In Dialogue events are a series of lectures, pre-show talks, post-show discussions and concerts that offer our audiences the opportunity to engage with the work, themes and aesthetic of our featured writer through a broad, vibrant and ever-changing series of events and presentations.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

IN DIALOGUE EVENTS FOR FIRES IN THE MIRROR:

Friday, October 12th – 6:30-7:15 pm
Queer Night
Join us on Queer Night for a fun mixer before the show. Enjoy a glass of wine (on us!), enter to win fun door prizes and mingle a bit before enjoying an engaging night of theatre.  RSVP to the Facebook event for special ticket offer!

Saturday, October 13th
Opening Night Celebration
Join us immediately following the performance for a celebration of the work.  Wine provided by our 2018-19 wine sponsors Wildwood/Mahonia.

Sunday, October 14th – Post-show
Mat Chat with Seth Rue and Josh Hecht
Stay after the show for a conversation about the performance with Artistic Director Josh Hecht and Actor Seth Rue

Friday, October 19th – 6:45 pm
Vanport Mosaic

Vanport Mosaic presents: “Sting Like A Bee”: Kent Ford and the Portland Black Panthers 

(Film in the lobby)

Portland Black Panthers Founder Kent Ford shares his memories of life in Albina in 1960s-1980s, and the Party’s community activism and organizing.  This story was produced by Lisa Serrano, Donovan Smith, and Mohammed Alkhadher, and is part of the on-going Vanport Mosaic oral history/Albina Chapter directed by Story Midwife Laura Lo Forti.

In these times of collective amnesia, remembering is an act of resistance. The Vanport Mosaic is a community-driven memory-activism platform that amplifies, honors, and preserves the silenced histories that surround us. Co-founded and Co-Directed by Laura Lo Forti and Damaris Webb.

www.vanportmosaic.org

Saturday, October 20th – 6:45 pm
Confrontation Theatre

Confrontation Theatre presents a silent vigil and staged die-in located in the lobby of Artists Rep. The presentation reflects the lives lost at the hands of neighboring communities, during heightened tension of racial differences and turmoil. Reminding audiences of Fires in the Mirror of the heartache, senseless murders and violences leaves on us all.

www.confrontationtheatre.com

Sunday, October 20th – Post-show (Matinee)
Mat Chat with Seth Rue and Josh Hecht
Stay after the show for a conversation about the performance with Artistic Director Josh Hecht and Actor Seth Rue

Back to Fires in the Mirror

Crown Heights, Brooklyn: A Chronology

1991

UNITED STATES – CIRCA 2000: Mayor David Dinkins looks on while a Hasidic Jew and a black man argue during riots in Crown Heights. Rioting erupted after two black 7-year-olds, Gavin and Angela Cato, were hit by a car driven by a member of the Hasidic Jewish community. Gavin died. Hours later, Yankel Rosenbaum. a young Hasidic scholar, was attacked by a mob and fatally stabbed by Lemrick Nelson, a 16-year-old black.Street violence continued for days with confrontations between blacks and Hasidim. (Photo by Anthony Pescatore/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

August 19

8:20 P.M. A station from a police-escorted entourage bearing Lubavitcher Grand Rebbe Menachem Schneerson careerns into two Guyanese American children at the intersection of Utica Avenue and President Street. Seven-year-old Gavin Cato is killed, and his cousin Angela suffers a broken leg. As an angry crowd gathers, the twenty-two-year-old Hasidic driver, Yosef Lifsh, and his two Hasidic passengers are taken from the scene by a private ambulance.

11:30 P.M. Three hours later and five blocks from the car accident, Yankel Rosenbaum, a visiting twenty-nine-year-old Hasidic history professor from Melbourne, Australia, is stabbed. Just after the incident, sixteen-year-old Lemrick Nelson, Jr., a Trinidadian American from Brooklyn, is arrested in connection with the stabbing.

August 20

2:00 A.M. Yankel Rosenbaum dies at Kings County Hospital.

PRE-DAWN Rioting begins on the streets, as Blacks and Lubavitchers set fires, throw stones and bottles, and unleash insults at each other and the police. The rioting continues throughout the day.

Yosef Lifsh leaves the United States for Israel.

By the end of the day, police report sixteen arrests and twenty policemen injured.

August 21

8:15 A.M. Yankel Rosenbaum’s funeral held at Lubavitch World Headquarters in Crown Heights. Afterward, Rosenbaum’s body is flown back to Australia for burial.

Rioting continues and several stores are looted.

Before leading a march of nearly two hundred Blacks down Eastern Parkway, the Reverend Al Sharpton and Alton Maddox hold a news conference demanding Yosef Lifsh’s arrest.

New York mayor David Dinkins and New York police Commissioner Lee Brown visit Crown Heights to urge peace, but both are silenced by rocks and bottles and insults.

