Culture
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S tr e e t R o o ts •
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Off the grid, in search of Utopia
A new Hand2Mouth play explores human experiences behind intentional communities like communes
BY SARAH HANSELL
S T A F F W R IT E R
he atmosphere of Hand2Mouth
Theatre’s new production “Psychic
Utopia” befits its title - ethereal,
intimate, experimental and brimming with
flora and fauna.
The play is centered on the experiences
of the thousands of people who immigrated
to the Pacific Northwest in the 1960s, ’70s
and ’80s, seeking a different kind of life
through off-the-grid communities:
communes, co-ops, co-housing and
autonomous zones. Communities that are
autonomous from the authority structure in
which they are situated. Attempts at utopia.
The performers tell the audience these
stories and act them out in ways
that are metaphors for the play’s
content - the performers moving
in unison, mouthing one
another’s words, delighting in
human contact. The stories are
bookended by audience
interaction that is intentional
1 f a
from the moment the playgoers
>ec.2(no
enter the venue; a thought
experiment meant to compel the
Matinee at 2 p.m. Dec. 3.
audience members to examine
Pi
their own journeys as seekers.
“So many people stop
tntÆWW
seeking,” performer Jenni Green
Works, 810 SE Belmont St.,
Miller said. “We start the show
by reminding, for lack of a better
Portland
word, that we all may have been
,11
seekers at some point, starting in
‘e.
our childhoods, and then I think
it’s common for adults to stop.
And I think we end on this
(thought that) all of us are still seeking at
the end.”
The play is built around 30 interviews
and additional published accounts of people
who lived in and co-created these
communities. The stories span a wide
range, from a woman who left her children
behind, to a man struggling with mental
health who experienced healing through his
intensive work within a community and is
now a therapist, to a young woman simply
seeking to open her mind.
“We’re trying to make a show where they
seem suspiciously like us,” director
Jonathan Walters said. “You could see
yourself having the original impulses.
Maybe you wouldn’t join that community,
maybe you wouldn’t go that far. Maybe you
would go farther.”
Yet they all follow a similar arc - a person
seeking a change, arriving in one of these
communities. Things fall apart, and then the
person grows from the experience.
“The stigma is that there have been
stories that things fall apart at a lot of
communes, everything getting in the way,”
T
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P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F M I S H I M A P H O T O G R A P H Y /S A R A H M A R G U IE R
said Liz Hayden, one of the performers.
“People think about the extreme version
that they read about in papers. But (with)
our show, we’ve taken that out and really
focus on their stories, them as human
characters, just as seekers seeking
something, like a calling.”
The play isn’t so much an argument for
or against these intentional communities as
a meditation on the lives of those who
sought something different from the world
they found themselves in and decided to
look for, or build, the world that they
wanted.
“I’ve been personally surprised about
how negative a lot of people’s reactions have
been about some of the communities that
we’ve talked about,” Walters said. “It was so
incredibly intolerant of a group of people
choosing to live amongst us in a radically
different way. Not choosing certain kinds of
commercialism, not choosing to live in
homes like we would think of.”
This pushback, Walters said, reinforced
how important it was to create this play.
The play is a group-created labor of love, 18
months in the making. Its text has been a
living document since the beginning,
molded by deliberate ideas and inspiration,
as well as improvisation from the cast,
director and crew.
The result is a production that at times is
shaped by audience response, and at times
feels like the audience spying on deeply
personal exchanges among the performers.
“We start the show trying to get the
audience to feel like you’re in a space with
people who are really intensely linked, that
have done a lot of work together with their
mind, that have done a lot of time staring
into each other’s eyes,” Walters said.
Most of all, the play is about the different
ways in which people set out on a quest for
self-discovery, self-improvement and self-
healing, a quest to live differently.
“It’s very dangerous, it seems like, in
2017, to believe there’s nothing new to be
discovered in how our society can move
forward,” Walters said. “That there’s
nothing new to be discovered in how gender
should be talked about. That there’s nothing
new to be discovered about how America
should work racially and work better.
“It’s very dangerous to have no sense of
wanting to go deeper and go forward. It’s
very dangerous for people to be in that
mode, and it can be any side of the
spectrum that people feel like, T got it, I got
it figured out.’ And these people are
relentless in their quest for betterment and
joy, and that’s really inspiring.”
A n artistic
representation
o f “Psychic
Utopia. ”
Performers
move in
unison,
mouthing one
another’s
words, in the
Hand2Mouth
production.