THE BOOK OF JOSEPH
By Karen Hartman
Directed by Josh Hecht

March 19th & 2oth  7:30 pm, Alder Stage at Artists Rep   

The Book of Joseph was commissioned by the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, where it premiered last season. Profile patrons will recognize Karen Hartman as the co-author (with Tanya Barfield) of 2016’s Antigone Project and author of the play SuperTrue, which Profile presented as an In Dialogue Reading alongside the 2015 Sarah Ruhl season.

Every family has its secrets. The Hollander family’s spanned three generations and two continents, from World War II Poland to present-day America, all locked in a suitcase in Joseph Hollander’s attic. When his son, Richard, uncovered the suitcase, he found more than just Swastika-stamped letters and legal documents—he found a family he never met, and a father’s legacy that was never mentioned. A family torn apart by war, fighting to escape and survive, an unplanned immigration and quest to stay in the US, and a tale of love lost and found, were all captured in letters uncovered a generation later, which became the book Every Day Lasts a Year. Now adapted into The Book of Joseph, the Hollander family journey offers a story for each of us.

“★★★★ This real-life story … reminds an audience to pay attention to changes in the world.” -Chicago Tribune

“A simple yet wondrous insight into the nature of those who not only survived against all odds, but prevailed.” -Chicago Sun-Times

Free and open to the public – General Admission

 KAREN HARTMAN had four productions of three world premieres in 2016-2017, all with productions in 2017-18 as well: Roz and Ray at Victory Gardens and Seattle Repertory Theater (Edgerton New Play Prize), Book of Joseph at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and Project Dawn at People’s Light (NEA Grant, NNPN Rolling World Premiere). Other works: Goldie, Max, and Milk (Steinberg and Carbonell Nominations), SuperTrue (Kilroy’s List), Gaza Rehearsal (Victory Gardens Ignition Fest), Goliath (Dorothy Silver New Play Prize), Gum, Leah’s Train (Weissberger Finalist), Going Gone (NEA Grant), Girl Under Grain (Best Drama, NY Fringe), ALICE: Tales of a Curious Girl (Music by Gina Leishman, AT&T Onstage Award), Troy Women. New York: Women’s Project, NAATCO, P73, Summer Play Festival. Regional: Center Stage, Cincinnati Playhouse, Dallas Theater Center, the Magic, and elsewhere. Publications: TCG, Dramatists Play Service, Playscripts, Backstage Books, NoPassport. Honors: McKnight Residency, New Dramatists, Bellagio, Helen Merrill Foundation, Hodder Fellowship, Jerome Fellowship, Fulbright Scholarship. Prose: New York Times and The Washington Post. Ms. Hartman is Senior Artist in Residence at University of Washington, Seattle. www.karenhartman.org

CAST

Cast: (L-R)

Jaclyn Maddox
Samson Syharath
Josie Seid
Jason Glick
Jamie Rea
Murri Lazaroff-Babin
Crystal Ann Muñoz
Anthony Green
Patricia Hunter

Stage Manager: Kira Atwood-Youngstrom

Profile is featured in this article written for American Theater Magazine by local arts writer TJ Acena.  Learn more about the transitions coming at Artists Rep as well as the dire need for art spaces in Portland.

www.americantheatre.org/2018/01/30/portlands-space-race/

“How did a decent girl like me get involved with a cult of murderous secretaries?”

Pretty Patty Johnson is thrilled to join the secretarial pool at the Cooney Lumber Mill in Big Bone, Oregon under the iron-fisted leadership of sultry office manager Susan Curtis. But she soon begins to feel that all is not right—the enforced diet of Slim-Fast shakes, the strange clicking language between the girls, the monthly disappearance of a lumberjack. By the time Patty discovers murder is part of the office skill set, it’s too late to turn back!

In the guise of satiric exploitation-horror, The Secretaries takes an unflinching look at the warping cultural expectations of femininity and the ways women themselves are often the enforcers of sexism.

Click here for an ASL interpreted description.

“One of the most uproarious plays staged in Portland in recent memory” -Willamette Week (Read the review!)

“Loud, Lewd, and Gleefully Weird” -The Oregonian (Read the review!)

“Just what the world needs right now” -Oregon ArtsWatch (Read the review!)

Watch the trailer: 

(Photos by David Kinder)

JUNE 14th – JULY 1st, 2018

Alder Stage at Artists Rep

** See the schedule of vibrant IN DIALOGUE events for this run HERE **  

(Comedians, Novelists & Queers, oh my!)

