Theater

All the world’s a stage

By Robert von Stein Redick

It’s the rare night of theater that takes you to more than one country: as yet there is no “world theater” genre to match the musical phenomenon. In its stead, we have international drama festivals, such as ones held in Belgrade, Vancouver, and Dublin. Portland may be years away from achieving the critical mass necessary for such prestigious events, but you wouldn’t have known it last Tuesday night, when through a single stage-experience the audience visited Madrid, Tel Aviv, Kampala, and Ireland.

For four years now, Portland Stage Company has hosted an international festival in microcosm. From Away: an Evening of International Playwriting is PSC’s collaborative effort with the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. Now in its 33rd year, the Iowa program brings together writers of world stature, including some who are persecuted for their art and lack the material resources to sustain their work. Some of these are playwrights, and one of their rare excursions from Iowa City is to Portland.

Waiting for them are a dozen or so volunteer actors from the Portland community. This year for only a single day, the actors and playwrights convened at PSC to read and walk through the scripts. The next night on the PSC stage, a crowd of about 50 watched these freshest-of-fresh takes on four new, edgy, and exhilarating plays.

Pigtown conveys a century in the life of Limerick, Ireland, a city dominated by “four plants that turn pigs into sausages,” as author Mike Finn explained. Also an actor, Finn portrayed his own Tommy Cloxen, a luckless midnight suitor of a factory worker who sails at dawn for America.

The scene from In the Dark, by Israeli playwright Motti Lerner, served up a mystery in the form of a prodigal son whose return to Tel Aviv might just be a ruse for trying to steal away his brother’s inheritance, and his girlfriend.

In Martin Rejtman’s hilarious and aptly titled Madrid Sucks, a young Argentinian becomes a kind of Spanish Prisoner — mystified by Iberian culture despite the common language, and to make things infinitely worse, harassed by expatriate Americans.

And in what was surely the largest experiential leap for most of Tuesday’s audience, five local actors portrayed the evening before a coup d’êtat in Uganda.

Rewarding as the plays were, the discussion afterwards was even more so, as the four authors took the stage to share their widely different experiences. Adyeeri Mugarra spoke of Uganda as still recovering from the “literary desert” created by Idi Amin, when “anybody who tried to write anything about the reality of the nation was killed.” But Lerner described a hunger for theater almost beyond belief: when a new play opens, he claims, literally everyone shows up — presidents, Cabinet members, even the heads of the armed forces. Shouting matches about plays break out in parliament.

From Away actually didn’t happen last year, because the Iowa Program briefly ceased to exist. As program curator Shelly Berc told the crowd, the university’s new budget-minded administrators saw no great profit in the program. Months of flaming emails from around the world eventually changed their minds; one hopes the same could have been accomplished with a few hours at Portland Stage Company last Tuesday night.