For a decade, Portland’s Northwest Theatre Workshop has been one of the region’s principal incubators for new theater. But even more notably, beyond those individual works (57 productions and readings), the company has also created an innovative model of how to nurture new theatrical works from idea to production. 

Now, the principal visionary and instigator behind that model, Ciji Guerin, is stepping aside from her leadership role — and pushing NWTW to create yet another theatrical innovation — a different way of running a theater company.

“What defined Guerin’s decade at Northwest Theatre Workshop,” wrote longtime member Brad Bolchunos and other NWTW veterans on the company’s blog, “was her dedication to building an effective and repeatable new play development process. Since taking the helm in 2015, she has shaped a company that thrives on analysis, collaboration, and invention. Under her direction, NWTW became a proving ground for new plays and playwrights in a city known for its scrappy originality. Now, as she prepares to step down, Guerin leaves behind more than a record of productions. She leaves a blueprint: a way of creating, developing and producing new work that survives upheaval and uncertainty.” 

You can see the results of that process in this month’s NWTW Founders’ Showcase, featuring a pair of staged readings of long-incubating plays by NWTW stalwarts. This Saturday and Sunday brings Brad Bolchunos’s Unmediated, about a reporter uncovering strange doings in a small Oregon town where the decline of trustworthy information sources has produced confusion and contention over what’s real and what isn’t. On Dec. 12-13, the showcase features Wayne Harrel and Craig Bidondo’s romantic comedy musical, Do That Dance. Both productions will be script-in-hand staged readings.

Decade of Development 

Founded by Guerin, Harrel, and George Taylor in 2015, NWTW has been an important incubator of new Oregon theater for a decade, with roots stretching back to 2002. (Read my 2024 ArtsWatch story about its history.) NWTW has recounted the company’s “decade of innovation” under Guerin’s leadership in an informative pair of posts on its blog (Part One, Part Two. Check those out and we’ll be here when you come back. 

Guerin and her team spearheaded innovative NWTW programs like the Cantilever Project, Short Play Workshop, Scene2Scene Online Workshop, and more. “She treats every playwright equally,” says Harrel about his longtime collaborator. “She’s fully invested in every writer who comes along and she will do what she can to elevate their work, support their artistic growth.” That includes obtaining consistent funding from donors.

The culmination of Guerin’s leadership came with the 2018 inception of “a comprehensive dramaturgical engine known as The Create Process,” according to the NWTW blog, which goes on to explain the program in detail. “What began as a practical fix for the ‘production gap’ evolved into a disciplined method for understanding how a script builds its thematic meaning and communicates it to an audience…. By the end of the decade, The Create Process had evolved from a single workshop model into a versatile set of story and concept development tools that artists across disciplines could use to build new work.” The Create Process provided the nurturing environment for both of this month’s Founder’s Showcase productions.

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“When we started [NWTW], we were frustrated that we were getting readings, even awards, but not productions [from local theater companies] — and didn’t really understand why,” she recalls. “What could I do differently, how do I better my work? By reverse engineering a lot of plays, we’ve come to understand how and why [a play] worked or didn’t. We no longer sit around and say ‘we don’t know.’ We have very specific priorities about where a work is strong and where we’re trying to evoke the missing piece. We have a lot of techniques, a lot of tools, and a shared dramaturgical language, so communication is much clearer than when we started. We’ve come to a place where we work effectively and efficiently in a situation that’s actually difficult to do that. I feel we very much accomplished that with Create. It’s what I had hoped for when we started.”

Trust the Process

Brad Bolchunos’s Unmediated, performed this weekend, exemplifies NWTW’s extensive development process. This latest incarnation emerges 11 years after Bolchunos, a former reporter for The Daily Astorian, conceived the idea.

“Having worked at a small daily newspaper, I noticed how much smaller communities especially have this affinity for their hometown paper,” he remembers. “I was contemplating where our stories come from, and how they’re shaped in so many ways, and observing how much social media is affecting how we take in our news — and looking at that through a comedic lens.” 

He plotted a story about “a damaged newsman looking for connection in a small town and finds it through a news story about a cult,” Bolchunos blogged. Torn between journalistic skepticism and open mindedness, the story’s reporter protagonist struggles “to distinguish what’s real from what his perceptions cause him to misconstrue,” Bolchunos told ArtsWatch. 

Bolchunos initially developed the idea in a 2016 workshop with acclaimed Portland playwright Andrea Stolowitz, then mounted a staged reading in Portland’s annual Fertile Ground Festival of New Works, which often serves as a launching pad for new plays in progress. 

“Even though I was really gratified with that reading at Fertile Ground, some aspects of it didn’t fully take shape as I really would have liked,” he says. “It needed to go to some next level.“ But where? That’s the point at which so many plays in progress expire, with the writer knowing that something needs to change, but unsure what it is, or how to make it happen.

The prolific playwright decided to let Unmediated marinate while working on other plays. Then, after a 2023 rewrite, Bolchunos dusted it off last summer and, with the perspective that often comes only with time away from a creative product, took a new look at Unmediated via NWTW’s Create process. 

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Bolchunos detailed the play’s evolution in a NWTW blog entry. In weekly meetings involving everything from diagramming theme maps to tackling structural issues to focusing on audience perspective, 

“Ciji’s been working with me to honor my intentions for the piece,” Bolchunos said. “She picked up on my desire to have more thematic weight. Earlier on I felt it was a bit fluffy, so she really heard me when I was striving to take it in a more thematically rich direction.”