ABOUT THE FIVE LESBIAN BROTHERS HERE

CAST & CREATIVE  (All-Female!)

(left to right)

Andrea White, Susan

Jamie M. Rea, Dawn

Claire Rigsby, Patty

Jen Rowe, Peaches

Kelly Godell, Ashley

Directed by Dawn Monique Williams

Stephanie Mulligan, Stage Manager

Megan Wilkerson, Scenic Design

Emily Wilken, Props Master

Wanda Walden, Costume Design

Jennifer Lin, Lighting Design

Jen Raynak, Sound Design

Lilo Alfaro, Production Assistant

Kristen Mun, Fight Director

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Read the playbill

Wednesday, February 7th, 2018

by Megan Burbank

“Undeniable and frightening political resonance”

https://www.portlandmercury.com/theater/2018/02/07/19660118/roller-coasters-emotional-and-otherwise-in-25-minute-ride

Wednesday, February 7th, 2018

“A scalding standup routine and a love letter to her father.”

“Packed with affectionate jabs”

“A spectacular showcase for the talents of actress Allison Mickelson”

“Packed with affectionate jabs”

“A spectacular showcase for the talents of actress Allison Mickelson”

http://www.wweek.com/arts/theater/2018/02/07/2-5-minute-ride-recalls-a-drug-addled-trip-to-an-amusement-park-and-a-sobering-journey-to-auschwitz/

A comprehensive introduction to and review of 2.5 Minute Ride.

“A journey worth taking”

“Powerful in its simplicity”  

“Very funny”

“Mickelson makes the perfect Lisa”

A swift and savvy ride

2.5 Minute Ride 2 Decades Later

We asked Lisa to reflect on the creation of 2.5 Minute Ride, now that it’s been two decades since it first premiered.  She kindly shared an brief insightful essay on her experience making the piece and its relevancy today.

I worked on 2.5 Minute Ride for five years, from 1995 until it opened in its completed form at the Public Theater in 2000.  I was 39 years old then and I remember feeling I had reached the summit of a mountain I hadn’t realized I was climbing.  It occurred to me then that throughout the previous 20 years, which had felt distressingly aimless as I was going through them, I had actually been doggedly, if unconsciously, accumulating the craft I would need to…what?  I was going to say “tell my father’s story.”  But 2.5 Minute Ride isn’t a story.  It’s a serial deconstruction of stories I yearned to tell about my father’s life.

Before 2.5 Minute Ride, I had tried to tell those stories in a previous show.  It went badly, though at the time I thought it was aces.  It felt extremely satisfying, telling those stories on stage.  And I thought the show had been a success until, about six or eight months later, I watched the archival video.  And I was plunged into a months-long feeling of humiliation and shame.  My father had lived through a cataclysm that cost him everything.  Watching that video, I saw myself reveling in my ability to ignite a charge in the audience by repeating his accounts of that cataclysm—a narrative thrill ride that ultimately cost me and my audience nothing.   

My father spoke about the things that had happened to him with a disarming equanimity.  He always couched his recollections in the context of history’s long arc.  He never saw his experiences as singular, but as part of the human continuum.  I think that gave him comfort.  It also gave him a way to stand to the side of trauma, while remaining engaged with his past.  But there was something else, as well, something unsettled at the core of his stories, something he was still grappling with.

There’s a difference between lived experiences and the stories we tell about them. Stories are created after the fact: we choose a handful of elements from the great swirl and arrange them into constellations of comprehensibility and meaning.   But life, as we live it, has no narrative.  It sweeps us ceaselessly forward, demanding that we act and react but providing none of the context or certainty that will come with hindsight. 

At the center of my father’s cannon of stories were those about people he had known who raised their voices, even at great risk, who had the courage to stand up and say, “This way of treating other people is wrong and I will not go along with it.”  The question my father couldn’t stop asking himself, that hovered in the background of every story he told, was “How could I have behaved better?  In what ways could I have been more humane?” 

My dad died in 2015.  I miss being able to talk to him about current events.  I miss the wisdom of his long perspective.  I yearn to hear his thoughts about this current regime.  I’m also relieved he’s not here to see it.  He would have a fascinating analysis.  But so many times in this past year I’ve read the news, wondering if these events would trigger in him a fresh unleashing of old trauma. 

