Weekend reviews: 'Jack Goes Boating,' Northwest Dance Project, Linda Austin at Disjecta

By Barry Johnson

This was one of those weeks when the events of the outside world -- the drama with nuclear reactors in Japan, the institution of a no-flight zone in Libya -- creep into our theaters, galleries and concert halls. Sometimes a play is so involving that it acts as a momentary escape from international news, and that's how Artists Repertory Theatre's production of Jack Goes Boating worked for me. Not that the relationship issues at stake in Bob Glaudinin's romantic comedy aren't important themselves: We know from experience that our personal lives go on regardless of the events in Japan or Libya, and that those events go hardest on the personal lives on people a lot like us. But still, this is an indirect connection.

Other times, we may be watching a dance performance, as I did Saturday night, and experience a sudden mental newsreel -- of file footage of Tomahawk missiles or fresh video from the one of the tsunami's many disaster areas. In this case, I think the dance itself, Sarah Slipper's Black Ink for Northwest Dance Project, inspired that jolt of memory.

Those were two of the shows I saw this weekend. The third was an improvisation by Linda Austin set on and around and even under an installation by Kurt Burkheimer at Disjecta, an art space in the Kenton neighborhood. It took me on an entirely different course altogether, as Austin's work often does.

Theater review: "Superior Donuts" is not a sitcom snack

Bill Geisslinger and Vin Shambry/Photo: Owen Carey

By Barry Johnson

Artists Repertory Theatre has extended its run of Tracy Letts's Superior Donuts through February 12, four more performances, which isn't surprising. A good comedy in January in Portland is hard to pass up.  Portland Center Stage is running Constance Congdon's raucous version of Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid now, too, more proof of Montesquieu's contention that climate is destiny and that we ignore it at our peril.

Although I've already characterized Superior Donuts as "a good comedy," I want to argue against the prevalent descriptions of the play by the nation's critics. Just about all of them, from Chicago and New York to D.C. and the Bay Area, mentioned sitcoms when describing the comedy.  They didn't use "sitcom" as a pejorative, either, as it once was when we described stage comedies. Not at all. Because except for a few dissenters (The Village Voice, for example, the New Yorker), the critical reception to the play has been kind.

The reviewers didn't just leave it at "sitcom," either. Some of them mentioned Norman Lear's '70s sitcoms (All in the Family, Maude) specifically. A couple brought up Chico and the Man. And from those hints, you might be able to figure out a lot about Superior Donuts. It has a "social" edge to it; it makes fun of a certain sort of racial stereotyping; a clash of generations is involved. And something else: It's all going to be all right in the end. Because "sitcom" still means "comfortable" and "familiar" along with "funny."

Portland theater: Panel discussion time for "Long Day's Journey Into Night"

William Hurt and Robyn Nevin/"Long Day's Journey Into Night"

By Barry Johnson

After I've seen a play that's gone especially well, as "Long Day's Journey Into Night" has done, I'm especially interested in "What happened?".  I've seen too many productions in which a bunch of good actors, a good director and a good script get together and nothing much good happens onstage.

So, when the peripatetic Tim DuRoche sat down last night to lightly emcee a conversation between the director of the show, Andrew Upton, and Allen Nause, his co-producer and artistic director of Artists Repertory Theatre, I took full advantage -- and I wasn't disappointed.

The panel was seated on the stage of ART's Morrison theater, with a drum kit and keyboards as a backdrop. (I was hoping that drummer DuRoche might flourish a brace of drum sticks and attack those drums in a moment of wild abandon, but he didn't).  Upton is unprepossessing -- soft, a little nebbish-y looking, with thinning hair and an expressive face and voice. He's smart, you can tell, and I have the feeling he couldn't be more determined or dedicated to a play -- text, actors, process -- once he takes it on, an intensity moderated by compassion. But I am merely speculating here.  He and Nause are a congenial fit, actually, because I'd use some of the same words to describe Allen -- smart, determined, compassionate, expressive, unprepossessing.

First, maybe you want to know how the show came together in the first place?

Well, it started on the set of this summer's "Robin Hood," during which Cate Blanchett (Upton's wife, they have three sons) and William Hurt struck up a friendship. They even went to the theater together, the three of them, and after a dismal production of "A Winter's Tale" (see? good actors/director/script, less than brilliant results), Hurt asked Blanchett why she'd avoided the "LA thing" for "something a good deal harder, as we all know," Upton said. Which also describes Hurt and his continuing passion for theater, I suppose.

Upton and Blanchett had already chosen "Long Day's Journey Into Night" for their next season at the Sydney Theatre Company, and after the ride back from "A Winter's Tale," they started pondering Hurt in the role of Tyrone, the family patriarch. ("Theater, good or bad, brings you together," Upton quipped -- which he does on occasion, quip, I mean.)

When Upton later asked Hurt if he'd consider the role, Hurt immediately said yes, because he'd been thinking about the play ever since acting in it at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the 1970s -- with Allen Nause -- which Upton didn't know at the time. And when Upton later asked him if he could recommend a possible theatrical partner in America, Hurt suggested Artists Rep, with whom he's had two previous successful encounters.

We were in!