Page 12
January 8, 2020
Obituary
Community
Advocate
Remembered
Edna Robertson
1929 – 2019
On Dec 29, 2019,
Edna Robertson, a
local hero who was
affectionately called
the mother of Port-
land’s black commu-
nity, passed away.
During the late 1980s and throughout
the 1990s, Robertson worked tirelessly
as an advocate for neighborhood partic-
ipation in North and Northeast Portland
as the Executive Director for the N/NE
Neighborhood Coalition for the city of
Portland.
In the late 1980s, she was the face of
the Portland Fire Bureau’s Smoke De-
tector campaign that lowered fire deaths
in the community.
Edna Robertson loved pre-gentrified
North/Northeast neighborhoods. She
fought for economic justice, education-
al equality, compassion and understand-
ing during the crack cocaine epidemic
and was a strong advocate of commu-
nity policing.
She leaves behind three daughters,
one son, two grandchildren and one
great granddaughter.
photo by k ate s Zrom /C ourtesy of p ortland C enter s tage at t he a rmory
Ithica Tell (from left) plays Yitzhak, Delphon “DJ” Curtis Jr. stars as Hedwig, and Chip Miller directs in ‘Hedwig and the Angry
Inch’ at The Armory.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
C ontinued from p age 8
C. Hall, one of several other famous ac-
tors who inhabited the role of Hedwig.
Hall’s Hedwig was big, mouthy, hungry.
The character struck me as offering good,
famous actors a chance to show off their
brilliance, their acting chops, but I can’t
say that it moved me.
The two Hedwigs I first saw on film
and onstage were white. The character is
described as an East German “slip of a
girly man” and in those performances, the
story reads white and defaults to white.
But of course, there are black people in
Germany, as anywhere else. Taye Diggs
took over the role on Broadway at the
end of its Broadway run in 2015, the first
black man to play Hedwig. I hear he was
great, but I wasn’t there.
And having seen a prior version of
that Broadway production, I have to be-
lieve that PCS’s show starring two black
performers--Delphon “DJ” Curtis Jr.
as Hedwig and Ithaca Tell as her gen-
der-bending husband Yitzak--is a differ-
ent thing entirely. Directed by PCS as-
sociate producer Chip Miller (who most
recently directed its world premiere of
“Redwood,”), this show is built around
what these black performers can bring to
it, and plays on a much smaller and grun-
gier stage than the Broadway house. Brit-
ton Mauk’s brilliant set places the show
in an abandoned mall, most definitely on
the sidelines, and places the audience in
much closer proximity to this intimate
and interactive performance. Hedwig’s
story rings much differently here, told by
these performers.
In these hands and in these bodies, the
music and guts of the show come alive.
Hedwig’s story has always been one of
fighting to be loved, fighting to be seen.
Inside a black body, that story rings more
deeply. The fight for identity, the creativ-
ity stolen and colonized, the struggle for
love and a persona that is whole and truly
one’s own, the ways being a hurt person
can turn one into a person who hurts--all
of these aspects of Hedwig’s personality
and her entanglements with Tommy Gno-
sis (the more-famous off-stage performer
and Hedwig’s former lover who built his
fame on Hedwig’s creativity) and Yitzhak,
who Hedwig holds back and abuses, res-
onate here in new ways. Curtis and Tell
absolutely convince in every moment;
both sing with voices that make you be-
lieve in their dreams of stardom and at the
same time make you understand why it
has eluded them. And the movement and
costume design inspire an appropriately
fine mixture of cringes and admiration.
You feel Hedwig fighting for something
that sometimes only she can see.
I left identifying with Hedwig in ways I
never had done before; this production is
a better and deeper container than I have
yet experienced for what is heroic about
a struggle to be truly oneself. It deserves
an enthusiastic audience, and especially
more audience members of color.
Darleen Ortega is a judge on the Ore-
gon Court of Appeals and the first wom-
an of color to serve in that capacity. Her
movie and theater review column Opin-
ionated Judge appears regularly in The
Portland Observer. Find her review blog
at opinionatedjudge.blogspot.com.