The party was as much about relief and gratitude as celebration. Last fall, Northwest Theatre Workshop hosted a bash at the home of one of its directors to thank all the playwrights and artists that had rallied around the Portland-based theater company during the Covid pandemic. The past three years had been turbulent for NWTW, as for every other arts organization, but despite cancellations, postponements and drop outs, the company had still managed to produce an online season, workshops and more. It was time to celebrate — and say thank you.

And to evolve. In the wake of the shutdowns, NWTW was changing its operating model to better adjust to 21st century realities. The company’s new structure comprised “a team of resident playwrights and artists dedicated to the creation, development, and production of new plays as well as collaborative and devised works,” recalls Producing Artistic Director Ciji Guerin, who spearheaded the reboot. 

As the music played and conversations swirled, Guerin explained the company’s goals to one of her colleagues, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Rothan, how “we needed more versatile ways of sharing stories and art, building community, and supporting local establishments where we can gather, interact, share ideas, art, story, new plays, good food, interesting conversation — you know, human-to-human experiences,” she remembers. Guerin wanted NWTW to apply its new model to collaborations with Northwest artists, writers, businesses, and other organizations. 

Rothan nodded. She’d had similar thoughts for Hopewell Hub, a century-old rural general store she and her family had recently acquired and transformed into a gallery/multifarious educational space/community hub/ pottery studio/cafe and, yes store. A resident artist with the Salem-based Theatre 33 and actor with NWTW, Rothan naturally wanted to bring theater into her growing art/community space, she told Guerin, but couldn’t figure out how to make that happen. 

What if, Rothan mused, NWTW could produce a theater project at Hopewell Hub? 

A collaboration was born. Next weekend, Oregon theater lovers can experience the fruits of that partnership in Fragments, which the two organizations are co-producing as part of Theatre 33’s Summer Festival of New Works. They describe it as “an interactive series of site-specific, devised short plays that explore the stories inspired by the artists, lovers and friends that have left their mark at Hopewell Hub.” The performances also include locally grown live music, art exhibits, and wine tastings. 

Not only did Hopewell Hub seem like a promising inspiration for a theatrical production — it also provided a unique opportunity for Guerin to put into action a new model for Northwest Theatre Workshop for the post-pandemic era. 

Developing New Theatrical Works

Now entering its second decade under its current name, NWTW’s roots actually stretch back to 2002, when it was founded as Bump in the Road, aiming to produce theatre that “helps people get over the little bumps in life,” including domestic violence, terminal illness, grief, aging, at-risk youth, and more. Guerin joined as a playwright and director in 2010, and succeeded Bump’s founder Carmela Lanza-Weil as producing artistic director in 2015. 

The leadership transition also heralded a change in mission. Although the company remained dedicated to creating, developing and producing new work, rather than emphasizing plays that helped people overcome life’s bumps in the road, “the purpose of BUMP’s work under my leadership was to figure out a better way to develop and produce new work,” Guerin told ArtsWatch. “As a playwright, I’d had plays workshopped to death. As a director, I’d been asked to direct the same play in two different new play workshops with two different companies three years apart. I was frustrated. I wanted to figure out a better way. Others did too.  And all of our efforts since then have been towards that goal.”

A new mission, in turn, meant a new name. Northwest Theatre Workshop explicitly announces the company’s focus on our region’s creators, audience and community, and emphasizes creating not just new plays — but also better ways of making and producing new plays. It was a prescient goal. Since the pandemic, practically every theater company in the country, even those not exclusively devoted to creating new work, is asking those same questions.

The company called its first effort in that vein the Cantilever Project, which spawned a series of new plays cooperatively produced under a newly devised development process, as well as some hard-earned lessons in how to make that model sustainable. Other theaters, including Portland’s Vertigo and Milagro, heard about NWTW’s new process and asked the company to teach workshops. 

NWTW’s next model built on Cantilever’s lessons, but shifted some of the production burden from the creators to co-production “with other companies whose main purpose was production,” Guerin explains. It focused on developing scripts through various iterations, with a special focus on nurturing useful feedback from fellow artists and audiences. “This model was more sustainable, but it limited what we could produce, and it was brittle. Two key players had to pull out during COVID and the company nearly collapsed. It was the community we’d built around us that pulled together and got us through. Everyone stepped up, did what they could, and made it happen. It was incredible to see. But it was also clear that we needed a more robust model that included partnerships, co-productions, and independent productions,” and one that included not just developing scripts — but also actually producing finished plays.

