Like so many other remote-working coffee shop laptop jockeys, Amanda Clark had been frequenting her favorite coffee shop, Beaverton’s Ki Coffee, for years. One day a few years ago, she remembers, “I looked at their back room with fresh eyes and wondered — what if we transformed that back room into a performance space?”

She proposed the idea to the owner, a serious local arts supporter.

“Hell yes!!” came the instant reply.

A lot of work later (some funded by a Beaverton Arts Commission grant), Spark Plug Theatre Collective ignited, initially to produce a single play. But a surprising surge of demand from local audiences led to further productions of the kind of ambitious shows she and other creatives didn’t see enough of in the area — “stories that spark conversations and inspire new perspectives,” Clark says. “We want the story to stick with you after you leave the theater,  and lead to after-the-show conversations – in the car or at drinks after –  about the themes and story, prompting people to connect with each other more deeply.”

And now, thanks in part to the Fertile Ground Festival, Spark Plug has been able to stage new works by Oregon playwrights for the past two springs. Alas, Moments of Reckoning, this year’s slate of Spark Plug Fertile Ground shows, sold out the tiny space weeks ago. But the flourishing of new, homegrown theater in an unlikely space in the Portland suburbs shows the value and attractiveness of both Spark Plug and Fertile Ground itself. 

Evolving Audience

Clark’s involvement in West Side theater stretches back to 2011, when she moved to the area from the Midwest and began performing and (putting her marketing background to work) volunteering at Beaverton Civic Theater, which focused on “traditional community theater fare,” she says: familiar comedies and melodramas, big group shows etc.

Other West Side theaters, such as Tualatin and Tigard’s Mask & Mirror’s Unmasked series (separate from its more traditional main stage series) and Hillsboro’s Bag & Baggage, were more willing to sometimes venture beyond the familiar. Otherwise, West Side shows by Oregon playwrights, much less West Side writers, have been rare in the 21st century.

But Clark, who serves as Spark Plug’s producing artistic director and board president, thinks that conservative, conventional approach is starting to change.

“Part of it is the shift we’ve been seeing in the theater-going audience, who now have grown up with Netflix and HBO” and other relatively sophisticated offerings, she explains. That’s “lowered the barrier for what stories people are open to seeing. In the old days we had mostly sitcoms and other formula shows. Now we have audiences watching TV at home and being more open to the kind of stories those prestige TV shows put in front of them. Theater audiences might be more willing to engage with a story that challenges their worldviews or stretches their perspectives. So even some theaters working with traditional audiences will be able to get a portion of their audience to say they can trust us to take a chance on some newer material.”

Beaverton Bound

Spark Plug has been building that trust since Clark started it in 2023. With Beaverton Civic Theater increasingly leaning into family-friendly programming for kids and schools, she created Spark Plug with founding board members Les Ico and Alex Woodard, just to be able stage Jordan Harrison’s Futura, a play she (and I) had seen during its developmental phase in a production at Portland Center Stage’s Just Add Water festival in 2011, on a visit to Portland before deciding to move here. 

They found a back-room space at Ki Coffee that held only 22 souls, had to be vacated after each performance, and resided in a shopping strip amid a tangle of noisy stroads — the kind of pedestrian- and community-unfriendly spot that has ever posed challenges for anyone trying to build an arts scene in that urban planning challenged city. (Fortunately, that’s starting to change with the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts and other recent initiatives.) 

“One of the major challenges for startup art groups is finding performance space that is both affordable and serves the special needs of theater,” Clark explains. “And it was the last piece we needed to know we could realistically make the project happen.”

Despite the obstacles, the intimate, creatively designed production found an enthusiastic audience, so much so that she couldn’t accommodate everyone who wanted to see it. Clearly, the demand for forward-looking theater in Beaverton was real, even for a little-known play from an unknown company in a difficult-to-find non-theater space. 

“It was really cool to see that there are other people out there in the community who are hungry for those stories too,” she says, “and willing to take those risks” to experience them.

After that first production, the question she got most often was: What are you doing next? 

Clark hadn’t really planned for a next. She thought: “Oh no, I guess we better figure out what’s next!” The one-off production became an ongoing company. Spark Plug has sold out all its shows, all contemporary dramas and comedies, since then.

“Like many creative endeavors, it started with the seed of urgency to ‘make a thing’ and then finding people to jump into to the deep end with you, collecting other talented artists you admire to bring the idea to life — and in doing so, find something special that grows beyond yourself,” Clark recalls. “We’re so inspired that it’s resonating with our community — creators and audience members — as well.”