Guein helped him see that the play suffered from competing imperatives. A gifted comic writer, Bolchunos had originally leaned into the Scooby Doo echoes of a reporter probing into a cult’s mysterious happenings in the woods. “But we felt that the comedic component was overtaking some of my other intent for the story to have thematic weight,” he explains. “It’s not just about making people laugh, but it’s also about making them understand the universal human conflicts” underlying the action. 

“Before, I had some wonderful scenes but I needed to figure out how they all tied into the story in driving it forward. [Guerin] helped me see where I needed to make choices and stick to them as part of the process,” Bolchunos explains. “It’s a problem I’ve struggled with in so much of my work. I want to have everything — including the kitchen sink! I know it strengthens the work to get that focus, but I find it easier said than done. I love all the possibilities. ‘Pick a lane, Brad!’ she’d say.”

The sustained, back and forth attention that NWTW’s Create process brings to works in progress is unfortunately a rarity in American theater. Staged stories especially require lots of feedback and rewriting to ensure that the writer’s intentions make it intact to the audience. Too often, plays get stuck in “development hell,” with various iterations appearing over sometimes years, each followed by rewriting based primarily on responses to readings, rather than NWTW’s immediate, hands-on feedback to drafts in progress.

 “Ciji has been generous with her time and steady insistence on striving for these works to be the best they can be, and supporting each other in that,” Bolchunos says. “Writing can be such a solitary pursuit. There are times I’ve been like ‘why am I putting myself through this torture?’ But when you have that collaborative dimension, you start to really appreciate the power of that creativity and collaborative energy. “

Development will continue through rehearsals and this weekend’s staged readings, directed by Guerin, as Bolchunos listens carefully to actors’ and audience feedback. “I see it as a sharpening process,” he says. “I’m going into this process with Unmediated, knowing full well I’ll be rewriting and refining. I’m hopeful to glean as much insight as I can and apply those refinements and then take it to the next level of full performance.”

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Relationship Dancing 

The second show in NWTW’s two-week Founders’ Showcase is also a revision/revival of an earlier creation. Playwright Wayne Harrel (who wrote the book and lyrics) and composer/music director Craig Bidondo (probably best known in Portland for his role as pianist for singer Tony Starlight) created “thirty years ago, when we were kids,” Harrel says. “I was feeling some things about my own marriage, and started writing them down to get them out of me.”

That first version of the romantic comedy, titled Look at Us Now, enjoyed a full run at Portland’s Masonic Temple. Harrel went on to an accomplished career in playwriting, including several musicals, most recently the terrific Just This One, based on the life of celebrated Portland bluesman Paul deLay. Like Unmediated, this revival/revisioning of the show also benefited from NWTW’s Create Process.

A sung-through musical, with no dialogue, Do That Dance “starts with a squabble over sex, and expands to other things going on in a married couple’s life,” on their seventh wedding anniversary, Harrel says. Using flashbacks to previous anniversaries, and even all the way back to their honeymoon and even beyond to their first date, the show takes the audience on a quest to discover how their relationship wound up in so much trouble. (Shades of Sondheim & Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along, now a major motion picture currently in Oregon cinemas.) This staged reading, directed by Judy Straalsund, features Bidondo accompanying the two performers on piano.

Shifting Model

After she steps down December 31, Guerin will work on her own creative projects, and on an online course based on her dramaturgical ideas. She also plans to continue to be involved in NWTW, but believes that its leadership model needs to change. 

“It frightens me a little bit to be handing over the reins of something I’ve worked very hard on” for a decade, she says. “I want it to move forward sustainably and with care. Part of our lesson from Covid is that for a tiny company to be sustainable, we can’t just be dependent on one person. If another crisis (like Covid) happens, is it sustainable? Is it adaptable? The current producing artistic director model doesn’t allow us to be as adaptable as we need to be.”

Other theater companies around the country are also reassessing the PAD model. “The audience’s expectations of theater are changing,” Guerin explains. “They’re not looking for something to be curated for them [by a single leader] anymore.”

The company has been working on the new model for some time. While NWTW is still determining its precise new direction, rather than a single uber leader, it envisions a board of producing artists that hires a managing or executive director whose business expertise who can handle the non artistic side. The group has worked with several producing artists over the years and is approaching some of them to consider being part of the new collective leadership.

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NWTW will also pause putting on productions (like last summer’s collaboration with Salem’s Theatre33) and scene workshops, and focus on new play development. Each project might be led by a different artist, rather than all being captained by a single PAD. 

Whatever precise form the new NWTW takes, Guerin says, “the next step forward in its evolution will be as an artist run company, with a shifting collaborative leadership model, founded on the idea that artists can lead not just artistically but also organizationally.” NWTW accomplished the first goal over the last decade. The next decade will see whether it can achieve the second.

Northwest Theater Workshop’s Founders Showcase happens this weekend and next at Copewell Commons at Taborspace, 5441 SE Belmont St., Portland. Brad Bolchunos’s Unmediated plays Saturday, December 6 at 7 pm and Sunday, December 7 at 4:30 pm. Wayne Harrel’s Do That Dance runs the following weekend, starting at 7 pm on Friday and Saturday nights, December 12 and 13, and 4:30 pm on Sunday December 14. Tickets and more info.