Artists Repertory Theatre’s decision to set A Streetcar Named Desire in a mental hospital sounds gimmicky—like a beatnik version of Hamlet, or My Fair Lady as performed by clowns. The show is staged as a flashback experienced by an institutionalized Blanche DuBois. For the first half of the play, this does indeed feel like a […]
Alison Hallett
Alison Hallett served nobly as the Mercury's arts editor from 2008-2014. Her proud legacy lives on.
Posted inMovies & TV
Last Year at Marienbad
A Succinct Review for the Discerning Cinephile
Alain Resnais’ 1961 French film Last Year at Marienbad is both highly regarded and almost entirely inscrutable. Anyone who claims to understand it is lying: Last Year at Marienbad is not a film you “get,” but a film you have theories about. (If you Google it, you turn up essays like “Last Year at Marienbad: […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
Sometimes a Great Notion
Sometimes a Great Notion is a book that’s near and dear to the hearts of many a Pacific Northwesterner (read it, if you haven’t), and hopes are high for Portland Center Stage’s production. A locally developed show, cast with a decent number of local actors (though none of the leads, it must be noted), based […]
Posted inBooks
True Tales of Rollerderby
A comic book about the Rose City Rollers is one of those ideas that’s so obvious, once you’ve heard about it, that it seems strange such a thing hasn’t been hit on before—like a Flowbee, or those IKEA ice trays that make heart-shaped ice cubes. When I asked Lisa Titan (AKA “Titania”) how she got […]
Posted inBooks
Animal’s People
by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)
The fictional town of Khaufpur—the setting of Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People—is based on Bhopal, India, where a 1984 gas leak at a Union Carbide chemical plant caused thousands of deaths and countless more injuries. (Corporate accountability being what it is, residents of Bhopal are to this day lobbying for reparations and cleanup.) Sinha’s novel is […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
Throwing Bones
Sojourn Theatre does some of the most ambitious work in town, and with their new site-specific work Throwing Bones, the ante is higher than ever. The show sounds a little random, if not downright woo-woo: South African healing traditions? Portland? Health care? There will be dancing? The show is based on research conducted in South […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Don’t Mess with Texas
Soldiers on the Run in Stop Loss
Stop Loss is the sophomore effort from writer/director Kimberly Peirce, and it is clearly motivated by the same empathetic social sensibility that made her 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry such a heartwrencher. But where Boys devastatingly humanized the consequences of homophobia, Stop Loss relies on stereotypes and cartoonish oversimplification to critique the US military. It’s […]
Posted inBooks
The English American
Alison Larkin (Simon & Schuster)
It would not be fair to dismiss Alison Larkin’s The English American out of hand for its frivolity. Everyone knows that books with large text and little subtext between their widely spaced lines make for the best bus reading, and Larkin’s first novel has an easy-to-follow voice that easily accommodates the stops and starts of […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
An Afternoon of One Acts
The Northwest Classical Theatre Company (NWCTC)’s Grant Turner introduced this Sunday program as a “dour afternoon” of one acts, before concluding that the shows are each about the strength of the human spirit. Fair warning, but the attempt to illuminate the bright side of this grim little lineup seems more like wishful thinking than text-based […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
Landscape of the Body
If I could, I would base my entire review of Profile Theatre’s Landscape of the Body on two very specific aspects of the production: (1) The live music provided by bassist Will Ammend and pianist Bill Wells, which endowed many a scene with a much-needed liveliness; and (2) The Danny DeVito-meets-Gilbert Gottfried comedic stylings of […]
Posted inMovies & TV
That’s What Friends Are For
A Harrowing, Grim Four Months
By the end of the Romanian drama Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, friendship, family, and romantic love have all been quietly eviscerated. What’s left is an ambiguous tribute to strength of character, a critical but not unsympathetic depiction of the lengths to which one young woman goes to help a friend. An inquisitive camera […]
Posted inBooks
Arkansas
by John Brandon (McSweeney’s)
Add novelist John Brandon to your list of hipster-sanctioned must-reads: His first book, Arkansas, has just been released by the McSweeney’s Rectangulars imprint. The predictably well-designed hardcover tells the story of two disaffected Southern boys who have drifted into a life of crime with the same nonchalance that someone else might take a job as […]