“Theater is dead.” 

This mantra, or some version of it, has been circulating throughout the nationwide theater community for at least as long as I’ve been a theater artist, and possibly much longer. For years, industry professionals have warned that the business model of regional theater, in particular, was unsustainable.

Nobody seems to know an easy way to fix it. Nationally and in Portland, the vast majority of money and support comes from a generation that is slowly disappearing, and the handful of donors left are tapped out. 

The pandemic hit theater harder than every other medium, even live music, and theater has taken much longer to bounce back. In the age of TikTok, YouTube and streaming channels, theater can barely tread water. And for an industry largely existing in the nonprofit sector, the recent sturm und drang of the political climate does not bode well.

But theater has survived the Black Plague, the Spanish Flu and two world wars, and will no doubt come out the other side this time as well. 

So, as a theater artist, I’m not necessarily concerned that theater will die any time soon. How it is made, the form it takes, whose stories it tells and to whom, these things and others might change, but theater will still be here. 

The question becomes, who is willing and able to bring theater into the future? It’s an unanswerable question. I won’t be trying to answer it on a global or even national level. I’m primarily talking about our corner of the Pacific Northwest. 

I’ve put together a list of seven-up and-coming theater artists who I feel will have a lasting impact on theater here in greater Portland – our taste-shapers of the future. This is an entirely unscientific and by no means comprehensive list. I avoided folks I’ve written about in the past, such as Lo Steele and Ken Yoshikawa. I didn’t try to be “fair” at all. There’s no math to this. Just who came up in my mind. 

Two of my three favorite shows of the year (along with Salt and Sage’s Henry V) were Corrib Theatre’s From a Hole in the Ground, for its breathtaking, shapeshifting theatricality, and Annabel Cantor’s production of Shopping and Fucking, for its raw, emotional genuineness and the audacious use of its found space. These shows breathed new life into me as a practitioner of the art, and raised the bar for the scene in general. 

I can think of another seven-to-twenty-seven young artists I should talk about, the Netty McKenzies, Leiana Petlewskis and Max Bernsohns of the world. And writers such as Sara Jean Accuardi and Dylan Hankins. Then I think I should do another such list made up solely of stage managers and set, lighting, sound and costume designers. Yes, all that should happen — in the future. But for now … here are seven artists who have moved me, impressed me, inspired, dazzled, galvanized and most of all, given me hope for the future of theater in Portland, Oregon. 

Ashlee Radney

“Ashlee is an incandescent performer; she’s exceptionally talented, her imaginative work makes every scene she is in more interesting and real. The sky’s the limit for Ashlee, she’s ready for Broadway, she’s ready for the West End, we are so extraordinarily lucky she chose Portland as an artistic home, and we get to witness her work.”  — Asae Dean, Artistic Director, Salt and Sage 

Ashley Radney, a Colorado native, did theater in high school but didn’t see herself as an actor. “I never acted,” says Radney. “I did behind the scenes stuff. Like, I did makeup. My dad was my biggest supporter, and he kept telling me, ‘Why don’t you audition?’ Which in my brain, that was something that didn’t seem real to me. I was always like, ‘Nooo…’

But he persuaded her, and the first play she did in high school was West Side Story. Her father came to every performance. After high school, Radney first went to Arizona State University. She kept switching majors until she finally returned to theater, but it was too late. “I hated Arizona. I was failing. I went home. I watched a lot of Portlandia. And that’s why I decided to move to Portland. I was like, ‘If it’s really as silly and weird as they’re showing it, I want to check that out.’”

She entered Portland State University to study theater, and theater prof Richard Wattenberg recognized her talent and pushed her along. Then 2020 happened, which for Radney, was particularly devastating. Her beloved father, her biggest believer, passed away in August of that year. “I love my dad so much,” she says. “George Radney. The best father in the whole entire world. My biggest fan.”

At first, Radney tried to throw herself immediately back into life, but it was too much. “I tried to go back to school that fall. And I was like, ‘What am I doing? I don’t want to be here. This is soulless.’”

Veteran actor Gretchen Corbett had seen Radney’s work at PSU and invited her to try out for Portland Playhouse’s apprenticeship program; she even worked with Radney on her audition. “And they wait-listed me, first of all!” Radney laughs. “I was like, ‘Well, whatever.’ And then I got in. I guess, thanks to whoever decided to turn it down.

“It was really cool doing the apprenticeship,” says Radney. “School theater was very like, ‘This is how you’re going to go about things. And then when I did the apprenticeship I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, there are a lot of ways to make art in theater.’ 

