ON STAGE

More distaff theater for Portland

By Sam Pfeifle

Carolyn Gage has been a force in women’s theater for quite some time now. She is the author of more than 40 plays and four books, her one-woman show The Second Coming of Joan of Arc is currently touring Brazil, and her musical Leading Ladies is close to being performed off-Broadway after a recent reading by New York’s Music in a Box.

And from time to time, she likes to give back to those women interested in theater here in Portland, her home town. In June of 2000, she, along with Cathy Plourde, established the Readers’ Theatre for Women, and as many as 20 women helped to perform Leading Ladies and some new work by Plourde.

Now, Gage has returned from a cross-country tour with a grant from the Haney Foundation in hand to found Cauldron and Labrys Productions, a new women’s theater company. “It’s kind of like a trial balloon,” says Gage, “to see if there’s enough support in the area for this kind of project. The grant makes it feasible as a start-up project.”

On December 1, Cauldron and Labrys will hold auditions for their first production, an innovative piece by Gage called The Anastasia Trials. Not only is it different in being cast entirely with women (a little turnabout on the way things were in theater until somebody finally decided it shouldn’t be illegal for women to act), but, in exploring the way that women betray women, Gage’s piece employs some interesting tactics.

The Anastasia in the title is the very controversial woman who came to light many years after the Russian Tsar Nicholas 2 and his family, which included a very young Anastasia, were murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1917. If the woman who claimed to be Anastasia’s stories were true, then there were at least five women who could have verified her story of surviving her family’s murder, but betrayed her.

Gage’s play puts these five women on trial for their betrayals, and leaves their fates up to the audience.

“Normally, when a lawyer makes a motion in a trial,” explains Gage, “the judge decides whether to accept it or not. In this play, that call goes to the house. There are 12 different points in the play where whether a motion is overruled or not moves the play in a different direction. So, every night, the audience is going to see a different play.”

Women looking to act in the production can show up on Saturday at 341 Cumberland Avenue in Portland between 4 and 6 p.m.

“I’m very excited about doing theater with a population that’s not represented in mainstream theater,” explains Gage about whom she wants in her play. “It’s very restrictive in terms of size, race, appearance, and age. I specialize in non-traditional roles for women.”