Rehearsals are underway for the final play of the 2016 Tanya Barfield Season! Look at the team artists bringing Bright Half Life to the stage.

Get tickets to Bright Half Life HERE.

CAST

Chantal DeGroat
Vicki

Chantal  is honored to perform again in this Profile season. Working with this team of women has been transformative. Chantal performed a reading of Bright Half Life this summer with The Hansberry Project (Seattle). Training: Shakespeare & Co., Emerson College. She is a Third Rail Repertory company member. Credits: Seattle Rep (2017), Intiman, Third Rail Rep, Portland Center Stage, Artists Rep, Badass Theatre, Portland Playhouse, Clackamas Rep, NWCTC, Jewish Theatre Co. Educator/Actress: August Wilson Red Door Project, Portland Center Stage, & Exeter University (England). She is Artistic Director & activist of The Color of NOW. Representation: Arthouse Talent. www.chantaldegroat.com

Maureen Porter
Erica

Maureen  is a Company Member of Third Rail Repertory Theatre where roles include Arphra Behn in Or, Maureen in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Belinda in Noises Off, Marian in Sweet &; Sad and That Hopey Changey Thing, Lisa in The Wonderful World of Dissocia, Pam in The Gray Sisters, Eleanor in Dead Funny, and Mom in Number Three. Other local credits include Dark Ahab in Or, The Whale with Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble, The Taming of the Shrew at Portland Shakespeare Project, Crooked at CoHo Theatre, No Exit and Betrayal at Imago. This is Maureen’s debut at Profile.

CREATIVE TEAM

Rebecca Lingafelter
Director
Rebecca is a local director, performer and educator. Directing credits include Peter and the Starcatcher (Portland Playhouse), Procedures for Saying No (PETE) Realistic Joneses (Third Rail), Tongues (Profile), Elective Affinities (Boom Arts), 448 Psychosis and As You Like it (Lewis & Clark). She is a company member at Third Rail Repertory Theatre and co-artistic director of Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble (PETE). Upcoming projects include co-directing The Angry Brigade (Third Rail Rep). Rebecca is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Lewis & Clark College. Columbia University, MFA.

Peter Ksander
Scenic Design
Peter is a scenographer and media artist whose stage design work has been presented both nationally and internationally. In 2008 he won an Obie award for the scenic design of Untitled Mars (this title may change), and in 2014 he won a Bessie award for the design of This Was the End. He holds a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, is an Associate Professor at Reed College and is an associate company member with the Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble. This his first show with Profile.

Miranda K. Hardy
Lighting Design
Miranda is a Lighting Designer based in Portland.  Previously with Profile she lit Master Harold and the Boys.  She is an associate company member with PETE (Portland Experimental Theater Ensemble) designing lights for R3 [Drammy Award], The Three Sisters, All Well, or, the whale, and Procedures For Saying No, designing scenery and lights for Song of the Dodo and Drowned Horse Tavern.  She has worked with Laura Heit on her shadow/animation spectacular The Letting Go and Alicia Jo Rabin’s Kaddish For Bernie Madoff.  Miranda has worked extensively in New York City, as well as nationally and internationally including four seasons as the resident Lighting Designer at Festival Di Due Mondi (Spoleto, IT).  Miranda holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts.

Jenny Ampersand
Costume Design
Jenny  is a designer based in Portland OR.  She is an associate artist with PETE (Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble), Liminal, and The Late Now.  With PETE, she just completed The Journey Play Constellation.  Other local credits include, costumes for Third Rail’s The Realistic Joneses, Oregon Children’s Theatre’s Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, Liminal’s 7deadly Sins (Drammy Award), scenery for PETE’s Enter THE NIGHT, Shaking the Tree’s A Doll’s House, Phame’s Up the Fall, and puppets for Strawberry Theatre Workshop’s This Land-Woody Guthrie.  She received her BFA in Scenic and Costume Design from Cornish College of the Arts.

Mark Valadez
Sound Design
Mark  is a sound designer who has made work in New York City, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Budapest. He is a proud member of Third Rail Repertory Theater and an associate artist with Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble (PETE). Third Rail credits include: Midsummer; A Play with Songs, The Mystery of Irma Vep, Belleville, Or, The Realistic Joneses, Mr. Kolpert, The New Electric Ballroom, Annapurna, and The Nether; with PETE: R3, The Song of the Dodo, The Three Sisters, Enter the Night, Drowned Horse Tavern, All Well, [or, the whale], and Procedures for Saying No.