Since her apprenticeship, Radney has performed one of the greatest parts in the English language: “At school, the roles I was getting cast in, I was somebody’s mom, I was a grandma. When Asae offered me Juliet, I was like, ‘What? I could really be Juliet?’” to the opposite end of the spectrum. “Like, when I did Shopping and Fucking – to have it in a small little retail store space and to work with a young director who had such a clear vision – it reminded me of a quote I got from someone, ‘I will not let my schooling get in the way of my education.’”

Radney is also a playwright, and is  working on an ode to her father, Cranberry Peaches. “It’s about this character who’s getting ready to make their big debut but then she starts telling herself that she’s not ready to do this and somehow she finds herself in a whole other world. Essentially, I want the story to be about what I went through after my dad passed.” This is a challenge Radney is still working through in her real life. Even though she’s raised her profile in the Portland theater community, she hasn’t put her scripts out there yet. “I always think ‘That’s not how I present myself. Who’s going to take me seriously?’” Of course, that sounds suspiciously like how she began her journey as an actor. 

Orlando Cabrera

“I would characterize Orlando’s work as being rooted in curiosity, observation, experimentation, and presence. They are bold and deeply thoughtful. As a director I loved working with him and hope I’m lucky enough to act alongside them one day.”  – Anna Cantor, actor/director/deviser

Orlando Cabrera comes from a working-class family, the oldest of six children, and hails from Manteca, California. “It means ‘lard.’ A very apt description for that city,” says Cabrera. “Dad works at a tree nursery, my brother’s a mechanic; he works on cars. I worked with my dad at a tree nursery. I did warehouse work for a while.” 

Cabrera was also an apprentice with Portland Playhouse, in the same class as Ashlee Radney. Like Radney, Cabrera discovered theater in high school, and, perhaps, took it even less seriously than she did at first, getting into his first theater class, as he says, “for shits and giggles.” But an unexpected thing happened: He fell in love with the stage. 

That theater class made frequent week-long field trips to Ashland, Oregon,home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. When Cabrera was coming out of high school, those field trips solidified Southern Oregon University as a possibility for a next step. SOU has a long history of supplying Portland with quality theater artists. Cabrera applied and got in. “My professor, Jackie Apodaca, sent us the link to apply for Portland Playhouse apprenticeship,” Cabrera says. “Didn’t get in the first time (a recurring theme) than a couple of weeks later they were like, ‘Hey, we want you in this program.’”

That was a luminous apprenticeship class, producing both Cabrera and Radney, as well as exciting talent like Anthony Michael Shepard, one of Cabrera’s best friends, and Jasmyn Tilford, both of whom now live in New York, where Cabrera plans to go. 

“Doing the Playhouse apprenticeship has afforded me so many great opportunities,” says Cabrera. Since leaving the Playhouse, Cabrera has hit the ground running, performing lead parts in Trade at Corrib Theatre, Blood Wedding at Shaking the Tree, and then Annabel Cantor’s exposed, raw-wound production of Shopping and Fucking. 

When Cabrera first read the latter, he was not entirely sure what he was getting himself into. “On the first read,” he says, “I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’” But in the end, the play and the role of impulsive and possibly psychopathic Robbie drove him to new heights. 

“I’m big on trying to find the very human bare bones of my characters,” says Carbrera. “Working with those people in that space – I felt very comfortable being able to let go a little bit more. Having that rapport with Ashlee Radney, who did the apprenticeship with me, really helped. I think tackling Robbie and drawing inspiration from where I saw him and where he was coming from, helped me feel like I didn’t have to make Orlando-choices, if that makes sense. I found such a great love and care for the script.” 

A male prostitute in Trade. The doomed Leonardo in Blood Wedding. The irretrievably broken Robbie in Shopping and Fucking. What is it that directors see in Orlando Cabrera, that he keeps being cast in these dark roles?

“I wear my heart on my sleeve,” says Cabrera. “It gives an indication of the emotional places I’m willing to go. There’s an interesting opposition when you meet somebody who’s nice in real life but can play a real asshole or vice versa.”

Though this piece is primarily about young artists making an impact on Portland in ensuing years, Cabrera is in a New York state of mind. His plan is to move there next November. “I have a lot of friends who were on my BFA track with me [at SOU] who are living in New York, too. Having people on the ground is awesome.”

