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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (April 19, 2002)
42 * aprii 1Î2QÛ2 THEATER ................▼................ Performing wellness A collaborative approach makes Living with H IV powerful theater by Thirtieth • i 9 7 1 - 2 O O Í • A nniversary D o w n t o w n Po rtland Portland A irp o rt 5 0 3.284.9929 9 0 1 SW Y a m h i l l W ashington Square 5 0 3 .223 .9 5 10 5 0 3.620.22 43 www. therealmothergoose. com m S f j j i L h E cmr* E Tha Pet Shop Boys have sold over 3 million rocords In the US alono and Sanctuary I s proud to present their most current studio album, Release. Always remaining one step ahead of their contemporaries, the British duo navigates the constantly shifting landscape of modern dance-pop with rare grace and Intelligence moving easily from disco to house to techno with their own distinctive Im age VsKtuory : w w w .m u s ic m ille n n lu m .c o m M IL L E N N IU M EASTSIDE 31 5 8 E B u r n s id e 5 0 3 -2 3 1 -8 9 2 6 NORTHW EST 801 N W 2 3 r d 5 0 3 -2 4 8 -0 1 6 3 G ary M orris abor grins and calls it an “internal cir cus.” Michael asks himself, “How do I theatricalize the work?” Kate says, “G et out of your head— stop thinking!” Tahor is Portland metal artist Tahor Porter, and the “circus” is the prcx:ess of telling his life story as a long-term A ID S survivor. That story is interpreted and performed hy gay actor Michael Teufel as part of Living unth HIV: Performing Well ness III, sponsored hy Interstate Firehouse Cul tural Center in cooperation with Project Quest. Kate Hawkes is director and mentor of the show as well as a kind of mother hen, guiding the pair through a complex process of empathy and self-understanding. Sh e’s also working with four other couples for the production. This event is the third in a series that began two years ago as a collaboration between Hawkes, then director of Artists Repertory Theatre’s com munity outreach program, and Susan Hedlund, an oncology social worker at Oregon Health Sciences University. Inspired in part by Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit, about a professor fighting ovarian cancer, the two created a theatri cal form to help terminally ill people express them selves and come to terms with their diseases. They set up workshops for a small group of matched writers and actors who would spend sev eral months getting to know each other and together create a kind of dual autobiography. The stories are then performed as theatrical vignettes, making up the “Performing Wellness” series. Hawkes encourages the participants to he as ambitious as possible, incorporating poetry, dance, dialogue, storytelling, jokes— anything to capture a life under duress in less than half an hour. whining, leechlike creature in a gunny sack, hanging onto its victim. Hawkes and Hedlund started the Well Arts Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to exploring and publicizing the connection between cre ativity and good health. T he organization bases its work both on sound science that shows the traasformative power of art and on their proven ability to create a strong theatrical experience. Interest in these events has been high. Actors now approach Hawkes, rather than vice versa. T h e plays are performed in high school and medical school classrooms as well as the aters. T he quality of the writing hasn’t gone unnoticed, either; two o f the pieces were short listed for the Oregon Book Award. Hawkes says the series has concrete benefits for both participants and audiences. “Every human being is an artist," she asserts, “and when an individual is given an opportunity to access that...w ellness is facilitated— emotional, spiritual and psychological.” A crucial component of this is trust, she notes. Writer and director must go with their instincts and move out of the analytical into the more daunting hut, in this case, more rewarding realm of feeling. You must “stop thinking,” she contends, “and trust that artist-child inside.” awkes endeavors to find actors with both technical skill and a “deep emotional well.” i I To avoid them overtaking the story, she he success of the first two shows indicated this stresses the power and, indeed, sanctity of the was a sound approach. Audiences expecting a words. “Everything you choose to do,” she tells maudlin sohfest instead found pathos and hu the actors, “has to support and not overwhelm mor in such stories as “Traveling with Mr. C ,” the story.” which presented cancer as an oily Lothario in a tux This means no improvisation, although who laments the “had press” he gets and chillingly Teufel slyly admits, “If the joke works, you reminds the woman he’s “involved with” that “I’ll work the joke.” A familiar face from Portland always love you, no matter how you lcxik.” plays such as The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, Another segment, “Picking Up the Pieces,” Things You Shouldn’t Say After Midnight and, paired a leukemia patient with her “emotional most recently, After the Zipper, he says one of baggage,” arrestingly the attractions of this work is “the universality visualized as a of the stories. W hat the writers talk about is lit erally life and death.” The 30-year-old actor is a veteran of the series, having performed the story of a cancer survivor named Laura in one of the previous shows. (In a startling and apparently quite effective conceit, he played her as a man.) \ Inevitably, the participants bond in these circumstances— Laura and Teufel so ; much so that when she passed away, he read her eulogy. He still gets emotional _ ¡P * when he talks about her, perhaps in part because of another personal connection: His mother, too, died of breast cancer at 50. Teufel says he’s well matched person- ^ ally with Porter, 48. It doesn’t hurt that I P the subject’s roller-coaster life, from Michael Teufel | which he managed to step off before crash- (left) and Tabor I ing, is an actor’s dream. Porter during Growing up in the ’60s and 70s, Porter | sampled all those decades had to offer.
