T H E AT E R
BY RICK LEVIN
IDENTITY
POLITICS
PIA SOSA
HILDENBRANDT IN
LCC’S CONSTANT
REVOLUTION
LCC’s excellent student
production Constant
Revolution takes
on sticky issues of
authenticity
PHOTO: DUSTIN NAGY
I
dentity is a bitch. By the time we’re grown up enough
to ask ourselves who we are and what the hell we’re do-
ing with this thing called life, we realize our so-called
self is an infinitely convoluted and mysterious patch-
work — a mashup of past indignities, adopted attitudes
and a certain incommunicable something howling deep in-
side for meaning and contact.
The search for identity and authenticity is at the heart
of Constant Revolution, a fetching new work written and
performed by students in Lane Community College’s the-
ater arts program. The play, directed by Willow Norton, is
itself something of a quilt, an assemblage of bits and pieces
of individual stories stitched together by themes that are
distinctly existential, and which constantly complicate the
dilemma of being and becoming.
The young cast — Darius Bunce, Sabrina Gross, Pia
Sosa Hildenbrandt, Milo Kent-Pettit, Emma Rain and Alex
Vowles — is uniformly excellent, and boy can they write.
The intersecting skits and soliloquies, which take on every-
thing from early romance and identity politics to consumer
ennui and the crunch of career choices, exhibit a surprising
T H E AT E R
standing. It finds its guiding principle in a poem by Jack
London, a line of which states, “The function of man is
to live, not to exist.” Living, unlike merely existing, is a
kind of artistry — an authoring of the self that is itself a
creative act, a moving from inwardness outward.
In this sense, the play’s title reveals a dual meaning: It
is at once highly personal and implicitly political. To con-
front the world with one’s truest self, a thing of perpetual
motion, is a supremely revolutionary act. The stories that
comprise Constant Revolution would seem to argue that
identity can’t be purchased in the marketplace, nor can it
be constructed in bitterness and fear.
The play answers Beckett’s famous line — “I can’t go
on, I must go on” — with a simple affirmative: Go on.
This is the hope that trumps all despair, and it’s inspir-
ing to behold in a troupe of young artists, especially in
these dark days. It is, and ever has been, the only hope
we have.
was brought into the OCT production of Melancholy by
director Tara Wibrew to compose a half hour of cello music
to be performed on stage by Julian, one of the characters
in the play. The music is almost Julian’s only voice in the
show.
“Melancholy Play explores something we may be los-
ing in a society that’s obsessed with being happy,” Vance
says. “What have we lost in a society that’s trying so hard
to fight depression?”
Ruhl’s script specifies that a cello be played, but doesn’t
say what the music should be.
“Melancholy is very simple,” Vance says. “The people
on stage can never say one thing and be thinking another.
That’s one of the things I love about Sarah Ruhl. There’s
never any subtext.”
Vance, 25, came to Eugene three years ago from Tur-
lock, California, where he grew up the son of a Marine
drill sergeant. Since they arrived here, he and his wife,
Mia, have both begun to make their marks in the local arts
world. He’s performed for children at the Oregon Bach
Festival and at Saturday Market and has taught theater at
Springfield’s Academy of Arts and Academics; she runs a
fusion belly dance troupe.
With a background in both theater and music, Vance has
long been comfortable combining the two forms. “Every time
I direct a show I write a little music for it,” he says. “And
when I write music for a play, it’s completely intertwined, not
just with the characters but with the heartbeat and tempo of
the show.”
Vance has thought a lot about the role of music in the play.
“What I’ve tried to do is have the music be the fourth wall, the
thing that connects what’s on stage to the audience.”
He has built much of the music for Melancholy Play
around a major seventh chord, that slightly bright but unre-
solved sound that makes the blues sound like the blues. “That
seventh wants to resolve,” he says. “But at the same time you
don’t want it to resolve.”
Vance is self-taught as a musician. All his composition is
done through improvisation.
Ruhl won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship in
2006. Her plays include The Clean House, which ran at OCT
in 2009, and Dead Man’s Cell Phone, which ran at the Oregon
Shakespeare Festival the same year.
Constant Revolution plays 7:30 pm Thursday through Friday, Feb. 23-25, and
3:30 pm Sunday, Feb. 26, at LCC’s Blue Door Theatre; $10, students and staff
free.
BY BOB KEEFER
MELANCHOLY
BROUGHT TO LIFE
THROUGH MUSIC
Violinist Cullen Vance creates the
cello’s voice for OCT’s production of
Melancholy Play
S
arah Ruhl’s Melancholy Play, opening Friday
night, Feb. 24, at Oregon Contemporary Theatre,
posits an idea that seems utterly un-American:
What if it’s OK not to be happy? What if we don’t
need to smile all the time, despite our ingrained
right to the pursuit of happiness?
That radical notion formed an emotional starting point
for Eugene musician and performer Cullen Vance, who
30
level of maturity and sophistication. They are by turns
surreal and pedestrian, played out on a stark stage that
becomes at one moment a wintery dreamscape, at another
the setting for a teenage party.
Constant Revolution finds a delicate balance between
narcissistic obsession and human communion, as each ac-
tor brings an isolated and beleaguered self to bear upon
the world, sometimes bumping up against one another,
striking sparks of recognition or fanning the flames of
incomprehension. Such is life, but the play deepens our
everyday experience by making our interior monologues
explicit and therefore lyrical, loaded with yearning.
Imagine Beckett in the land of Millennials, with their cell
phones, sinister ironies and downgraded opportunities.
Waiting for Go, perhaps.
But, unlike Beckett, the play refuses to wallow in a
fumblesome striving that forever veers toward nihilism.
Yes, Constant Revolution takes on the big ontological and
existential questions of life, but it does so with a spirit
that is essentially optimistic. Communication may crum-
ble, but its crumbs can mark a path that leads to under-
February 23, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
The OCT production of Melancholy Play runs features an ensemble cast with Ben
Brinkley, Leslie Jones, Chelsey Megli, Tracy Nygard, Kelly Oristano and Joseph
Workman. The show runs Friday, Feb. 24, through March 12 at Oregon Contem-
porary Theatre; tickets are $15 to $35 at octheatre.org.