Remember Sowelu? The experimental ensemble is back with three new plays

Bobby Bermea: After several years of shifting to award-winning independent films, the ensemble returns to the theater stage with a short run of one-act plays.
Nanette Gatchel's Casper is one of three short one-act plays marking Sowelu's return to the Portland stage. Photo: arkphotos.com 
Nanette Gatchel’s Casper is one of three short one-act plays marking Sowelu’s return to the Portland stage. Photo: arkphotos.com 

Whatever happened to Sowelu, the experimental ensemble theater company from the early 2000s, noted for its commitment to excellence and unique brand of theater on the edge? 

For years, Sowelu provided some of the most provocative work seen on Portland stages. Actors including Lorraine Bahr, Chris Harder, Kelly Tallent and Sean Skvarka, among others, thrilled and challenged audiences with their particular alchemy of virtuosity, physicality and risk-taking.

Artistic director Barry Hunt was the prime mover behind this collection of creators. Hunt’s vision was always to create an ensemble of twelve like-minded creators that could financially sustain itself. That never quite happened. But, as is so often the case in the history of human endeavor, it was the reach that mattered. 

Starting Thursday, Feb. 6, and running through the weekend until Sunday, Feb. 9, Sowelu will be returning to the space where it all began way back in 1998, the Back Door Theatre on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard. Perspective is a trio of short one-act plays that explore, in the company’s words, “contemporary social, political and environmental issues affecting people as they try to live their lives.”

The individual pieces — Casper, Fully Automatic Heart, and You Never Listen — are written by longtime company members Nanette Gatchel and Luke Heyerman, and newcomer Nick Floyd respectively. All three are directed by Hunt, and the evening looks to be one of multimedia experimentation and, as Hunt describes it, “existential horror.” 

According to the Sowelu website, in Casper “a sink hole opens in the home of Mr. Hamm. His small dog Casper falls in. Is this a bad dream or our new normal?” Fully Automatic Heart follows the relationship between “a born wrong cowboy and a pointy headed gal.” You Never Listen is a grimly topical piece about a young couple having a relationship crisis while a wildfire bears down on them. If this sounds like not your typical theater fare, well, welcome to Sowelu. 

So what has Sowelu been doing since its last venture on stage? The simple answer is, it’s been making movies. But, as always with such things, the answer is anything but simple. 

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Portland Opera The Shining Newmark Theatre Portland Oregon

Barry Hunt was a William Esper Studio-trained (Meisner technique) actor in New York City when he and his then-wife Erin, a Portland native and former Jefferson dancer, decided to move to the Rose City where they would have the support of her family, while they raised their own. A move to the relatively sleepy Pacific northwest had not been on Hunt’s radar and initially, he was not sure how he fit in.

“When I came to Portland at first,” remembers Hunt, “I was not finding the community that works the way I would want to work.” But then he met David Demke, artistic director of Stark Raving Theatre, who, like Hunt, had his foundational training in Meisner. That turned out to be the first step in building the creative community Hunt had been looking for. “[Demke and I] agreed that we needed an ensemble,” says Hunt; “we needed a training ground, we wanted to build the skills so that we can work the way we work in a community.” 

They did, and that worked for a while. But the collaboration, while fruitful and enriching, couldn’t last forever. Eventually Hunt and Demke found themselves interested in following different creative directions, and a divergence in paths was necessary. “He was like, ‘I’m heading towards Shakespeare’,” Hunt remembers, “and I’m like, ‘I’m headed to Viewpoints and Anne Bogart and physical theater and experimentation.’ Sowelu was born out of that intense conversation.”

