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John Rudoff

John Rudoff is a photojournalist and documentary photographer living in Portland, Oregon. He also occasionally reviews theater. 
Posted inTheater & Performance

Theater Review: Waiting for Godot Is Samuel Beckett—Straight, No Chaser

Portland’s Irish theater-focused company Corrib has devoted this season to Godot and works that respond to it.
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In the setting of a desolate landscape, two old men await someone named Godot. The duo, Vladimir (Roo Welsh) and Estragon (Karl Hanover), are friends to the extent that they use pet names for one another—Didi and Gogo—but their tones intermittently turn harsh or tender, as they recount their respective miseries and await their man. […]

Posted inTheater & Performance

Infinite Life: A Play About Pain That Hurts So Good

Third Rail Repertory kicks off its 2024-25 season with a work by contemporary theater star Annie Baker.
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Infinite Life opens with six, indistinct chaise lounge chairs set in stark California sun. Sofi (Maureen Porter) is reading there. Eileen—played by famous Portland blues artist LaRhonda Steele—joins her. They have a brief conversation about Sofi’s name. Then they talk about where they are: a low-end fasting clinic, which we later learn faces a bakery. […]

Posted inVisual Art

Beatlemania Through the Eyes of a Beatle

Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm provides the ultimate insider’s view of a singular cultural event.
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Imagine you’re a Beatle. After years of small, grinding successes in the Liverpool-London music scene, you’re riding a wave of international Beatlemania: screaming girls, luxe hotels, entourages, motorcades, and hundreds of photojournalists. You’re in the eye of a storm—willingly, but a storm nonetheless. A new gorgeously-produced and hung photography exhibit Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes […]

Posted inTheater & Performance

Ponder the Mysteries of Greg in Middletown Mall

Third Rail Repertory Theatre closes out their season in a mall wasteland.
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Middletown Mall is a marvelously bland name for a generic no-place middle-America shopping mall in the late ’90s. It is here that playwright Lava Alapai sets her scene and where Third Rail Repertory Theatre takes us for its final production of the 2023-24 season. While you may be initially drawn in by the energy of […]

Posted inTheater & Performance

Theater Review: Sanctuary City Follows Two Undocumented Teens Through the Chaos of the US Immigration System

Third Rail Repertory deftly adapts Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok’s gorgeous mosaic of lived experience.
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In contemporary US political language, a sanctuary city is a city where the local government has agreed not to assist our larger, federal government with immigration and deportation enforcement. Newark, New Jersey—where Third Rail Repertory’s latest production Sanctuary City is set—is one such municipality. It became one in 2017, around the same time as Portland—though […]

Posted inTheater & Performance

Theater Review: Grab a Guinness and Two Pints at CoHo Theater

Third Rail Repertory’s season opener is a gorgeous little diptych, two-hander play about a friendship between two Irishmen.
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Buy a Guinness in Coho Theater’s lobby before entering the intimately-lit set of Two Pints, and when you find yourself facing a flawless facsimile of an Irish pub, watching a barkeep glide by with a rag and tray of glasses—well, you get the point. You’re there. You’re in the audience, but you’re also in a […]

Posted inTheater & Performance

Theater Review: Artists Repertory Theatre’s True Story Packs a Hard-Boiled Punch

Oregon playwright E. M. Lewis has penned a timeless noir play.
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Artists Repertory Theatre’s final production of its 2022-23 season is a richly characterized work that falls forward into a hard-boiled whirlwind around a seemingly innocuous writing assignment. With just five characters and 80 minutes Oregon playwright E. M. Lewis unpacks how easy it is to lose the plot line of truth. Read the review from photographer and critic John Rudoff.

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