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander) theater company. It’ll be an original script by local playwright Jhus Custodio and is, naturally, a musical.

It’s telling that the Spring Revels program was one of the things that made the job attractive to Amanda McRaven. A Virginia native, McRaven has spent the last fifteen years working out of Los Angeles. She is a winner of an LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award for her direction of Meghan Brown’s The Pliant Girls, a member of Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and a Fulbright Award recipient to New Zealand, where she created and directed community-based theater projects including stories with refugee communities for The Mixing Room at Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand. She also directed for Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand, according to her website. 

McRaven’s wife moved here a year ago, and McRaven herself was looking to downshift from the L.A. lifestyle. Purple-haired, boldly LGBTQ, coming from the big city and trained in Viewpoints, there were lots of reasons to wonder – in either direction – whether McRaven would be the right person for the job. “I was ready for something different,” she says, “and I didn’t know what it was. But every time I did another interview I thought, ‘Something feels really alive in this. I think I have to follow this.’”

The interview process took three weeks. McRaven met Hostetler, music director Daniel Buchanan, board members, community members, and actors who had been doing the shows for years. “I’ll be honest, it was a lot,” she says, laughing. “But I appreciated them vetting me and the other candidates so carefully.”

The final thing she had to do was make a presentation of how she would direct an existing Revels script. McRaven decided the best strategy was to go big or go home:

“At the end of the day, I like the work to be edgy, to be bold. My work is very gender-queer. I direct a lot of Shakespeare; I pay no attention to gender, I just put people in. How do I be myself as a director and let them know that I love what makes the Revels the Revels? I finally decided I was just gonna go for it. So, one of the things I presented I was like, ‘I’m going to say this part of the show is drag.’ And the whole Zoom screen smiled. And I was like, ‘Okay, they get it.’” 

McRaven has every intention of being true to the central intentions of Revels.

“My first big plan,” she says, “is to do a listening tour. To really sit and listen to people who have been part of the Revels for a long time.” One of the many centuries-old traditions that turns up in the Midwinter Revels is the Morris Dance. “The thing about theater traditions is that they’re all spiritual at the beginning. They’re all about expressions of soul. Why are we doing this thing? What is the heart of this tradition? What does a Morris Dance look like in 2025?” 

One of McRaven’s goals for the future of the Revels is to have the spring and midwinter shows be in dialogue with each other. She credits Hostetler, executive director Lauren Hanover, and McGillivray for the evolution of the company that made the job a desirable one for her. “I love a good kilt show. But you can’t do only kilt shows and have an IDEA statement. There’s a lot of people of color who might want to do a kilt show. But you have to do the work to invite folks in. That is my task as a white arts leader … to use my position to open more doors and to invite folks in.”

So, there is a balance to be struck, a line to be walked, between holding on to what gives the Portland Revels its strong and vibrant identity and advancing that identity into the 21^st century. And in Amanda McRaven, the Portland Revels feels like they found the right person.

“Amanda was able to show us that she gets us,” says Allison McGillivray. “She has the heart and the community focus and the collaborative style that I feel is necessary to succeed in this role. Having people on stage that have been there for almost thirty years themselves, there’s a lot of investment in the show from a personal perspective. When you’re leading the Revels it’s more about shepherding the community forward than leading your own passion project.”

“That is the central tension of this company,” says McRaven. “And it suits me really well. I’ve always been drawn to these old stories. There’s something exciting about working with our mythologies and reimagining them. I’ve always been really intrigued by what went before, what aspects we keep, and what we let mutate. I’m here for it. I don’t have to feel like, ‘I’m gonna innovate!’ Because they’ve already been doing that, one baby step at a time.”

Growing, evolving, innovating, one baby step at a time, while having a firm grasp on who you are, is how an organization stays alive and thriving for thirty years. Song. Dance. Laughter. Story. The renewal of Life. A formula that has sustained people and will sustain people through the darkest, coldest days of the year for many years to come.

The Midwinter Revels: Highland Hearth

• Company: Portland Revels
• Where: Scottish Rite Center, 705 S.W. 15th Ave., Portland
• When: Opens 7:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 12. Continues 1 p.m. (ASL interpreted matinee) and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 13; 1 p.m. (audio described performance) Sunday, Dec. 14; 7:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 19; 1 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 20; 1 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 21
• Tickets: Here