New Model

Like many theater companies, after the pandemic, NWTW embarked on another journey: to find a sustainable way to not only periodically produce plays, but also to become a company that continually evolved to meet changing — and often challenging — circumstances for the arts. Even with the able assistance of redoubtable institutions like Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival of New Works, PDX Playwrights and Linestorm Playwrights, it’s a real struggle for independent Oregon theater makers to get their original works produced onstage, and it’s only gotten harder since the pandemic struck.

“The biggest obstacle,” Guerin says, “is that, in most new play workshops, a playwright brings in a play in progress and works for a week with a director, a dramaturge, and actors.  It’s better than nothing, but it’s not uncommon for a play to be picked up and put through that process by more than one company. It’s really hard to improve a script if you’re a part of multiple workshops that are each giving you different and often contradictory feedback. We need a way to provide new work creators with a longer time to create and develop their work, to be working with the same collaborators for a longer period of time, and, if the playwright and director aren’t a good fit for each other, a way to discover that quickly and move on.”

Along with lack of continuity and consistency in development, Guerin sees another big barrier to making new work for theater outside major metropolii like New York or Chicago. “There’s not a lot of MFA theatre programs in Portland, putting out highly trained theater artists, writers, and technicians every year who need to build up their resumes and are ready to hit the ground running and create new work with a small company still building up its budgets, developing the work of a very focused group of resident playwrights and theatre artists who are dedicated to the creation, development and production of new work.” 

Determined to figure out a sustainable new approach to not just making new work, but also to sustaining a new-works theater company, Guerin researched various models, and consulted with NWTW’s board of directors, regular contributing theater artists and writers, and other advisors “to come up with a model that would be versatile, adaptable and have a strong virtual and in-person presence,” she recalls. That’s what Guerin was discussing with Rothan at the party last fall.  

They settled on “developing work for a very focused group of resident artists dedicated to the creation, development and production of new work,” Guerin explains. “We’re looking at eight resident playwrights, four to six resident directors and their actors, and leaving it open for rotation so a playwright or director can be involved in the company for the duration of development of their piece, then step away, and come back in for the next one.”

Last year, that model resulted in a series of Scene2Scene workshops crafted especially to get useful feedback on readings of scenes from works in progress — input that its surveyed playwrights told NWTW they really needed. And, for its resident playwrights, NWTW relaunched its new play development process which begins with an unrehearsed reading that allows the playwrights to test their script and the relationship with their chosen director, and then to work with directors and dramaturges to plan the next stage of development. 

But Guerin also wanted the new model to take plays in progress beyond script development into full production. And this year, it’s produced Fragments.

Creative Collaborations

Now that Guerin had assembled a group of theater artists committed to NWTW’s new model, she needed a project “that could unite the newly formed company of artists and get them collaborating,” she remembers. She also wanted to collaborate with local businesses and arts organizations.

Her discussions with Rothan intrigued Guerin, but she needed to check out Hopewell Hub in person to see what possibilities might emerge. She drove out to rural Salem for a guided tour from Rothan, who with her brothers, sisters and father had been refurbishing the long-disused, century old store since early 2018. Since the three sisters moved in that July, they’d turned it into a hub for permaculture, art (pottery, sculpture, painting, fiber, culinary), gardening, education, community and more.

“As Lizzie showed me around, she’d suggest different ways we could put together a theatrical event in different parts of the Hub as she shared the entire history of Hopewell Hub and every structure within it,” Guerin remembers. “After I took it all in, I found the Hub to be an amazing place and suggested that we create a theatrical journey for the audience that celebrated Hopewell Hub’s architecture and landscape — a walking theatrical event where the audience would travel from one site-specific devised play to the next, each taking place at a different location within the Hub.”

Rothan liked that idea, and suggested augmenting the theatrical performances with local art exhibits and wine tastings to celebrate the region’s artistry. “I was thrilled with the idea because it was exactly what I wanted to do, but I had no idea how to make happen,” Guerin says. “It was a great way to share stories and art, build community, and support writers, artists, musicians, winemakers, a local business establishment, and two arts organizations. Score!” 

It also provided NWTW’s new resident theater artists an opportunity to hone the kind of collaborative work needed under the company’s new model, advancing the new goal of developing not just plays, but also a sustainable process and company. They decided to document the creative process in a series of blog posts as a way of developing a knowledge base for future creative endeavors by NWTW and anyone else — including developing new plays for the company’s next project, a holiday show at Rose City Book Pub. 