This weekend, as I write this essay, is the one year anniversary of the Women’s March.  This morning I was at one of the many rallies across the U.S., across the globe, where people gathered to affirm their steadfast commitment to resist, and I realized that not all of the events past year would have been a source of trauma for my father.  The hundreds of thousands rising up to say “This way of treating people is wrong and I will not go along with it,” would have moved him beyond measure.

-Lisa Kron, January 2018

Thanks to Amy Wang at The Oregonian for a lovely preview of the 2018-19 season, beginning with 2.5 Minute Ride on January 25th!

Read the full article HERE

Lisa Kron grew up in Lansing, Michigan and like many artists, moved to New York after college. As a teenager and young woman in Michigan and in New York, she pursued acting in straight plays, increasingly dissatisfied with the roles for women, and especially LGBTQ women. Seeing the work of the  pioneering group Split Britches had a profound impact. Lisa writes, “it was so beautiful and complete and so utterly unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was strange yet totally familiar. Funny and heartbreaking and so sexy.  It was non linear – that blew my Midwestern MIND. And – they made it themselves. To me this was a revelation.”

Through Split Brithes, Lisa found her way to the WOW Cafe, a hot-bed for experimental lesbian-centered work in the New York’s East Village, the city’s bohemian heart. At WOW’s tiny storefront theatre she found a like-minded tribe of theatre-makers devising their own work, writing their own plays,  sometimes in a few months, sometimes in a few days, with sets and costumes made from found materials. It was here that she started doing her own solo work. And it was here that she, her girlfriend Peg Healy, and friends Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, formed the Five Lesbian Brothers. Throughout the ‘90s, both Lisa’s solo work and the plays created with the Brothers gained increasing prominence, and were produced throughout New York at PS 122, The Kitchen, Dixon Place, HERE Arts Center and eventually at large off-Broadway venues like New York Theatre Workshop and in 1997 The Public Theater, where 2.5 Minute Ride opened to rave reviews, winning OBIE, Drama-logue and GLAAD Awards.

The Public Theater became an artistic home for Lisa, developing and producing her plays Well, which transferred to Broadway, earning Tony nominations for Lisa and co-star Jayne Houdyshell; In The Wake, Lisa’s most traditionally well-made play; and Fun Home, her musical written with Tony-winning composer Jeanine Tessori, which also transferred to Broadway, winning 5 of its 12 Tony nominations, including Best Musical of 2015.

Throughout it all, what makes Lisa’s writing indelibly Lisa’s is her interest in the mix of theatrical forms — from the straight play to solo story-telling to ensemble-generated work, sometimes co-existing in the same piece — her commitment to politically-engaged work, and her conviction that laughter and tears, joy and sorrow, can inhabit the same moment. You’re in for a wildly funny and deeply moving ride.

-Josh Hecht, Artistic Director

For more information contact info@profiletheatre.org

Media Release 2.5 Minute Ride

Browse the Playbill

2.5 Minute Ride by Lisa Kron. Directed by Jane Unger. Scenic Design by Peter Ksander. Costume Design by Sarah Gahagen. Actor: Allison Mickelson. Photo by David Kinder

2.5 Minute Ride by Lisa Kron. Directed by Jane Unger. Scenic Design by Peter Ksander. Costume Design by Sarah Gahagen. Actor: Allison Mickelson. Photo by David Kinder

2.5 Minute Ride by Lisa Kron. Directed by Jane Unger. Scenic Design by Peter Ksander. Costume Design by Sarah Gahagen. Actor: Allison Mickelson. Photo by David Kinder

2.5 Minute Ride by Lisa Kron. Directed by Jane Unger. Scenic Design by Peter Ksander. Costume Design by Sarah Gahagen. Actor: Allison Mickelson. Photo by David Kinder

2.5 Minute Ride by Lisa Kron. Directed by Jane Unger. Scenic Design by Peter Ksander. Costume Design by Sarah Gahagen. Actor: Allison Mickelson. Photo by David Kinder

2.5 Minute Ride by Lisa Kron. Directed by Jane Unger. Scenic Design by Peter Ksander. Costume Design by Sarah Gahagen. Actor: Allison Mickelson. Photo by David Kinder

2.5 Minute Ride by Lisa Kron. Directed by Jane Unger. Scenic Design by Peter Ksander. Costume Design by Sarah Gahagen. Actor: Allison Mickelson. Photo by David Kinder

2.5 Minute Ride by Lisa Kron. Directed by Jane Unger. Scenic Design by Peter Ksander. Costume Design by Sarah Gahagen. Actor: Allison Mickelson. Photo by David Kinder