Carol Triffle’s “Happyness (The Wrecking Ball)” hits Imago Theatre in a zany burst of song.

The ironic title says it all. Happyness (The Wrecking Ball), the latest musical from Imago Theatre’s co-founder and absurdist auteur Carol Triffle, is a comedy about the housing crisis.

Directed by Triffle and opening May 16, the show features Danny and Anny (frequent Imago collaborators Laura Loy and Anne Sorce), who are getting desperate. Just four blocks away, a wrecking ball is demolishing houses to make room for high-rise condos. Each time a building falls, their dilapidated home shakes, in what Triffle, in a phone interview, calls a funny, scary “Halloween trick. “

Caught in a ripple effect, the two characters are dealing with loneliness, too, because everyone else has fled the neighborhood — plus, it’s getting harder and harder to find food, not to mention that the wrecking ball is swinging closer and closer to their own abode. Feeling helpless, Danny resorts to singing I Want a Gun.

“It’s quite funny – the song – but it’s really awful,” Triffle says, which seems to sum up her deliciously distinctive view behind her work: Embrace the awfulness around us while also having a good laugh at the absurdity.

Her process of making one-of-a-kind shows (her most recent productions were Imago’s 2023 Where’s Bruno?, a paranormal musical about two slackers/rockers; and the 2024 Mission Gibbons, which combined three backpacking ladies with a pair of soothsaying Neanderthals) is as unique as her vision.

No matter how wild the finished plays may be, her subjects usually come straight from current situations. “I force myself to look at the news or read the newspaper, but it just is so hard,” she says. “Then I just know, ‘well, it’s right there looking at you.’ Or it’s right next door to me or somebody I know is going through something.”

That’s when Triffle starts writing until a story starts to emerge:

“For me, it has to provoke me in a way that I’m not comfortable with and am kind of sometimes embarrassed by it when I’m writing, and I think, ‘OK, that’s where it’s going.’ If I’m comfortable with it, it’s probably not going to be that interesting.

“I learned a long time ago, don’t try to write what’s wanting to be heard. Write what bothers you. Then move it around.”

This process of trying things on for size and then changing them is essential to Triffle. “I have to work with people who are OK with that. Some actors, it’s very difficult for them,” she says. “I can’t work with them. I won’t work with them, and they wouldn’t want to work with me.”

As a student of Jacques Lecoq, who emphasized the physical nature of performance, paying special attention to how actors moved through a space, she’s also sensitive to the importance of the set and costumes in creating characters. Because Imago has its own building, she can rehearse on a partially formed set for months, so that the actors aren’t just walking around a room, but feel like they actually live there. “They grew up in the room, they feel the room, they can lay on the bed like ‘this is my bed,’” says Triffle.

Working with artists who share a common approach is key. “I find people that I’ve worked with or I have seen them work or even just been in a room with and have observed how they are, and I think, ‘oh, that would be an interesting person who I could do a character with. Sometimes I think of them and just write from their point of view.”

The cast of Happyness, which includes Kyle Delamarter, who created the videos and wrote the music for the show, are all on Triffle’s wavelength. “You can tell they really put their soul into it,” she says. “Luckily, none of them are prima donnas. It’s so nice to work with people who just like to try stuff.”  

These actors, she points out, have been performing for a long time and excel at what they do, including singing. “They are making it come alive in a way just words can’t do on their own.”

She adds that the same is true for Delamarter’s compositions. “The songs are really catchy,” she says, noting that the music “made my words way better.”

Triffle, who studied set design as well as performance with Lecoq, first conceived of the type of beat-up, falling-down rentals where a college student might live. Going online, she researched houses that had been deconstructed, as well as bombed neighborhoods, which she’s seen in real life.

“Jerry [Mouawad, who founded Imago with Triffle], is Lebanese, and we went to visit his family in Lebanon when it was occupied by Syria. They had a home in the mountains where they were from, and it was just totally bombed out,” Triffle says. “The city had big huge buildings with holes in them. Now they’re just being shot at by another group.”

While folding real-life devastation into Happyness, Triffle, who believes that laughter may be key to saving us all, never loses sight of her sense of humor. “This [story] sounds really depressing, but it’s poignant and funny at the same time. It’s weird.”

Imago, she adds, excels in creating more than just a spectacle that audiences sit and watch. Instead, the artists work to create an experience for the company’s audiences: “I always felt that theater is a big circle from actor to audience and back again, and so when people come here, I feel like they have experienced something with us.”

With Happyness, that experience promises to include the truth about contemporary life viewed through an absurdist lens, and a lot of laughs.

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Happyness (the Wrecking Ball) opens Friday, May 16, and continues through May 31 at Imago Theatre, 17 S.E. Eighth Ave., Portland. Find tickets and schedules here.

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Home again: Damaris Webb reclaims her identity as an Oregonian in her solo show “Precipice: re-membering, forgetting, and claiming home.”

When Damaris Webb was a child, her father worked for Bonneville Power Administration as a land easement specialist and was tasked with talking to white Eastern Oregon ranchers, who were traditionally wary of the federal government, about putting power lines across their land.

In a phone interview, Webb talked about what it’s like to grow up in the “white utopia” of Portland, while attempting to process personal stories like this one.

“To imagine my dad in the ’70s and ’80s – I mean when Mulugeta Seraw was murdered –  and [my dad] would say he would always make sure he got back to the hotel by dark, and every time he left the hotel he would tell someone at the desk where he was going and when he should be back.”

Through conceiving and performing her magical realist solo show Precipice: re-membering, forgetting, and claiming home, a Third Rail Repertory production that opens at CoHo Theatre on May 16, Webb has found a way to explore her rich and complicated heritage. (Webb also recently talked with Dmae Lo Roberts on her Stage & Studio podcast about the play, which was written by Webb and Chris Gonzales, and its performances that are part of this year’s Vanport Mosaic festival.)

Coming from a mixed-race family (Webb’s white mother was from Finland), Webb had two sets of dolls growing up: the Black “Happy” family and the white “Sunshine” family, both of which are still in boxes in the basement of her family’s home in Irvington.

Besides exploring her own identity, Webb says, “It is not lost at all on me what it means to be a third-generation Black homeowner in Irvington. There aren’t that many of us. It’s not lost on me what it means to have accumulated the wealth, to be able to hold onto a property for a period of time. My dad worked for PDC [Portland Development Commission] as a relocation specialist. He moved some of those Black families out of Albina. To hold all of that – the guilt around that even though my dad was doing his job – we got to keep our home.”

At the same time, due to Portland’s racist redlining policies, Webb’s Black grandparents weren’t allowed to buy the family’s property in Irvington until the 1950s, a fact that raises complicated questions for Webb, such as “What am I supposed to do with it? What is the right thing to do? How do I honor it? How do I listen closely?”

As she embarked on her research for Precipice in 2023 and then developed its first iteration in 2024, thanks to an IFCC grant, Webb and friend Chris Gonzalez spent time in her home, talking about the objects in it, the stories behind them, and what they meant to her. In response, Gonzalez took those stories and made poems out of them. When he had to be in New York, Webb and her director, Olivia Mathews, would send him more ideas via videos, extending a conversation that eventually became a script.

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Third Rail Repertory Theatre’s Precipice: re-remembering, forgetting, and claiming home, a Vanport Mosaic festival feature, opens Friday, May 16, and continues through June 1 at CoHo Theater, 2257 N.W. Raleigh St., Portland. Ticket and schedule information here.