D WESTERHOLM
Stage Manager
With Profile Theatre: Blue Door, The Call; 2014 Sam Shepard Season; 2015 Sarah Ruhl Season, The Road to Mecca. Other Portland stage management credits: Trevor, The Skin of Our Teeth (ASM), The Price (Artists Repertory Theatre); The Light in the Piazza (Portland Playhouse). Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Production Assistant: The Unfortunates (2013), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2013), Troilus and Cressida (2012), The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa (2012), Julius Caesar (2011), The African Company Presents Richard III (2011). BA in Theatre Management from Western Washington University, MFA in Stage Management from Columbia University. Active member of Actor’s Equity Association.

Charlie Capps
Production Assistant
Charlie graduated high-school from Arts and Communication Magnet Academy in 2015. He has taken part in the Summer Musical Intensive program for the past two years, designing scenery and stage managing for Once Upon A Mattress (2015) and Into The Woods (2016.) Since graduating, he took an internship at Artists Repertory Theatre as a stage management and scene shop intern where he worked on productions such as Mothers and Sons, We are Proud To Present…, and Grand Concourse. He was a member of the PATA Spotlight Award winning crew for The Skin Of Our Teeth. Most recently he was production manager on The Gun Show at CoHo Productions.

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Adriana Baer first reached out to us at String House last year about collaborating on Antigone Project, and we (Alex Leigh Ramirez, Kaye Blankenship, and myself) were instantly hooked on the prospect of a project so crammed with amazing female artists working on such potent and timely stories. When she pitched us the script for Antigone Arkhe, however, the third piece in the festival written by Caridad Svich, I was admittedly daunted. Arkhe is arguably the most structurally experimental of these one-acts; the text alone is tricky to grasp in its poetic and fragmentary nature, but the added elements of tightly integrated projection, video, and sound also make it a logistically ambitious piece to implement on its own, let alone as part of a larger suite of work. A collaborative co-production made immediate sense as the best way to deliver it to an audience, and despite the obvious challenges I couldn’t help but get more hooked on the script the longer I sat with it. The ideas this piece contains about narrative ownership, female empowerment, and the politics of storytelling itself are just too interesting for a director like myself to pass up exploring. In the end we simply couldn’t say no.

To me, Arkhe is a story about a woman who has had her story stolen. Here she has been relegated in death to pieces of what she once was– shards of memory, artifacts of experience, and bits and pieces of hearsay. In her absence these pieces have been collected and commodified without her consent in order to reshape the story of what happened to her. The Archivist represents this act of appropriation. She has taken ownership of everything that once belonged to Antigone, primary of which is the trauma of her experience, and neatly packaged it all so that it can be delivered to us, the audience, in a palatable form. The journey of Antigone Arkhe, therefore, is that of Antigone’s attempt to reclaim what is rightfully hers.

String House is keenly interested in the practice of storytelling, and it is something we have focused on tightly in our previous theatrical work. However, examining this particular subject through the lens of race yields an even greater depth of field than what we’ve worked with before. As a mixed race artist working in the world today, I am avidly interested in how we as an artistic community tell the stories of people of color; as such, this piece raises fascinating questions for me. For instance, when are depictions of racial trauma on stage empowering, and when are they disempowering? At what point as art-makers do we cross the line from giving voice to a community’s experience into co-opting it for titillation, edification, or dramatic affect? In the terms of this particular story, whether or not the Archivist’s intentions are good or bad, right or wrong, what right does she have, at the end of the day, to Antigone’s story? All loaded questions. Difficult questions. Questions I am excited to drop into a room filled with other amazing female artists of color for some deep exploration.

– Emily Gregory, Co-founder of String House Theatre and Director of Antigone Arkhe

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For additional information, please contact Marketing and Communications Manager Natalie Genter-Gilmore at natalie@profiletheatre.org or call 503.242.0080.

Antigone Project Media Release

Click on the thumbnails below to download the Photos files.

Andrea White and Cecily Overman in “Hang Ten,” part of Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts playing at Profile Theatre September 7-11, 2016. Photo by Owen Carey.

Seth Rue in “Hang Ten,” part of Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts playing at Profile Theatre September 7-11, 2016. Photo by Owen Carey.

Lauren Modica in “Medallion,” part of Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts playing at Profile Theatre September 7-11, 2016. Photo by Owen Carey.

Chris Murray in “Medallion,” part of Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts playing at Profile Theatre September 7-11, 2016. Photo by Owen Carey.

Alex Leigh Ramirez in “Antigone Arkhe,” part of Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts playing at Profile Theatre September 7-11, 2016. Photo by Owen Carey.

Andrea Whittle in “Antigone Arkhe,” part of Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts playing at Profile Theatre September 7-11, 2016. Photo by Owen Carey.