Joellen Sweeney

“Joellen is a fierce, multitalented artist who works holistically. Whether she’s working as an actor, director, musician, vocalist, or writer, her work builds exquisite detail into a theatrical piece that serves its higher, most profound purpose.”  – Holly Griffith, artistic director of Corrib Theatre, director of From a Hole in the Ground

You can’t get much more “Portland-based” than Joellen Sweeney. She grew up in the southeast section of town, went to Cleveland High School, her father was a professor in communication studies and rhetoric at Marylhurst University, her mother worked in collections at Portland State. Her one brief foray out of state was to the University of Washington, to get her MFA after doing her undergrad at Willamette University. “I really love being close to my family,” says Sweeney. “I love the nature here. It’s hard for me to imagine living anywhere that doesn’t have access to the landscapes that we have. I feel fortunate to do the work that I want to do and have access to the beach and the mountains and, and, and…” There was a brief moment when she wondered if her life might be happening somewhere else, but then she thought, “Nah, I’m working here.”

Sweeney is a dominant force both as a theater artist and a musician, but she doesn’t see much space between the two. “I came to them both at the same time. Joined a choir in third grade. I was in one of the Missoula Children’s Theatre touring productions that came to town in the summer. It combined so much of what I like. I loved getting to dress up. I loved being on a team. And I loved singing and dancing. Musicals really allow you to do that.” She did both music and theater throughout high school and never felt the need to give up either. “I love both and am grateful to do both.” 

Sweeney speaks movingly about why she loves her home. “I really love being close to my family. I love the nature here. It’s hard for me to imagine living anywhere that doesn’t have access to the landscapes that we have. I feel fortunate to do the work that I want to do and have access to the beach and the mountains and…and…and…” she trails off, laughing. 

The last seals the deal. She works. “That first phase after I got out of undergrad I was just trying to understand what it felt like to make a go of this life,” says Sweeney, “I did the internship with Third Rail and met some people there and it really felt great. I was starting to get into some of the rooms I really wanted to be in and I was starting to find the ceiling of my own skill set, which is what sent me back to school, ultimately.”

Since then Sweeney has been on fire, acting, directing, music directing, designing masks and costumes, at Shaking the Tree, Renegade Opera and Seattle Shakespeare Company, among others. She even teamed up with friends Emily Eisele and Sean Grosshans, who she had met during her Third Rail internship, and started Bedrock Theatre, a company that specializes, as its website declares,  in connecting “audiences to their environment and to each other through immersive storytelling in natural landscapes.” 

She also worked on the remarkable From a Hole in the Ground at Corrib. Her online resume lists Sweeney as her character name and “musician,” which is true, but that word doesn’t seem large enough to encompass what she accomplished in that play. “We came up with the idea that we could create Foley [sound effects] out of gardening implements. We brought gardening equipment from home, and I brought nature stuff from my backyard. And we found a bunch of garbage and recycling at Alberta House, and we would just play with stuff at rehearsal. I had a great time coming up from all the sounds and all the music for that. I got to do some recorded music too, which was really neat.”

Sweeney’s not slowing down any time soon. Next up, she will be directing Silent Sky, a play about the pioneering astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt, at OMSI, in its planetarium, a collaboration with Mount Hood Repertory.

For Sweeney, theater is about connecting. “Theater makes me feel connected to other people and other places,” she says. “When it’s working I feel like I am more integrated with community, like I am more in love with humanity. ​”

Melory Mirashrafi

“Melory’s close, generous observations of character and adventurous imagination bring freshness and vitality to everything she works on. She gives me hope for the future of theater!” – Luan Schooler, Director of Artistic Programming, Artists Repertory Theatre

For Melory Mirashrafi, the journey has been a bit different. She spent her years growing up between Hillsboro and Iran. Her parents are from Tehran, and every summer she would go back to that city. “We’d leave a couple of weeks before school got out,” says Mirashrafi, “and come back a little after school started. I didn’t even know Portland got warm ever until after high school. It made my world bigger. Tehran is a much, much bigger city. Busier, way more people, taxi cabs everywhere. Hillsboro was a little podunk town.” 

Mirashrafi discovered theater in high school but did not immediately make the leap to see it as the track which her life would follow. “I was really down the STEM path,” she says. “Did a lot of robotics programs. My dad is an electrical engineer. We did lots of tinkering with motherboards at home.” Perhaps the artistic impulse comes from her mother, who Mirashrafi says is “a really talented painter.”)Throughout her later schooling, at Chapman University and Linfield University, Mirashrafi was a biochem and music major. But a connection she’d made back in Hillsboro proved to be life-altering. 

