theater
BY RICK LEVIN
Shadow Dancing
in Pleasant Hill
Eugene playwright says get on the bus
F
irst impression tells you that
Eugene-based playwright Cassi
Holmes was once that quiet girl in a
summer dress who regularly had her pigtails
pulled by mean boys during recess. Holmes
exudes a sort of bemused thoughtfulness,
and her blue eyes sparkle with the punch
line to a joke she has yet to formulate. Her
manner is halting but generous, and she is
quick to bite off a sentence if she thinks you
have something to say.
The plays Holmes writes seem to belie
her innocent mien: They are wicked nasty,
full of blood and sweat and beer, and they
map a surreal landscape ruled by twisted
Jesus freaks, heavy metal messiahs and
defi ant belles with clipped wings. Music
takes on a signifi cance of near-religious
grandeur, capable of conjuring moments
of sentiment so strong they travel time and
space.
In Holmes’ most recent work, Shadow
Dancing, which opens Friday, June 22, the
music of Andy Gibb, Ozzie Ozbourne and
Queen creates a psycho-emotional world in
which roller skating is a transcendental act,
and where blood and butterfl ies comingle to
the strains of “Highway to Hell.”
“It’s where I come from,” Holmes says of
the disturbingly intimate imagery in Shadow
Dancing, which is by turns brief and brutal,
sweet and sick, like Sylvia Plath huffi ng
nitrous oxide. “It’s the only thing I can write,
really. It’s just kind of a twisted, jacked-up
version of what I’ve been through.”
There are no half-measures in Holmes’
artistic universe. Her previous play, the
grotesquely brilliant Cowboy Mouth, was
staged in an artist’s warehouse and then, for
its closing night, before a standing-room-
only crowd at Wandering Goat during the
2010 Whiteaker Block Party.
This time around, Holmes is asking folks
to hop on a bus for a ride to Pleasant Hill,
where a semi trailer parked near an old saw
mill has been converted into an outdoor
stage. Once again, she has cast her play
with friends and confi dants, none of them
professional actors, whose quirky antics
somehow elevate the eerie, apocalyptic
tenor of Shadow Dancing.
Neither is Holmes a pedigreed author,
though she’s paid her dues in her own
fashion, having studied theater arts both at
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Lane Community College and University
of Oregon. “I literally walked out in the
middle of some dumb monologue,” she says
of her aborted career in academia. “I said,
‘Fuck this,’ and I never went back. Half of
those years I was just all over the place and
botching it up.”
After a long hiatus, Holmes again picked
up the pen, but nothing was clicking at fi rst.
“I couldn’t do it,” she recalls. “I would try. I
would hack away at this old typewriter. And
then everything just started kind of coming
to me in the last couple of years.”
Holmes credits the support and aid of
friends for again opening up her creative
pathways, and she especially praises the
local amateur actors who make up the cast of
Shadow Dancing: Aaron Sullivan, Gridlock,
Lindsay Lepon, Amber Taylor, Daniel
Williams and Julia Holtzman, who also lent
her frenetic chops and physical charisma to
Cowboy Mouth.
These, then, are the unhinged elements
that make up Shadow Dancing, an exemplar
of underground art. Hey, it’s not for nothing
they call it a “theater of battle.” The wily,
elastic tactics of guerilla warfare trump the
rigid rules of conventional engagement,
damn near every time. Holmes is proving
that guerilla theater can be just as crafty and
effective, and with less collateral damage.
By adopting the scrappy, DIY aesthetics
of punk rock, Holmes and her troupe
are thriving off the radar, tapping into
undiscovered reserves of native talent and
can-do; they’ll stage these homegrown plays
for anyone willing to forego the pampering
of white wine and seat cushions. The upshot
of bypassing the establishment route is
artistic freedom and creative control.
Holmes says she’s hoping people
will have a visceral response to Shadow
Dancing. “I just want them to be kind of in
this grip that they can’t get out of, whether
they enjoy it or absolutely hate it,” she says.
“And because of that, it’ll be memorable.”
ew
Get on the bus: Shadow Dancing plays 9pm Friday &
Saturday, June 22-23 & June 29-30; on show nights, a
bus will pick people up 8pm at Blair Alley Arcade, 245
Blair, and folks who want to drive should meet at 8:20pm
at Gatehouse Pizza, 35855 Plaza Loop Rd., Pleasant Hill,
to carpool to the site; for further info, visit shadowdanc-
ingtheplay.blogspot.com or call 743-3141; $10 sug. don.,
nobody turned away.
EUGENE WEEKLY JUNE 21, 2012
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