Andrea Whittle in “Antigone Arkhe,” part of Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts playing at Profile Theatre September 7-11, 2016. Photo by Owen Carey.

Andrea White in “A Stone’s Throw,” part of Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts playing at Profile Theatre September 7-11, 2016. Photo by Owen Carey.

Seth Rue and Lauren Modica in “A Stone’s Throw,” part of Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts playing at Profile Theatre September 7-11, 2016. Photo by Owen Carey.

Cecily Overman and Chris Murray in “Red Again,” part of Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts playing at Profile Theatre September 7-11, 2016. Photo by Owen Carey.

Cecily Overman and Andrea White in “Red Again,” part of Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts playing at Profile Theatre September 7-11, 2016. Photo by Owen Carey.

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Antigone is the gut-wrenching finale to Sophocles’ soul-and- spirit-wrenching Oedipus trilogy, which details the rise, fall, and inevitable fulfillment of prophecy of Oedipus. Following his timely death in the previous installment, Oedipus at Colonus, his lifelong battle with fate is passed down to his next of kin – sons Eteocles and Polyneices and our titular heroine, daughter Antigone. Their prophecy, foretold by the prophet Teiresias, states that the two brothers will kill each other in a battle for their late father’s seat as the King of Thebes. Antigone returns to Thebes, hoping to halt this prophecy, only to discover her brothers already dead and Polyneice’s body rotting in the town square. Creon, believing Polyneice a traitor, has made it illegal for him to receive proper burial rites. Refusing to accept Creon’s word as law, Antigone decides to bury her brother, leading to her imprisonment. Knowing she likely faces torture and death, Antigone hangs herself in her cell, defying Creon once again. In the wake of her suicide, Creon’s son (Antigone’s fiance) is stricken by grief and kills himself as well, leaving Creon to end the play in anguish.

Antigone is, at its heart, a story of defiance, of civil disobedience, of doing what is morally right in the face of unjust laws. The entire Oedipus trilogy revolves around these themes but the previous two installments focus mainly on the conflict of free will vs. fate (or prophecy). The battles are heady and internal and in many cases a character’s enemy is themselves, or what they may one day be. But Antigone is unique in that the prophecy has been fulfilled before Antigone ever enters Thebes. Her brothers lay dead and the wrong person is in power. So, what is she going to do about it?

For once, it is up to her.

As long as we as a society have governments and centralized powers, stories of civil disobedience will resonate. We often hear of protests and boycotts, walk-outs and sit-ins; in this Post-Ferguson, Post-Occupy world, people are realizing the power of like-minded groups. But what if you have no group? Antigone stands alone throughout the play. Her family is dead and the city she once called home is against her. She is a young woman fighting for what she knows to be right in a patriarchal society which views her as objectively lesser. It is not an uphill battle; it is a gravity-defying climb up a jagged rock face in a storm. Still she is defiant to her last breath.

Antigone is the perfect example of fighting for what is right, of overcoming the odds, of looking fate in the eyes and saying “not today”. Many ancient Greek plays became archaic long ago – but Antigone holds up and speaks as true today as the day it was written.

-London Bauman
Profile Dramaturgy Intern

Get tickets to Antigone Project: A Play in 5 Parts

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Dates of run: September 7-11, 2016
Directed by Dawn Monique Williams
Featuring Chris Murray*, Lauren Modica, Cecily Overman, Seth Rue*, Alex Leigh Ramirez,  Andrea White and Andrea Whittle.

“My favorite offering in (the) season” – Broadway World

Antigone Project: A Play in Five Parts is the exhilarating realization of a fascinating idea -reimagining the myth of Antigone- brought to life by some of the most vibrant contemporary voices in theatre.  Together, these five playwrights – Barfield, Hartman, Svich, Nottage and Miyagawa – present us with a kaleidoscope view of our society, exploring themes of honor, love, loyalty and mortality through this exceptional collection of plays. The five short plays are:

Hang Ten by Karen Hartman

Medallion by Tanya Barfield

Antigone Arke^ by Caridad Svich

A Stone’s Throw by Lynn Nottage

Red Again by Chiori Miyagawa

Conceived by Chiori Miyagawa and Sabrina Peck

^Antigone Arkhe presented with String House Theatre and directed by Emily Gregory.
(Read about our collaboration with String House HERE.)

Creative Team: Kaye Blankenship (Scenic Design), Jennifer Linn (Lighting Design), Sara Ludeman (Costume Design), Phillip Johnson (Sound Design) and Miranda Russ* (Stage Manager)

ASL interpreted performance: September 10, 2016

See the media kit for Antigone Project here.

See the playbill for Antigone Project here.

*Member Actor’s Equity Association, the professional union of actors and stage managers.

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