Lemrick Nelson, Jr., is charged with the second-degree murder of Yankel Rosenbaum.

August 22

Rioting continues.

Police presence in Crown Heights is increased to over fifteen hundred officers. By the end of the day, police report 107 arrests overall.

August 24

Led by the Reverend Al Sharpton and Alton Maddox, approximately fifteen hundred protesters march through Crown Heights, while nearly as many police officers patrol the immediate area.  

August 26

Gavin Cato’s funeral is held in Brooklyn. The Reverend Al Sharpton delivers the eulogy.

September 5

The Brooklyn grand jury does not indict Yosef Lifsh in the death of Gavin Cato.

September 17

The Reverend Al Sharpton flies to Israel to notify Yosef Lifsh of a civil suit brought against him by the Cato family. The day is the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.

January 26, 1992

The Cato apartment is destroyed by fire. Fire officials determine the fire resulted from children playing with matches.

April 5

Lubavitchers demonstrate outside City Hall to mourn Yankel Rosenbaum and demand more arrests in connection with his slaying.

April 13

Brooklyn district attorney Charles Hynes says that it is unlikely there will be more arrests in connection with the death of Yankel Rosenbaum.  

October 29

5:20 P.M. Lemrick Nelson, Jr. is acquitted of all four counts charged against him in the killing of Yankel Rosenbaum.

8:40 P.M. More than one thousand Hasidic Jews rally outside Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights. Some bottle throwing and shouting matches ensue. Police report one arrest.

Mayor Dinkins offers a $10,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Yankel Rosenbaum’s murderer.

October 30

New York governor Mario Cuomo orders a state of review of the case.

New York police commissioner Raymond Kelly asks his chief of detectives, Joseph R. Borrelli, to review the entire case from the scene of the accident to the announcement of the verdict.

November 15

Despite Governor Cuomo’s assertion that Mayor Dinkins is being unfairly blamed for Rosenbaum’s death and the unrest in Crown Heights, the Hasidic community continues to harshly criticize the mayor for his handling of the riots.

November 17

The Lubavitch community files a federal class-action lawsuit alleging that the Dinkins administration and police department refused to conduct “any meaningful investigation” into the rioting and failed to “seek perpetrators aggressively.”

Source: Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights and other Identities by Anna Deavere Smith

Anna Deavere Smith has had a wide and varied career. Most may know her as hospital administrator Gloria Akalaitis on seven seasons of “Nurse Jackie,” National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on “The West Wing” or her current role on the new Shonda Rimes drama “For The People.” But Smith’s work as a dramatist goes back nearly thirty years and transformed the field.

Smith worked as an actor on stages across the country throughout the 1980s. While teaching at Stanford and at Princeton, she started a project she called On The Road: The Search for American Character. It was here that she honed what would become her signature style: in-depth, on-camera interviews with diverse subjects, which she would then excerpt into monologues that she performed verbatim, including every verbal tic and self-interruption, and every accompanying physical gesture. Smith calls these pieces her ‘portrait galleries.” “What I try to do is create a kind of document of what the person said, and the physical part follows,” she has said.

The interviews themselves can take an hour or more — however long it takes for them to, in her words, “come into character. I’m watching for them to discover their own personal literature, their own poem. I think everyone has a poem.”

In 1991, she began using this technique to document the Crown Heights riots and the communities that lived through them. FIRES IN THE MIRROR premiered at The Public Theatre in 1992 to rave reviews, notably from Frank Rich in the New York Times, an early champion of Smith’s, who subsequently performed the piece in cities throughout the US and at the Royal Court in London.

Her follow-up piece, Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 turned her incisive lens on the Rodney King beating. That show transferred to Broadway, where Smith was nominated in both the Best Play and Best Actress categories.

Subsequent pieces have included House Arrest, about the tense relationship between the American presidency and the media, Let Me Down Easy, her exploration of the vulnerability and resiliency of the body through the lens of the national debate about healthcare (which we’ll produce this spring at Portland Playhouse), and Notes From The Field, an exploration of the school-to-prison pipeline.

Her body of work is remarkable not only for its breadth of subject matter but for the complexity she is able to render simply by letting her subjects speak for themselves. More than any other dramatist, Smith holds a mirror up to our lives as Americans in all of our complicated, painful, joyous dignity.

-Josh Hecht, Artistic Director

Media Release: Fires in the Mirror

Browse Playbill:

Directed by Bobby Bermea

Starring Seth Rue

Rabbi Shea Hecht. Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder.

Rabbi Joseph Spiel Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder.

Ntozake Shange. Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder.

Norman Rosenbaum. Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder.

Michael S Miller. Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder.

Leonard Jeffries. Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder.

Leonard Jeffries 2.Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic and Projection design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder.

