For playwright Kallan Dana, having Racecar Racecar Racecar produced at Artists Repertory Theatre is a special homecoming. “I feel so lucky to get to come back and do a show there,” she says. “The Portland theater scene was such a huge part of my childhood and adolescence.” Now living in Brooklyn, Dana grew up in Multnomah Village. Theater was a huge part of her childhood, her parents often took her to Artists Rep shows, and she cut her teeth at both Northwest Children’s Theater and Oregon Children’s Theatre.
Interim artistic director Luan Schooler heard about a production of Racecar in New York and reached out to Dana when she found out she was from Portland. The company wanted to produce a lineup of women playwrights with ties to the Pacific Northwest for their 2025-2026 season. “It’s a truly original and startlingly funny play that explores complicated choices and relationships in a unique way,” says Schooler.
Billed as a Lynchian thriller, Racecar hops in the car with an unnamed father and daughter on a cross country road trip. As with anything described as Lynchian, something uneasy bubbles under the surface and things get weird. The duo picks up hitchhikers with inscrutable agendas, meets living memories from their past, and Jo March from Little Women makes a cameo. Dana cites Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Drive and Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things as major influences on the piece.
Despite these influences, Racecar has simple origins. Dana challenged herself to write a symmetrical play that revolved around a central event. “Restrictions are helpful for writing,” she says, “because it’s really overwhelming when you’re looking at a blank page and are like, ‘I could do anything.’ That, in fact, makes me feel like I can’t do anything.”
Racecar’s symmetrical structure mirrors a palindrome—a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards—which becomes central to the narrative and gives the play its title.
The play’s road trip fits the structure perfectly, set up in two parts of equal length that revolve around a destination. Family road trips were also a part of Dana’s life growing up. “I had extremely positive memories on those road trips that are still great sources of comfort to me,” she says. “I also have memories that are the source of my nightmares. They’re all kind of intertwined.”
Like many theater college students, first at Skidmore and later at Northwestern, where she completed her MFA, Dana describes her driving force to make her work, “capital ‘W’ weird.” But as she’s developed as an artist, she says she sees form and content as intertwined. “In every project you have to invent what the style is, of each play, each time. I have another play that’s set in Portland that also has surreal moments, but it’s much more grounded in naturalistic scenes.”
It’s the foggy nature of childhood memories that lends Racecar its weirdness. “Childhood is full of super confusing, upsetting moments that don’t quite make sense and that are out of their control,“ Dana says. “I was interested in writing something that dealt with the oscillating nature of nostalgia.”
Similarly, within the work itself, father and daughter have travelled this road before, so past and present easily bleed together. Each remembers their shared past differently, and neither sees the other as a reliable narrator, so as they try to make sense of what they mean to each other, they sort through beautiful and painful memories alike.
The production’s director Melory Mirashrafi says that memory has become central to how she understands the show. “Think of a memory from your childhood,” says Mirashrafi. “What’s in focus? What feels blurry? When I think of moments from my childhood, sometimes I discover that my memories are a story someone told me, or something I’ve slowly (and maybe deliberately) warped over time. Memory is slippery. So is family. Kallan explores the two with deep creativity and surprising abandon.”
Surrealism can be a difficult needle to thread as a playwright, but Dana uses surreal and tense aspects to peel back her characters and expose the parts of them they’d rather keep hidden from each other and themselves. “As an audience, I’m frustrated when I feel like things are happening for no reason. I always want it to be connected to something emotional or a character’s psychology,” Dana explains. “In Mulholland Drive it feels like so many moments were just pure dream logic, but then it culminates in emotional realization for the main character. It feels like, actually, all of the places it goes to are connected to her.”
That was particularly exciting to Mirashrafi. “This play is unafraid of complexity,” she explains, “and full of opportunities for our cast and designers to, for lack of better words, pop the fuck off. In short, come for the spectacle, stay for the brutal sting of reality.”
Racecar Racecar Racecar runs at Artists Repertory Theatre through Sun March 1, 75 minutes without intermission, $5-$60, tickets, showtimes, and content warnings at artistsrep.org.
