Creative work that offers audience members a genuine opportunity to sense their connection to marginalized experience calls for uncommonly clear intention and skill from the artists. Two one-person shows playing in Portland afford such opportunities from very different angles, and each displays the requisite intention and skill to engage audiences.

Of course, no show is wholly a one-person show; each of these shows reflect good collective process and work. But being the one person on stage — particularly with themes like these shows explore — is an especially vulnerable undertaking.  One more reason for audiences to show up with especially clear intention, too.

Precipice: re-membering, forgetting, and claiming home

Damaris Webb’s one-person show Precipice: re-membering, forgetting, and claiming home, a production of Third Rail Repertory Theater, mines her own complicated experience as the rare third-generation Black homeowner in the Irvington district of Portland. That house, which her Black grandparents were only able to purchase in the 1950s (navigating around Portland’s racist redlining practices) becomes a primary setting for Webb’s magical realist exploration of the benefits and challenges that come with that legacy.

Personal stories like Webb’s are difficult to tell; one is an expert on one’s own experience but not necessarily on how to find and communicate its larger meaning. Collaborating with writer Chris Gonzales and director Olivia Matthews, Webb wisely takes an indirect approach, metaphorically depicting how she experiences the pressure to sell the house, dancing with her complicated feelings about the privilege of holding that rare generational wealth denied to so many Black families (in Portland and elsewhere), glancing at the meaning invested in the private objects that live in her basement. 

She ruminates while assembling a tent, aware that Black people haven’t experienced the same freedom accessing outdoor spaces that white people experience and describe as open.  She engages thought experiments from inside the tent, and physically experiences the tent’s disassembly. 

Webb’s collaborators assist in bringing the audience along for the journey that Webb wants us to imagine with her.  Alex Meyer’s scenic and prop design helps us move inside and outside the house, the yard, and beyond, and strategically places the props she uses to impart the story. Lighting (Anabel Cantor), sound (Phil Johnson), and video (Akitora Ishii) deepen our experience of presence. And Webb’s performance is physical, playful, as though she is modeling the sort of buoyancy that benefits such contemplative work.

This production has been baking for some time. Webb began in 2023 by taking a series of camping trips around Oregon while also researching at her family home. In March 2024, she became a resident artist at Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center and developed and performed the first iteration of the show with help from director Matthews and writer Gonzales, and then presented the next expanded iteration at the ninth Vanport Mosaic Festival in May of that year. Webb continued her research (including more camping trips) and continued developing the play with her creative partners to bring it to this production, again as part of this year’s Vanport Mosaic Festival, produced by Third Rail Rep at CoHo Theatre. 

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Sharing that progression in press for the show strikes me as good practice at modeling what such work looks like. The quality of intention comes through in the show. I did wonder, seeing the show with a predominantly white audience (as is generally true in Portland), how many folks were internalizing the intersections of Webb’s experience with theirs; I fear that doesn’t happen automatically, and that folks will leave without seeing those intersections. But if audience members come prepared to do their own inner work (the only way to truly honor the efforts of Webb and her collaborators), this show sets the table.

Third Rail’s Precipice: re-membering, forgetting, and claiming home continues through June 1 at CoHo Theatre, 2257 N.W. Raleigh St., Portland. Find ticket and schedule information here.

Chris Grace: As Scarlett Johannson

Chris Grace: as Scarlett Johansson, at Portland Center Stage in a co-production with Boom Arts, takes an entirely different approach, though with just as clear intention. Grace’s way in is through humor — which, in the right hands, can be the best way to guide people past their defenses into difficult territory that they would otherwise avoid. Done well, it looks easy — but it’s anything but easy to do it this well.

Like Webb, Grace is mining his personal experience and, while you’re laughing, he will take you far deeper than you expect. He is a Chinese-American actor best known as Jerry on NBC’s Superstore; more recently, he appeared in Netflix’s The Residence. As a self-described “Asian, queer, and fat” performer — a “triple-threat,” in his terms — one could guess that his performing experience might involve some challenges not faced by, say, someone like Scarlett Johansson, but your thoughts likely would stop there.  Grace gives you a taste of what you hadn’t noticed or looked for.

At the top of his one-hour show, Grace promises to “solve racism” 27 minutes in — but most audience members will get that joke. What he may accomplish instead — easily and without didact — is to help you understand in ways you hadn’t considered when you entered how racism manifests and why that matters — and, if we’re really lucky, you might wonder why you hadn’t seen those things before.

The idea for the show began brewing for Grace when Johansson was cast as a Japanese character in Ghost in the Shell and famously dismissed concerns about that, insisting that, as an actress, she “should be allowed to play any person, tree or animal.” Noticing that that standard isn’t applied to him and other people of color in the same way as to white actors, Grace saw the potential humor in making a move toward reciprocity. If Johansson can play anyone, then of course he can play her!

That bit of humor becomes the vehicle for a lot of laughs and a lot of insights, as Grace plays Johansson playing Grace playing Johansson. Telling her story telling his story telling her story, complete with action moves and questionable choices of roles and songs (for both actors) keeps the audience amused, even when the laughs accompany cringes. It’s consistently funny and, I must say, as one of the few people of color in the audience the night I saw it, I left with some hope that Grace had opened some windows to lasting insight.

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Grace developed the show over a period of years of performing in fringe festivals, and he appears to tweak it for each new venue. He knows he’s in Portland, and grapples with Portland’s image of itself as more awake to these issues than other places. In his impeccably timed, disarmingly deadpan way, Grace may well succeed in loosening the grip of some audience members on that self-perception, which is all to the good. This skilled work deserves an audience.

Chris Grace: As Scarlett Johannson continues through June 22 in the Ellyn Bye Studio at Portland Center Stage, 128 N.W. 11th Ave., Portland. Find ticket and schedule information here.