From left, Sowelu members Dan Hill, actor in Casper, Bhule in The Further Adventures and Anse and Bhule, and Writer and Director of Beth + Jeremy & Steve; Nan Gatchel, writer of Casper and actor in Fully Automatic Heart; Barry Hunt, Artistic Director, director of Perspective and The Further Adventures of Anse and Bhule; and Luke Heyerman, actor in Casper and writer of Fully Automatic Heart. Photo: Megean McBride
From left, Sowelu members Dan Hill, actor in Casper, Bhule in The Further Adventures and Anse and Bhule, and Writer and Director of Beth + Jeremy & Steve; Nan Gatchel, writer of Casper and actor in Fully Automatic Heart; Barry Hunt, Artistic Director, director of Perspective and The Further Adventures of Anse and Bhule; and Luke Heyerman, actor in Casper and writer of Fully Automatic Heart. Photo: Megean McBride

In 1998 Sowelu was a much-needed jolt to the Portland theater community, in much the same way that Third Rail, Portland Playhouse, and then PETE, the Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble, would be in later years. The company members were passionate about the work, had a specific approach to craft, were all about expanding the boundaries of what theater could do, took themselves very seriously, and became critical darlings. Whether or not you vibed with the show, you were never going to get bored at a Sowelu piece. Perhaps most significantly, Hunt had discovered the artistic family he was looking for, artists who shared his sensibility about the stories they wanted to tell and a commitment to the way they wanted to tell them.

But theater is an ethereal experience, an art form of the moment. Although Sowelu developed a consistent funding base, it could never quite get over the hump to be able to sustain the lives of the artists.

“There came a point when we were deeply involved in the theater community, with the particular Sowelu aesthetic and making the particular work that we made, and had season donors and an audience,” Hunt says. “But creating that organization took a lot of wear and tear on us as an ensemble. It had been me and Lorraine Bahr and Nan Gatchel, entering our forties and fifties, relying a lot on the sweat equity of twenty and twenty-five-year-olds. As the young people are maturing they’re needing the financial stability to buy a house and have a partner, maybe have kids, and it caused a split, a lot of departures.”

He pauses for a moment. “Very heart-wrenching for me.” 

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Seattle Opera The Magic Flute Seattle Washington

But it wasn’t all loss. After all, Hunt had found his people. They had put together an impressive body of work. They were a family. Outside of being able to support themselves from their artistic work, Sowelu had been everything that Hunt wanted them to be. “Somebody at one point said, ‘I’m afraid Barry won’t get his dream,’” says Hunt. “I said, ‘No, I already had my dream, this is my dream. What we’re doing. What we’ve done. I just can’t make that organizatio sustainable.”

But the seeds of Sowelu’s second life had already been planted. For years Sowelu had had a significant educational component. They trained actors as a source of income and as a means of keeping fresh energy and ideas circulating through the company. Some of those students worked in film. 

“We were mentoring young people in their film work,” says Hunt. “They were attracted to the way we work with writers. They were attracted to the Meisner technique. They would go to film schools and then come back and study with us and I’m like, ‘Why are you coming back?’ and they’re like, ‘Well, they don’t train us how to act in a film or direct in a film or work with actors’ in the way we did.”

The upshot is that Hunt and Sowelu began to see film as a means of keeping the company together and being able to do work. Film, like theater, costs time and money, but it was more flexible, more adaptable to individual members’ adult lives.

“You come together, you make it fast, you go home,” says Hunt. “We had the aesthetic training in common already, they go home, I get to have them in the editing room for two years. It served my desire to stay with my ensemble and their desire to continue working with us and also do all the other things they needed to do.”

A couple of scripts came to mind for the company that might make interesting films, both from their earliest days: Tania Myren’s The Further Adventures of Anse and Bhule in No-Man’s Land and Eliza Anderson’s The Lower Rooms. 

Film poster with scenes from the movie version of Tania Myren’s The Further Adventures of Anse and Bhule in No-Man’s Land, which made the leap from stage to screen.
Film poster with scenes from the movie version of Tania Myren’s The Further Adventures of Anse and Bhule in No-Man’s Land, which made the leap from stage to screen.

 Anse and Bhule was going to take significantly more time, energy and money than the other, so Hunt decided to make that one first. Hunt’s reasoning was simple: “Let’s make the first one over five years and when it comes out, a year later we’ll have the next one. So they dovetail with each other.”

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Portland Center Stage at the Armory Portland Oregon

As you might expect, it turned out to be not quite as simple as that. Hunt and Sowelu had to learn – on the job – how to create in this entirely different art form. “Naively, I was like, ‘Well, we’re going to shoot in the Gorge,’” says Hunt. “These are all theater actors so we’re going to do it all in one take, every day at magic hour and we’ll be done.’”

That,” he says, laughing, “did not happen.”