In high school, Mirashrafi had taken part in Bag & Baggage Production’s free-ticket program and participated in workshops with Cassie Greer and Scott Palmer. Palmer reached out to see if she wanted to participate in a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet crossed with the classical Persian poem Layla and Majnun by the great poet Nizami Ganjavi. Layla and Majnun is thought to be one of the possible sources for Shakespeare’s famous romantic tragedy. “I was brought in as part dramaturg, part cultural consultant,” says Mirashrafi, “but they didn’t know what those things were yet, so we just called it assistant director.” The experience changed everything. “I felt I could bring my whole self to the rehearsal room instead of having to fracture out the different parts of who I am. I became a theater major at Linfield with a music degree.”

Mirashrafi graduated from Linfield on a mission. She applied for 27 fellowships and apprenticeships. She spent two months working with the education department of the Young Actors Conservatory at ACT in San Francisco. She did a year in person and a year on Zoom with the Huntington Theatre in Boston. 

“That was when I began to build an understanding of what a new works department is, how commissions work, how to work with playwrights, how to identify what my taste in plays was, what the structure and the flaws of these big theater companies are. Then the pandemic happened and all of the BIPOC staff being furloughed and then the backlash. It was a momentous time to begin my professional career. It gave me a healthy skepticism about the systems in place for producing theater in this country and that,” she said, laughing, “made me perfect for landing at Artists Repertory Theatre.” 

Mirashrafi was the stage director for Adam’s Run with Renegade Opera and directed the late Ernie Lijoi’s God’s Cluster with Fuse Theatre Ensemble. If you’re familiar with Lijoi’s work, you know he had strong opinions on religion. Mirashrafi is Muslim. “I really philosophically believe in working on things I don’t agree with,” she says. “I don’t think I need to morally align with everything that’s happening in a play in order to work on it. It was a good moment for me to put my money where my mouth was. We did that show and it was hard. We got into a lot of discussions, but we’re all still friends.”

Coming up next, Mirashrafi is directing Sapience by Diana Burbano, which is in previews now at Artists Rep and opens March 1. “It’s about a primatologist who’s trying to get an orangutan named Wookie to speak English,” explains Mirashrafi. “But really it’s a piece about communication and miscommunication and the overreliance that we have on the English language when really there are so many different layers of communication that we can also choose to focus on.”

What drives Mirashrafi is the people she works with: “My guiding principle is collaborating with people who inspire me. As much as any one piece of art, I really rely on my collaborators to let my brain generate and for the piece to come to life. I need that sense of connection and collaboration in order to feel creative at all. If I was stuck on a desert island, I don’t know if I’d make anything. I’d just sleep and eat coconuts.” 

Kamilah Bush

“Kamilah Bush is one of the most brilliant artists I have ever met. She is a sponge for knowledge, soaking up all the colors of our culture and turning them into beautiful tapestries that are at once complex systems of thoughts and accessible entertainment. Portland is lucky to have her in our city!”  — Chip Miller, Associate Artistic Director, Portland Center Stage 

Kamilah Bush is the dramaturg and literary manager at Portland Center Stage. She was born in San Antonio, Texas, raised in North Carolina, and came to theater organically. “I was a country kid,” she says, “grew up on a farm. My graduating class was 200. I started doing theater in high school. Everybody had to have a fine arts credit, and I got sorted into the theatre class. It was not a choice. But I fell in love with it immediately and took over the theater department.” 

But, a recurring theme, Bush didn’t see theater as a viable option for life as an adult. “I was going to be an English teacher. I thought, ‘I’ll do theater in the summertime or at night.’” Bush’s college career took her from Western Carolina University to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and from an English and education major, to a theatre education major. There was even a brief, desultory stint as a high school teacher. “I hated it,” she states, matter-of-factly.

Bush escaped when she landed a job at Greensboro’s now-defunct Triad Stage. “I was the artistic assistant at Triad Stage for two seasons,” Bush remembers, laughing. “I was doing dramaturgy and casting and assistant directing and getting coffee and making copies and being there every minute of every day.” She went from there to Asolo Repertory in Florida, a much larger institution: “It was difficult but I learned so much and I worked so hard.” 

Then Bush found herself in a similar job at Two River Theatre in New Jersey. She was there when the job at Portland Center Stage came to her attention. Her plan was to go to grad school and apply for the PCS position just to get experience applying. But she landed the gig. The nearly five years she’d spent interning and apprenticing at different theaters along the East Coast had been her grad school. “I knew I really wanted to work for Marissa (Wolf, PCS’s artistic director)  and Chip,” says Bush. “I was immediately taken by them. They understand the kind of art I want to make. They treat each other with compassion and respect, which is a little hard to come by in some theaters.” 

