What a fantastic show. The Imago Theatre have outdone themselves with their latest, written and directed by Imago’s own Carol Triffle: The Dinner is a hilarious unpacking of all the insecurity and anxiety and jealousy and resentment that could possibly be contained in one ill-fated dinner party. Dolores is a housewife and aspiring writer whose […]
Alison Hallett
Alison Hallett served nobly as the Mercury's arts editor from 2008-2014. Her proud legacy lives on.
Posted inTheater & Performance
From a Dream to a Dream
H and2Mouth is a restless, innovative young ensemble whose 2007 show Repeat After Me was the only local theater production in last year’s TBA Festival. Their new show, From a Dream to a Dream, opens this weekend in co-production with the Polish company Teatr Stacja Szamocin, whose members have flown in for the two-week run. […]
Posted inMovies & TV
XXY
A Succinct Review for the Discerning Cinephile
Lucía Puenzo’s excellent XXY does something really impressive: It makes a very specific and unusual circumstance into a coming-of-age story that’s both accessible and universally relevant. Alex (Inés Efron) was born with an extra chromosome, the most dramatic physical manifestation of which was the growth of both boy parts and girl parts. At birth, her […]
Posted inMovies & TV
I’m Going Out
Trashy Fun
Mercury Film Editor Erik Henriksen assigned me to write a piece about “why Sex and the City is like catnip to anyone with a vagina.” I can only assume I received this assignment because I happen to have a vagina—although, unlike my cat after a session with his favorite catnip-filled chew toy, a few episodes […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Morphine Dreams
The Fall: Adventures in Drug-Addled Babysitting
If contemporary kids’ movies are to be believed, children’s imaginations are glib, computer-generated videogame-scapes, full of skateboarding giraffes and wisecracking sea turtles. Alongside Guillermo del Toro’s recent Pan’s Labyrinth, Tarsem Singh’s The Fall refuses to countenance this candy-coated version of a child’s brain—taking us instead to a darker and far more interesting place. The Fall […]
Posted inMusic
Rhythm of the Night
The Mercury‘s Dance Party Field Test
We spill a lot of ink on these pages devoted to music, but with bands coming and going through town it’s sometimes easy to forget the resident nights of DJ-ed entertainment that actually get you through the week time and time again. And while it used to be a joke that “Portland doesn’t dance,” the […]
Posted inBooks
American Nerd: The Story of My People
by Benjamin Nugent (Scribner)
As one would expect from an author who also penned a book called Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing, Benjamin Nugent’s American Nerd does acknowledge the hipster nerd appropriation phenomenon so prevalent in this town and others [see Letters for further griping on the subject]. The book as a whole, though, is a very unironic […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
The Labyrinth of Desire
I saw the Miracle Theatre Group’s production of The Labyrinth of Desire on the first really nice day of last week—it was physically difficult to leave the blue skies and long-awaited summer heat for the cool, dark confines of the Milagro Theatre. But if I entered the theater with reluctance, two hours later I walked […]
Posted inNews
Tears, Cheers, and Beers
A Recap of Tuesday Night’s Election Results by the Mercury‘s Election Squad
IT WAS A PRIMARY ELECTION season marked, from the Democratic presidential contest on down, by excruciatingly close races—at least according to the pre-election day polls and punditry. According to poll numbers, Sho Dozono was holding Sam Adams under the 50 percent mark in the race for Portland mayor, and Steve Novick was consistently neck and […]
Posted inBooks
James Frey and Josh Kilmer-Purcell
Reading at the Bagdad Theater
This reading is an intriguing mess: James Frey and Josh Kilmer-Purcell are touring together, on new books and a certain amount of personal notoriety. In 2006, Kilmer-Purcell wrote a memoir called I Am Not Myself These Days, a bestseller about what it’s like to be a drag queen in love with a crack-addicted male prostitute […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
The History Boys
What is going on at the Artists Repertory Theatre lately? The bar has been incrementally dropping all season (a recent, decent production of Streetcar notwithstanding), and their current limp production of The History Boys does nothing to counter the downward tendency. Alan Bennett’s multiple Tony Award-winning script focuses on a group of bright secondary students […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Calling All Vaginas!
(It’s Okay—A Girl Wrote that Headline!)
There are approximately 807 film festivals in Portland every year, but there’s only one—one—dedicated to women filmmakers, and we haven’t seen a full-fledged festival lineup from them since 2003. But the Portland Women’s Film Festival is back, and after five years of fundraising, networking, building a fancy website, and making friends with folks like this […]