But what Sowelu’s members lacked in experience, they made up for with ingenuity. They had ideas on fund-raising, for example, that might not occur to most filmmakers. Though the theater scene had lost sight of Sowelu, foundations and donors had not. “One of the things that we found was that being a not-for-profit, I went to our community and asked, ‘Why do you think the same actors, directors and writers in a town, working on a project, could get funding to do it as a play, and not get funding to the same thing with the same people as a film?’” 

So Anse and Bhule got made over a three-year period, and the Sowelu family was able to keep making art together. “We finished it,” says Hunt. “I sent it out to a lot of festivals. It was rejected a lot. A lot.”

But the film made it into the Santa Fe Film Festival in New Mexico. Hunt and Kelly Tallent, who were both working on In the Boom Boom Room, and Daniel Hill made the trip down and, in Hunt’s telling, “It was awful. We were in this terrible environment, where it wasn’t even an enclosed theater, there were screens put up, seating, but it was in an artist’s work space, so there were people carving sculptures with tools and this simple projector screen; and then the projector went down and Dan, who works on the tech side, had to go in and fix it and there were four people in the audience. I was sick. I couldn’t sit. I was in the back just pacing. And then we had to leave town.” 

Trailer for the film version of The Further Adventures of Anse and Bhule in No-Man’s Land.

That could have been the end — but then something unexpected happened. Anse and Bhule won best cinematography in Santa Fe. That award led to the film finding a distributor, which led to it ending up on streaming platforms, which led to it being discovered by David J. Moore, the author of the book World Gone Wild: A Survivor’s Guided to Post-Apocalyptic Movies.

Moore was profoundly impressed by Anse and Bhule. “He said, ‘I really want to talk to you about your movie. I think it’s one of the six more important films in the genre,’” Hunt recalls. “He got us interviews and articles and reviews in probably a dozen publications around the world.” And, to back up his assessment, Moore included Anse and Bhule in the second edition of World Gone Wild with a four-page spread. 

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Portland Center Stage at the Armory Portland Oregon

Today, you can watch Anse and Bhule for free on YouTube. And Sowelu did, in fact, make The Lower Rooms, winner of the Oregon Independent Film Festival Best Actor award, and a third film,  Beth+Jeremy and Steve, directed by Daniel Hill, which has racked up a number of accolades from San Francisco to Germany.

So, the answer to question of “Whatever happened to …?” is, Sowelu’s been busy. It’s redefined itself, expanded its artistic parameters and skillsets, and maintained its connection as a creative family. And now, it’s even making it back to the stage. 

In more ways than one, Perspective, this evening of genre-defying short plays, makes it clear that Sowelu is not drawing any hard lines between being a theater company or a company of filmmakers.

“I have a love-hate dynamic tension between film and theater,” says Hunt. “I love them both.” And he and his family of creators are more and more comfortable doing both. They continue to learn, grow, and make work. So, in fact, Barry Hunt did achieve his goal of sustainability. It just looks a little different than he thought it would. 

*** 

“Perspective,” Sowelu’s program of three short one-act plays, performs at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 6, 7, and 8, and at 2 p.m. Feb. 9 at The Back Door Theatre, 4319 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd., Portland. Tickets are $5-$25 sliding scale. For reservations, call 503-730-9066.

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Portland Center Stage at the Armory Portland Oregon

Bobby Bermea is an award-winning actor, director, writer and producer. He is co-artistic director of Beirut Wedding, a founding member of Badass Theatre and a long-time member of both Sojourn Theatre and Actors Equity Association. Bermea has appeared in theaters from New York, NY, to Honolulu, HI. In Portland, he’s performed at Portland Center Stage, Artists Repertory Theatre, Portland Playhouse, Profile Theatre, El Teatro Milagro, Sojourn Theatre, Cygnet Productions, Tygre’s Heart, and Life in Arts Productions, and has won three Drammy awards. As a director he’s worked at Beirut Wedding, BaseRoots Productions, Profile Theatre, Theatre Vertigo and Northwest Classical, and was a Drammy finalist. He’s the author of the plays Heart of the City, Mercy and Rocket Man. His writing has also appeared in bleacherreport.com and profootballspot.com.

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