In his last week as a New Yorker, while waiting for the A-train to speed him home to uptown Manhattan, Scott Yarbrough found himself contemplating the subway tracks. A metaphor was taking shape in his mind, epitomizing his ambitions for the theater company he hoped to found on the West Coast. On the track bed lay the twin set of rails that conduct the train toward its destination, and alongside them —

“The third rail is the rail that provides power to the train,” Yarbrough explains. “It’s very dangerous. That sort of danger interested me.”

So, too, did the properties of motion, propulsion, and transportation that the tracks brought to mind, mirroring the type of work he aspired to put onstage.

The year was 2002, and soon after Yarbrough would relocate to Portland with his then-fiancée, Stephanie Gaslin. Gaslin, an actor, dialect coach, and born-and-bred Portlander, had long dreamed of returning to her hometown, a desire that harmonized with the couple’s shared goal of launching their own theater company.

Through a series of serendipitous encounters with some fellow East Coast transplants, the two would assemble a stable of collaborators that included actors Tim True, Valerie Stevens, and Michael O’Connell, as well as scenic designer Rachel Brodkey. And over the next three years, the six artists would lay the groundwork for Third Rail Repertory Theatre, which kicks off its 20th anniversary season on Friday, November 7.

“I think if any of us had said that the company would still be running twenty years later, our heads would have fallen off,” says Yarbrough, Third Rail’s founding artistic director.

His incredulity can surely be forgiven when one considers the roster of Portland theater companies Third Rail has managed to outlive. A non-exhaustive list: Action/Adventure. Confrontation Theatre. Badass Theatre. Impact Theatre. Insight Out. Jewish Theatre Collaborative. Portland Rep. Defunkt. Complete Works Project. Playwrights West. Liminal. Vertigo. Anon It Moves. String House. Stark Raving Theatre. Tears of Joy. Re-Theatre. Classic Greek Theatre of Oregon. Quintessence. Portland Civic Theatre. New Rose. The Other Side Theatre. Tygre’s Heart Shakespeare Company. The Reading Parlor. Circle Theatre Project. Storefront Theatre. Cygnet Productions. The Musical Theatre Company. Staged! Post5.

Some were casualties of the pandemic. Others were hobbled by poor management, financial turmoil, or the loss of a brick-and-mortar venue. Still others simply ran their course, their creators closing shop in response to transforming artistic interests or shifting personal priorities.

By having endured for twenty years, Third Rail is a kind of temporal anomaly, persevering through worsening economic conditions and leadership changes, dodging the pitfalls of mission drift and administrative burnout common in the nonprofit world, and averting the deal-killing relational ruptures that can occur in rooms full of passionate, sensitive people — theater people, in other words.

“Part of that comes from the fact that we worked together to figure out how to create a sustaining company for two years before we ever got a show up,” Yarbrough explains. “‘What is doable? What makes sense with our artistic sensibilities?’ A lot of work went into the first production, not only in and of itself, but into the organization.”

Yarbrough describes the founding company’s coming-together as “all these weird little fingers sort of out into the world.” He then goes on to narrate a sequence of missed connections so convoluted that it wouldn’t appear out of place on a police procedural investigation board, a web of red string crisscrossing half a dozen glossy headshots:

Tim True and Stephanie Gaslin both attended Grant High School, and later Southern Oregon University, but at different times. Yarbrough and True went to grad school at Ohio University, where Rachel Brodkey earned her BFA before moving to New York. True and Michael O’Connell lived in New York at the same time, but didn’t know each other.

Simultaneously, Gaslin worked at New York’s Cafe Fiorello, where she met O’Connell, the two hitting it off upon discovering they were both native Portlanders. Valerie Stevens also lived in New York for a time, but never connected with the others before returning to Portland, where she and True would meet while working at Artists Rep, and where True and O’Connell would meet during a different production.

(Still following along?)

After almost a decade in which the six artists cut not-quite-intersecting paths around the country, they eventually landed back in Portland within a year of each other. There was a synergy among them, and Yarbrough and Gaslin felt that it jibed with their vision for a company. They were all of a similar vintage, with similar training, and either new or newly returned to the city of Portland. As long as they were here, getting their feet wet together, why not make something new?

