Between their lines Affiliate Artists perform what was never meant for the stage BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	An Evening with Monica Wood Presented by Portland Stage Company’s Affiliate Artists, June 2, at 7 p.m. Tickets are pay-what-you-can ($5 suggested). Call (207) 774-0465.

By both necessity and affinity, most actors have an intimate relationship with the written word. It’s most often in collusion with language, after all, that a thespian’s gifts of voice, movement, and portrayal find form. But for many — and, just maybe, for the best — the fervor for words transcends scripts. The finest actors tend to be smart actors, says Daniel Noel, and, more precisely: "They tend to be readers."

Noel, professional actor of 25 years and self-described "book-nut" himself, is the original founder of a three-year-old series that lets actors take the stage with writing that was never meant, necessarily, to leave the page. After several stages of evolution, it is now co-organized by Noel and actor Moira Driscoll, and is known as the Affiliate Artists’ Longfellow’s Shorts: A series of dramatic readings-cum-author events, whose latest installment happens June 2, with local novelist Monica Wood, on the Portland Stage Company mainstage.

Noel started rounding up fellow actor book-nuts back in 2002, and the results of his efforts — a group culled from regulars of Portland Stage, Mad Horse, and other local theaters, nicknamed "The Usual Suspects" — presented a debut evening of readings at Longfellow Books in celebration of Valentine’s Day. Billed as "The Secret Ingredients of Love," the event included selections from classic and contemporary fiction, with some guiltier pleasures (back covers of romance novels, scenes from The Young and the Restless) thrown in for kicks.

Audience response was enthusiastic enough to move Noel, now with the collaboration of fellow actor Driscoll, to push ahead. Together, the two actors coordinated readings around events like holidays (a multi-faith celebration of the December holidays) and new book releases (true to the times, one of the Harry Potter books got a reading). All events were pay-what-you-can, and the Usual Suspects got a reputation as being, as Noel says, "good, cheap fun."

With a reverence for writers never far from their zeal for the writing, they soon hit upon the idea of including authors themselves as featured guests and discussants in the events. With the release of Monica Wood’s novel Ernie’s Ark, Noel and Driscoll organized an evening of readings from the book, with Wood on hand as guest of honor. Their Portland following welcomed this innovation, and along with a growing popularity, the series subsequently gained its current name and venue: Under the continued sponsorship of Longfellow Books, with one-time sponsorship from AudioFile magazine, the series officially became Longfellow’s Shorts, and found its proscenium on the mainstage of Portland Stage Company.

Acclaimed novelist Colum McCann was the evening’s author for the Longfellow’s Shorts inaugural, in May of 2003, and with its new home Noel and Driscoll instituted yet a finer honing of the series’ angle. In addition to readings from McCann’s bestseller Dancer, the program included readings from authors that McCann named as influential in his own evolution as a writer. Now much more intimate than a mere reading, the Shorts’ new format resembled a live portrait of an author.

It’s in this incarnation, with a focus on author influence (and still pay-what-you-can), that Longfellow’s Shorts remains. As of September 2004, it has been an official program of the Affiliate Artists (along with "The Little Festival of the Unexpected" and "From Away," annual staged readings of new works by American and international playwrights, respectively) under the auspices of Portland Stage Company. Since then, the series has hosted a slew of local and nationally recognized authors, including Tom Perotta (of Election fame), Gregory Maguire (author of Wicked and the other fantasy retakes), and Laura Shane Cunningham (The Midnight Diary of Zoya Blume). They’ve also put together an Irish night for St. Paddy’s, several musical-literary events at SPACE, and, most recently, Gothic!, which featured chills from Edgar Allen Poe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and M.T. Anderson.

Tonight’s reading features the return of Monica Wood with readings from her new novel, Any Bitter Thing, and her older works, along with pieces from Anne of Green Gables and Little Women, two books that were formative for her.

As a group, the Affiliate Artists look a lot like the original Usual Suspects gang, and includes such familiarly esteemed Portland thespians as Michael Rafkin, Peter Brown, Lisa DiFranza, RJ McComish, and Michele Livermore Wigton. What happens when these and the other Affiliate Artists take on prose, from atop stools and behind music stands, is an entirely different encounter than the one they would have with a script. Focus shifts dramatically away from physicality and deep character study, Noel says, to a mode of performing in which the slightest look or change in tone can help communicate the essence within the words. But it is still a visual performance. "People who listen to audiotapes often close their eyes," Noel says. "Here, you listen, but you also want to watch."

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com.