Expanding Vision

After establishing an audience for more artistically ambitious contemporary programming, Spark Plug raised its sights even higher by nourishing work by local playwrights. The Fertile Ground Festival, dedicated to locavore theater, offered an ideal opportunity to both spread the word about the company beyond its Beaverton base, and to produce homegrown plays. It’s one of the many ways the valuable festival has expanded opportunities for local creators. 

Last year’s festival included Spark Plug’s production of Looking for Light, a trio of new short plays by local playwright James Van Eaton. Clark says that unlike its previous audience, which came almost entirely from the West Side, many of the addresses given for ticket holders for this year’s shows come from other parts of the Portland metro region, which she attributes in part to the exposure the company gained beyond its Beaverton base by participating in the festival. (It’s a reversal of the perennial pattern of West Side arts lovers heading east to catch a show.) The company is actively seeking scripts from local playwrights for future Fertile Ground and other readings and stagings.

Spark Plug has earned an audience for the company’s ambitious vision, not just its shows, leading to what she called “the best compliment I’ve gotten so far” for the young company. “I knew nothing about this show,” an audience member told her after a performance, “but I knew I could trust that if I saw it here, I could leave with a quality performance that makes me think.”

That leads to the next questions: Is that growing audience too big for a coffeehouse? As she announces in her curtain speech before each performance, Clark, who’s directed or acted in some Spark Plug productions, deeply appreciates the opportunity Ki Coffee has provided from the outset.

“The partnership is great but difficult, because they have a thriving business” that can’t always accommodate a theater production and rehearsals, she admits. And as anyone who’s ever had to strike a set at the end of a production knows, it’s inconvenient — to say the least — to have to pack in a set and costumes and props before each performance, and load it all up and pack it in a trailer at the end of every performance — then repeat the process the next day and weekend. 

 Should Spark Plug seek a larger, dedicated performance space? The energetic, ever-ebullient Clark sees its current set up as “a feature, not a bug.” On one hand, its current compact setting makes it easier for the company to take artistic risks. 

“Being small, our overhead expenses are much lower,” Clark says. “We don’t need to fill 100 seats for three performances each over six weekends. We just need to fill 22 seats” for each of six performances. That frees them from having to program lower-common-denominator shows that would draw the bigger crowds needed to cover the expenses of a larger space, where, Clark has been told, to pay the bills, directors will “do three shows for the big audience, and one for us.” 

As it stands now, “We say, ‘Let’s do all of them for us!’” she continues. “We’re able to put the stories the artists want to engage with first, knowing that we can trust that the core audience we’ve built is willing to engage with them, too. They want performances that push them and stretch them. That allows us to take on those kinds of scripts.”

On the other hand, the cramped space and limited accessibility restrict the scope and nature of the shows Spark Plug can stage, the size of the audience, and maybe eventually its ability to keep its audience engaged.

“As much as we love Ki and their support of us, it would be nice not to load in and out of a U-Haul for every single performance!” Clark confesses. So, as its audience and ambition grow, Spark Plug is keeping its options open. Last year, a potential opportunity arose to move into a larger space, but it wound up not panning out. 

“Staying small and not compromising the intimate black-box experience is important to us, though we do have some big dreams that will allow us to root deeper (instead of wider) as we grow,” Clark explains. “So for now, we’re staying small and committed to growing organically.” 

They’re still looking for permanent space, but either way, Spark Plug is committed to trying to stay in Beaverton, which lacks a theater company devoted to contemporary and homegrown plays. 

“I believe there’s a new arts scene that’s happening here that’s something special,” Clark told ArtsWatch. “We’re invested in growing here in Beaverton, if they’ll have us and we can find the right location. I want to stay small — maybe up to 50 seats? — to help keep the intimate nature of our productions, and it would be amazing if the space offered us flexible seating options, like doing pieces in the round, thrust, or proscenium as the project dictates.”

Whatever move Spark Plug makes, Clark hopes it benefits not just the company but also the community that spawned it, whose sprawly environs make it desperate for the kind of arts experiences that can bring its scattered denizens together.  

“In a perfect world, we could find a space where we’re able to contribute to our local community like HART and Bag & Baggage have done in Hillsboro, where patrons can go out after a show and support local businesses by giving [audience members] something else to do in the area,” Clark says. “It creates a great community feeling when you have arts organizations as the core of building community.”

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Spark Plug’s next production, A Sleeping Country, opens May 16 at Ki Coffee, 4655 S.W. Griffith Drive #160, Beaverton. Tickets here.