Well, for one thing…

“We were all probably older than we had any right to be in terms of starting a company,” Yarbrough is quick to acknowledge. “That takes a lot of energy and is really a young person’s game.”

But whatever the six founders may have lacked in twenty-something verve, they balanced with years of professional experience in regional and touring theater, on Broadway, on Off-Broadway, on Off-Off Broadway, in television, and in teaching — not to mention a surplus of formal education. Among them they boasted a combined eleven degrees, all from well-respected institutions.

As far as their credentials were concerned, “We were kinda loaded for bear,” Yarbrough says. “We had all been to graduate training programs — the actors in acting, myself in directing. Not that that ever actually makes any actor better than another actor, but I think that was a key component [of the company’s vision]. We all knew that we wanted to have as strong a training background as we could.”

This shared emphasis on higher education would, the founders hoped, be reflected in Third Rail’s artistic standards, and in the versatility of performance styles in their joint repertoire.

The thoughtful, deliberative process by which Yarbrough and company began building Third Rail’s foundation was another obvious credit to the group’s collective wisdom. They convened for the first time in the spring of 2003, gathering at Yarbrough and Gaslin’s house for what would become a year of weekly summits. Here, the founders would discuss their aspirations for the company, identify their shared artistic values, and figure out what sort of offering could make them stand out against Portland’s theatrical landscape.

In the early 2000s, Yarbrough recalls, the city’s major players were Portland Center Stage — then housed in downtown’s Newmark and Winningstad theaters — and Artists Rep, which had only recently moved into its Southwest Alder Street location from a 110-seat black box at the YWCA. By then, he says, Artists Rep had grown to fill the vacuum left by Portland Rep (once the second-largest company in town), which shuttered in 1998 but still loomed large in communal memory.

There was also an array of smaller but equally stalwart companies including Imago, PassinArt, Triangle Productions, Portland Actors Ensemble, and Milagro, plus relative newcomers such as Profile and CoHo that were already making a mark. How would Third Rail establish itself in contrast to all these other institutional mainstays?

The right material would be key.

The six founders knew that their first play would serve a dual purpose as both a proving ground for their ensemble cohesion, and as a declaration of artistic intent — a flag planted on Portland’s theatrical frontier announcing who they were and where their values were anchored. Together, they determined that the ideal vehicle for their debut was Craig Wright‘s Recent Tragic Events, which Yarbrough describes as “stylistically kind of an existential romantic comedy” … about September 11th.

First produced in 2003 by the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington D.C., the play is set in Minneapolis on the night of September 12th, 2001. It focuses on Waverly, who prepares for a blind date while awaiting news of her missing twin sister, presumed dead in Manhattan after the attacks on the World Trade Center.

As an expression of Third Rail’s fledgling mission, Recent Tragic Events checked the founders’ every box. It was highly theatrical, blending the real and surreal in surprising ways. It contained exciting, challenging roles for every company member, fulfilling their requirements of “artist-centric” work and self-determination in casting. It had a vitality, almost an aggression, to its performance style that the company felt would help distinguish them. And the subject matter flirted with that sense of danger that so enthralled Yarbrough back in New York.

“At the time it felt pretty radical to try and address [September 11th] in art,” says Yarbrough, “especially when quite a bit of it plays as a comedy.”

The cast featured Stephanie Gaslin as Waverly, Tim True as Andrew, Michael O’Connell as John, and Valerie Stevens as Nancy. John Steinkamp was enlisted to play a fifth role — the Stage Manager — and subsequently invited to join the company. Yarbrough directed, with Drew Flint and Rachel Brodkey covering sound and scenic design respectively.

In February of 2005, Recent Tragic Events opened at CoHo Theatre, where, thanks to word-of-mouth, it quickly sold out four weeks of its six-week run. The play received glowing coverage in The Oregonian, Willamette Week, and the Portland Mercury. “God love the fringe,” wrote reviewer Justin Wescoat Sanders, “but we also need tightly oiled professional machines like this one if Portland is ever to move to another level in the dramatic arts.”

Third Rail’s current artistic director, Maureen Porter, echoes his sentiments.

