The best part of Aw, Hell is the walking tour at the beginning—it's not a long trek, though it is heavy on rules: No sinning. No laughing. No touching, but the monsters can touch you.
Ancient Roman poet Virgil meets the audience at the entrance to Hell—currently located in the Reed College Performing Arts Building. He's uniformed in a trench coat, boxers, knee-high, striped tube socks, and an ill-fitting bald cap, and barks an introduction via a wearable voice amplifier, addressing everyone in the audience as Dante. As a group, we are Dante Alighieri, the 14th-century poet who wrote an oft-referenced outline of Hell called the Divine Comedy.
Plenty remember the Divine Comedy's concentric, punishing rings—lust people go here, greed people go there—but the sweet little story of a sin-filled poet making his way through the underworld is largely forgotten. Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble (PETE) color brightly outside the lines with their interpretation of a clown Inferno, but surprisingly maintain some of Dante's most touching notes of regret, unearned grace, and undying hope.
Over the course of the "Inferno tour," Virgil is played by every member of the cast: PETE members Rebecca Lingafelter, Damaris Webb, Roo Welsh, Cristi Miles, and Amber Whitehall, along with Emily Newton, a celebrated comedic performer and internationally known clown.
Performers swap fluidly and speedily between countless roles for the varied skits that make up the rest of the journey. Costumed in a ballgown of what appeared to be tinfoil and shiny, flexible ductwork, Whitehall was powerful as sorrowful Beatrice: a personification of divine love. She also got some of the biggest laughs as a comically-shrieking seducer forced to perform a self-flaying striptease.
Given PETE's lauded prowess in physical theater, it's surprising that the troupe only recently brought in Newton—along with clown dramaturg Sasha Blocker—to collaborate. Lingafelter estimated it's been about six months, during a one-off, post-show clown panel.
Indicative of this new partnership, Aw, Hell is very heavy on toilet humor. Silly String jizz, erotic pantomime, and general pantslessness pervade the work—though not for want of Virgil's attempts to extort pants from audience members. But these things are not so outside of PETE's toolbox. During the company's 2024 staging of A Seagull, Whitehall and this show's director Jacob Coleman engaged in a conversation about relationship control, while crawling over one another in an acrobatic double-roll on top of a table. It was suggestive and penetrating and clearly the climax, stealing the fire from that work's inevitable gunshot.
Aw, Hell's Sunday night clown panel helped illuminate just how clowning fills out the work's layers. You'll find maybe one red nose (and it's not squeaky). The cast's clowning shows up more in moments of ironic stage presence, drawn out comedic bits, and easy-to-miss audience interaction. PETE aren't dragging people out of seats, but they're talking to us and playing with buffoonery at our responses. Most noticeable: Someone in the room let fly an awe-inspiring, deadly fart in the show's last 20 minutes, and it led to some ad-libbed material about an infernal storm that awaits those engaged in carnal passions, where you can also shamelessly fart as much as you like.
The majority of Aw, Hell's 100-minute run is presented in a theater setting with the audience sitting around a stage overlaid with a projected rotating spiral, and scenes are punctuated with flashing lights. If those sound like dealbreakers for you, don't ignore your worries—they made us pretty queasy. It was one of the things that didn't work for us, even as we respect the clown journey PETE has embarked upon.
If you can, linger in the brief hell house corridor, where various Virgils guard doors to areas like Limbo and "the blood pool." We appreciated the note about Hell's burning sands being under construction (as a necessary expansion to accommodate crowds of recent DOGE employee additions) and wished for more dense, fleeting material like it.
Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble presents Aw, Hell at Reed College Performing Arts Building, 3017 SE Woodstock, shows through Sat July 12, $25-45, tickets and showtimes at petensemble.org/aw-hell.