Bush immediately established herself as a force to be reckoned with, and perhaps more importantly, a person people wanted to work with. “I interface with playwrights trying to get their plays produced. I read between five and ten plays a week,” she says. “If I’m reading that many plays a week, fifty-two weeks a year, I only get to say yes to eight. That is a hard part of my job. I’m also doing the dramaturgical research for each of the shows, I’m making research packets, and I’m sitting in on rehearsals, and all those things.”

Now, Kamilah Bush is stepping into her own as a playwright. Like a lot of writers, she has been writing her entire life. But only recently did she start applying herself to putting her work out in the world. “I listened to a Suzan Lori Parks podcast where she said she wrote a play every day for 365 days and I thought, ‘I can write a ten-minute play every day.’ And by the end of it, I wasn’t writing different plays. I was writing scenes from the same play. That play became Nick and the Prizefighter, which has already had workshop readings at Williamstown Theatre Festival and Manhattan Theatre Workshop. If you go to her website, you’ll see a small platoon of her full-length scripts, one-acts and collaborations, including an adaptation of Hedda Gabler and, coming soon to PCS, an adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest. 

“The Earnest commission was a total accident. We were circling another adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest. But that playwright was not licensing their version of the play. We were like, ‘Oh no!’ We loved the idea of doing an updated version of that play. It made our season sing, and we didn’t want to lose it. And I suggested, ‘Well, we could just get another playwright to write one.’ A few weeks went by, and I got called into the office and it was like, ‘Would you like to do it?’ I believe that my job as literary manager is not to produce myself but to prop up other writers, so I was against the idea. But you get pushed and needled enough and you say yes. And I’m glad I did. I’ve loved writing this play, and I’m excited to share it.”

If it sounds like everything is going right for Kamilah Bush, it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. “Everything we do at PCS we do with great and serious care,” she says. “Sometimes that can cost a lot. Theater is hard. People see the end product and see how fun and exciting it is and say, ‘Your life must be wonderful.’ It is wonderful because I love this, but it is also a very difficult thing to do. The cost of care matters but not more than I love making theater, making it here and with these people.”

Olivia Mathews

“Liv is one of those rare artists who combines risky creativity with deep curiosity and a razor-sharp rigor. She is also committed to cultivating community and uplifts the work of her peers in collaboration as well as being a superfan of their work. She is a gift to Portland and I can’t wait to see what she does next.” – Rebecca Lingafelter, founder and co-artistic director of PETE

For most people, there is no “A-ha!” instance where their life’s path becomes clear. But native Californian Olivia Mathews remembers her lighting-bolt moment very well. Mathews, primarily an athlete in high school, was attending her first day at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College, and was still planning on pursuing the same path. “I actually had a meeting with the track coach to see if I was going to join the team and it was set for the first day of school and my very first class freshman year was Acting 1 with Rebecca Lingafelter and I walked out of that class and I was like, ‘I’m not doing track cuz I have to be around to make some plays.’ She blew my mind with that first class.”

When she left school she took corporate jobs but for her sanity’s sake, took part in Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble’s Institute for Contemporary Performance (ICP). “I was in a full-time position that I hated,” she says. “I did the ICP program, which was like 20 hours a week while working full-time 40 hours a week. I was fully investing myself in working through whatever was making me feel so trapped in my day job. By the time I graduated from ICP I was ready to take a leap of faith.”

That leap led her to teaching with Hand2Mouth and then co-directing The Americans with Cristi Miles for PETE. It was during this period that tragedy befell. Her father, Andre, unexpectedly passed away. “We were in the middle of The Americans when he passed. Headed into tech weekend. And I was headed home for Christmas. Wild time. Very important period in my life.” 

This defining moment led to a blossoming of Mathews’ career. She hooked up with Samantha Van Der Merwe for Shaking the Tree’s Forbidden Fruit. “Samantha was incredible to work with on that piece,” Matthews sys. “She offered me so much trust. I got to devise my own room, which was amazing. I was really proud of what we made together.” 

Mathews then played the Bride in Shaking the Tree’s Blood Wedding. She directed the indefatigable Damaris Webb in Webb’s one-person show Precipice, which she’ll be directing again this spring. And she was sensational in From a Hole in the Ground. 