George C. Wolfe. Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder.

Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic and Projection design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder(4)

Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic and Projection design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder(2).

Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic and Projection design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder(1).

Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic and Projection design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder(6)

Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic and Projection design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder(5).

Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic and Projection design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder(3).

Minister Conrad Muhammed. Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder.

Angela Davis. Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder

Aaron M Bernstein. Fires in the Mirror at Profile Theatre. By Anna Deavere Smith, Directed by Bobby Bermea, featuring actor Seth Rue. Scenic design by Peter Ksander, Lighting design by Carl Faber, Costume design by Wanda Walden. Photo by David Kinder.

Media Release for (Un)Conditional

Explore Playbill:

Cast (L-R): Katy Liljeholm, Jessica Standifird, Tim Stapleton, Jeanette Williams, Aubrey Daquiz, Jennifer Warner. Photo by Meg Nanna

(Un)Conditional at Profile Theatre. Lighting Design by Miranda k Hardy. Projection Design by Peter Ksander. Photo by David Kinder.

(Un)Conditional at Profile Theatre. L-R: Katy Liljeholm, Jennifer Warner, Aubrey Daquiz, Jessica Standifird. Lighting Design by Miranda k Hardy. Photo by David Kinder.

(Un)Conditional at Profile Theatre. Performer Katy Liljeholm. Photo by David Kinder.

(Un)Conditional at Profile Theatre. Lighting Design by Miranda k Hardy. Projection Design by Peter Ksander. Photo by David Kinder.

Performer Aubrey Daquiz in (Un)Conditional at Profile Theatre. Photo by David Kinder.

Performer Jennifer Warner in (Un)Conditional at Profile Theatre. Lighting Design by Miranda k Hardy. Projection Design by Peter Ksander. Photo by David Kinder.

Performer Jessica Standifird in (Un)Conditional at Profile Theatre. Lighting Design by Miranda k Hardy. Projection Design by Peter Ksander. Photo by David Kinder.

Performer Jeanette Williams in (Un)Conditional at Profile Theatre. Photo by David Kinder.

Performer Tim Stapleton with page turner David Poulshock in (Un)Conditional at Profile Theatre. Lighting Design by Miranda k Hardy. Projection Design by Peter Ksander. Photo by David Kinder.

On Tuesday, August 21st, 2018 Profile Theatre hosted a fundraiser & friend-raiser at the Lan Su Chinese Garden.  This event was in celebration of our commissioning of Ping Chong + Company to create an original work in collaboration with our Community Profile program, to be staged in February 2019.  Read more here.

We were joined by National Medal of Arts Awardee Ping Chong and artists Sara Zatz, Associate Director of Ping Chong + Company.

Event Program

Josh Hecht, Ping Chong, Sara Zatz photo credit Kevin Hoover

Ping Chong photo credit Kevin Hoover

Aiyana Cunninghma addresses guests by Kevin Hoover

Guests photo credit Kevin Hoover

Aubrey Daquiz and Caren Masum photo credit Kevin Hoover

Lan Su Chinese Garden photo credit Kevin Hoover

Special Thanks to:

And

Profile is thrilled to announce our 2nd Annual 24 Hour Playfest – a wild, exciting and vibrant way to celebrate our mainstage playwrights and come together as a creative community!

READY: On the evening of Sunday, July 1st over 30 local theatre artists, including directors, playwrights and performers will gather on the set of The Secretaries. They’ll be divided into 6 teams and given a prompt from the show. The playwrights will write into the night, delivering their new short plays to their collaborators by 9:00 am the next morning.

SET: Monday afternoon, throughout the Artists Rep building, the teams will meet together to rehearse and polish their pieces.

GO!: Monday night we share them with you in a not-to-be-missed one-night-only performance.

Monday, July 2nd 2018 7:30 pm
Alder Stage

“The Secretaries is one of the most uproarious plays staged in Portland in recent memory.”

CLICK HERE to read the Portland Mercury review by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

CLICK HERE to read The Oregonian review of The Secretaries by Ben Waterhouse

We asked Lisa Kron to contribute some words about The Secretaries, 25 years later!  Enjoy reading what she shared and learn about the origins of this groundbreaking project.

“The Secretaries” premiered in New York City 25 years ago. Wow! That’s so hard to believe, in so many ways! Mostly, I think (I hope!) the play holds up, though, of course, there are some elements that date it (most notably the frequent references to word processing codes that long ago were swept into the dustbin of technology). But the issues and dynamics that drive the play have remained surprisingly topical – disconcertingly so, really. But rather than parse that further, I thought instead I’d like to offer some background on the play’s genesis by way of the introductory notes the Brothers put together when the play was first published, way, way, way back, such a long time ago! I hope you enjoy. Thank you so much for coming!” -Lisa Kron, May 2018

Click to read