“No one in Portland at the time was doing the kind of work this group was doing,” she says. “There was a palpable energy, momentum, and clarity of vision surrounding Third Rail. The show itself was entertaining, surprising, wickedly smart, and deeply moving, and the production was excellent. Wright was asking big questions and then contending with them through finely drawn characters and rich relationships. It was, and is, very good writing, a hallmark of Third Rail plays.”

Porter and her husband, the late Philip Cuomo, were among Third Rail’s earliest supporters, and their endorsement no doubt helped to fortify the company’s burgeoning reputation, which was consolidated a few months later at the 2005 Drammy theater awards. There, Recent Tragic Events took home five awards: one for sound design, two for acting, one for direction, and one for overall production.

“That sort of validated our instinct that the kind of work we were interested in, if executed well, could find an audience,” Yarbrough says. This institutional recognition made it possible for Third Rail to procure foundation funding, ensuring its growth over the next several seasons.

“That production was instrumental in the company being able to form a solid footprint very quickly in the arts community,” says Yarbrough. “That’s one of the reasons I love the play so much: It provided an opportunity for us to just get in and do the work the way we wanted to, and it allowed us to find that audience.”

Maureen Porter so wholeheartedly shares Yarbrough’s love of the play that when it came time to program Third Rail’s twentieth anniversary season, a remount seemed like a fitting commemoration. “I knew it was essential that we find meaningful ways to honor our founders and legacy,” she explains. Her original plan was to revisit some of Third Rail’s most iconic productions through a series of readings that featured the shows’ original casts. But after re-reading Recent Tragic Events, that plan transformed.

“Getting Scott onboard [to direct] sealed the deal,” she says. Thus, Recent Tragic Events secured itself a second full-scale production, which opens November 7 at CoHo Theatre and continues through November 23.

Here I’ll admit to some questions about the remount. September 11th does, of course, still reverberate through all the corridors of contemporary American life. It’s recognizable in the permanent installation of security theater in our airports, in the rise of mass surveillance under the Patriot Act, in the trauma inflicted on migrant families and marginalized communities by Department of Homeland Security and its component agency ICE — to say nothing of its lasting influence on our foreign policy in the Middle East and abroad. But how does a play about the World Trade Center attacks, written in their immediate aftermath, hold up in 2025?

“Interestingly enough, I don’t think the play feels as dated as it feels possibly naive, knowing what we know now,” says Yarbrough. “And yet the things the characters are chewing on — it takes place on September 12th, when the world seemed like it had just turned upside down — that feeling is still very present today. We don’t know where are we going, how are we going to land there.”

Yarbrough has located a touchstone in a familiar sense of dislocation. There’s an eerie continuity between the post-911 and post-pandemic zeitgeists — the collective uncertainty, the upending of norms, the gradual realization that the world as we knew it has disappeared — and his updated direction serves to underscore this idea. “Rather than looking at the play in the context of that day,” he says, the remount explores how “the events of that day are still in play in ways that we don’t think about anymore. We’re living on a trajectory versus a moment.”

When asked what this means in terms of staging, Yarbrough is circumspect. He declines to share any details that might betray a plot twist, but he does offer this: “There’s an element that comes in at the very end that ties everything the characters are feeling into a more existential, universal context.”

This blending of present and past is likewise reflected in the cast and crew. The remount’s creative team includes artists from every stage of Third Rail’s lifespan, including two former members of its mentorship program, its original director, and one of its original cast members (Stephanie Gaslin, who in this iteration plays the Stage Manager).

Twenty years down the line, Yarbrough isn’t looking to break new ground in Portland theater. His past self already handled that part of the job for him. In 2025, his ambitions are simpler:

“I just hope if folks come to see this and haven’t been to the theater in a while, it makes them want to return.”

***

• Third Rail Repertory‘s 20th-anniversary production of Recent Tragic Events opens Friday, Nov. 7, and continues through Nov. 23 at CoHo Theatre,  2257 N.W. Raleigh St., Portland.
• Ticket and schedule information here.
• Playwright Craig Wright will be on hand for a talkback following the Saturday, Nov. 8, performance.
• Third Rail, Then and Now: A conversation with the company’s founding members about Third Rail’s history and continuing impact, will follow the Sunday, Nov. 9, performance.