Rothan proposed including the new project in Theatre 33’s summer 2024 festival of new works, and Guerin, who’d worked with that company (which is also dedicated to facilitating new work) in developing one of her own plays some years back and found it “a positive and hopeful experience,” enthusiastically agreed. Theatre 33’s leaders, Thomas Nabhan and Susan Coromel, quickly signed on, and Guerin praises their supportive energy in this collaboration. They timed the production so audiences could see both Fragments and Theatre 33’s final summer production, Portland playwright Lolly Ward’s Gone, on the same day, ”which helps Theatre 33 in its goal to build up a destination festival of new work by Oregon artists,” Guerin explains.

Stories from Spaces

Site-specific shows like Fragments have a long history in theater, but that doesn’t make them any easier to stage, if that’s the word. “With site-specific work, there is no set designed to enhance the story or theme or enable great staging, no lighting design to shape the mood moment-to-moment or to establish tone, no sound design to create ambiance or set tempo, no costume design to help establish the time period, character or each individual’s place in a social hierarchy,” Guerin explains. “It is only the site, the text, the performers, and the audience. It is work-in-the-raw — intimate, personal, and intense.”

All told, more than two dozen NWTW-associated artists wound up exploring the Hub. They talked with each other to determining which spaces to use, the themes those spaces suggested, and which artists would be on which team. They decided on six spaces: the front porch, back pond, a small home on a corner of the lot, a tent-like structure next to a horse pasture, a “mushroom wall” with squabbling siblings and “questionable sculptures,” and an artist’s studio. (Click the links to learn more about each space, play and the team that created it.)

“We discovered that each of the six sites had an aspect to them that was very fragmented but, despite that, still managed to come together as a single coherent space, and fit well into the larger landscape of Hopewell Hub,” Guerin says, which led to the collective title Fragments. The plays, collectively created by actors, directors and playwrights, include Garden Stranger (playwright Brad Bolchunos, director Scott Stroot), Watersports (playwright Kwik Jones, director Jeremy Cole), Honesty Box (playwright Niels Truman, director Mindi Logan), When The Artist Is Away… (playwright Zella Selvoy-Devan, director Michelle Seaton), Pond (playwright Justine Hanlon, director Jeffrey Puukka), and Psycho Killer, Qu’est-Ce Que C’est (playwright Nancy Campbell, director Jeffrey Puukka). Each sports a writer, director and at least two actors. 

Then came the work of creating each performance. In these devised performances, each team engaged in a collective process of character, story, and concept development, sketching out the world of each play. Some started with improvisational techniques; others were more conversational. Each playwright then took those ingredients and turned them into actual stories, brought those back to the team, and engaged in more discussions, rewrites, lather, rinse, repeat. (It’s a bit analogous to the creation process for NWTW’s new model: collectively determined, but mostly organized by a single director, Guerin.) Late last month, the artists received feedback on their works in progress, as part of NWTW’s developmental process, and further revision ensued. 

Beyond creating the individual plays, the artists also needed a way to smooth the audience’s transitions among the different sites. The answer, of course: kazoos, played by a troupe of high school musicians. Each play will be bookended by musical performance and art displays.

The spaces also lend an intimacy between performers and the audience. “There’s a lot of breaking of the fourth wall and talking to audience members,” she says, though the actors are careful not to interact with audience members who clearly don’t relish that. Such consideration for the audience experience shows that, for all its concern about creative stimulation, process and development, NWTW understands that any creative product will only go as far as its audience enjoys it. 

“It’s an incredibly fun way to see theater because so much is different from the usual experience,” Guerin says. “There’s lot more unexpected twists and turns [in each of the plays] and moving from play to play, and also just how different each play is from the others.” 

Continuing Evolution 

NWTW’s next expression of its new vision arrives during its upcoming holiday production (working title: “Pint-Sized Plays”), an immersive show produced in collaboration with Rose City Book Pub in December. Guerin also hopes to revive its Create workshops and play readings next year and maybe even mount a full production of any plays that are stage-ready.

When projects are fully developed, NWTW plans to reach out to local theaters in hopes of co-producing them, or, failing that, will produce the shows itself. But Guerin hopes to continue creative collaborations with other organizations in Portland’s theater ecosystem. 

“If we do all come together, it would be great for the community as a whole,” she says. “It’s a very supportive community in my experience. What I’d love for us to do more of is to sit down, have a coffee, and discuss how we can improve. With each project, we’ll deepen our collaborative relationships, fine-tune our skills, better our processes, build up our knowledge-base. Learn, grow, do better.” Just like developing a play, creating a sustainable new-works theater company is a work in progress.

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 Northwest Theatre Workshop presents Fragments at 2 pm Saturday, July 27, and 11 am Sunday, July 28 at Hopewell Hub, 22460 Hopewell Rd NW, Salem. Tickets & info.