“I don’t really have a dance background, I have an athletic background,” says Mathews. “Through training with PETE it’s been funneled into some expressiveness that I didn’t even know I had and hadn’t even fully explored until From the Hole in the Ground. ​​It was a perfect storm of world-building, character work and physicality that I didn’t even know I needed until I was already doing it.”  

That sentiment is indicative of Mathews’ career thus far. “One of the reasons I’ve felt like I’ve found a path that is right for me,” she says, “is that these opportunities have found their way to me in a way that makes me feel like, ‘Oh yeah, this is what I’m supposed to be doing with myself.’”

Annabel Cantor

“I think Annabel is an amazing young director, who has many fresh ideas! She really knows how to set the tone for work and makes everyone involved feel like they have emotional stakes when working together. I truly believe she’s going to go far, and I hope to be fortunate enough to work with her again. People will definitely want to keep an eye out for any near future work of hers!” – Ashlee Radney, actor, Romeo and Juliet, Shopping and Fucking, The Event

Annabel Cantor always knew she wanted to make theater. “I was interested in making a show,” she remembers, “before I’d ever seen a show. I was making everybody sit down in a living room and my older sibling would sit on top of a piano with a flashlight and be my follow spot.” Cantor, a Portland native, was nine years old when she decided this was the direction of their life. “I made it the family business,” she says, laughing. “I was a pretty outspoken kid about what I wanted to be doing.”

By the time Cantor was nine, she was a part of the Portland theater scene. “I grew up doing children’s theater. I feel lucky to have grown up in and around a Portland theater renaissance.” That included doing The Little Prince and Far Away with Shaking the Tree. 

Eventually, they needed to do something different from her life in the Rose City and went off to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. At home on breaks, she would take classes with PETE: “I started getting more and more into experimental ways of making theater, and discovering more and more about what I value,” she says. At first, for instance, she hadn’t been particularly enamored of Anne Bogart’s theatre practice, Viewpoints. But the PETE classes filled in the holes in her Sarah Lawrence education and she found that, in fact, Viewpoints was “a method of making that speaks to me.” 

Living in New York was never really in the cards for Cantor. Their last semester in college had to happen over Zoom because of COVID, and they seemed pre-programmed to make work here. 

“I was always planning on coming back to Portland. I don’t see myself as tough enough for New York. In Portland, even though it’s rough out here as well, you can do more with less. I also felt like I had unfinished creative business here. There are people here that I really care about and that I really want to work with that I haven’t worked with. There’s some unexplored territory here.”

Territory which, once she left Sarah Lawrence, Cantor immediately set about exploring. “It’s a strange time to be starting a career in theater,” she says.”It’s a time of crisis. Things are a lot more challenging funding-wise. It’s asking all of us to reframe how we think about things.” 

She worked on Forbidden Fruit at Shaking the Tree. She did PETE’s ICP program. “It was interesting,” she recalls, showing a heretofore undisclosed gift for understatement, “we had to work outside. We had to work in masks. But I think it’s one of those things where structure and boundaries can force creativity to bloom inside of them.” ICP served the dual purpose of teaching her new skills and methodologies as well as introducing Cantor to new, young artists like herself. 

She did Metaverse with Corrib, an intriguing foray into sci-fi. “Why don’t we see science fiction more on stage?” asks Cantor. “Now that we have such advanced technological capabilities why aren’t we letting that carry us into new and exciting genre places? I think science fiction is such an important mode of looking at the world around us. More of that, please.”

And she produced and directed Shopping and Fucking, in an empty storefront in Northwest Portland. “There were a whole lot of reasons to not do that play,” says Cantor, “and to not have it be my first real foray into self-producing. There’s tons of food, there’s blood, there’s fight choreography, there’s intimacy choreography, there’s one too many characters, there are all these things that make it impractical to produce in this climate. All those reasons that were staring me down or telling me not to produce it are why I felt like I needed to do it. It wouldn’t leave me alone.”

Cantor identifies as an actor, deviser and designer, and, interestingly, doesn’t even have director listed on her website. Which sounds like wherever the work takes her, that’s where she’ll be. She is driven by what she calls “a quest for immediacy. Things that force people to be present inside of them, those are the powerful moments of theatre for me, those moments where I feel present and alive. I love the way theater teaches us how to be in conflict with people that we care about. That’s a really necessary thing for the world right now.” 

***

We are living in dangerous times. Theater as we know it (along with everything else) is in a precarious position. I would never put the onus of saving the world on any of these young people. But their intelligence, sensitivity, creativity and passion give me some faith that it, and our industry, are worth saving.