It’s easy to think of summer as dead time for Portland theater. But that sentiment, while not wholly unearned—how many Shakespeare productions can one woman take?—ignores a whole slew of innovative performances that only arrives once the regular theater season is over.
Consider: Summer in Portland begins with the Risk/Reward Festival and ends with PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival. In between, CoHo Productions’ Summerfest is yet another chance to see something outside the more traditional offerings of prime time, as the company deviates from its usual programming in favor of four shows running over four weekends, which are likely to have more in common with performance art than the reanimated corpse of Thornton Wilder (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
This year’s festival opened promisingly last week with Australian theater artist and comedian Emily June Newton’s Frank: To Be Frank, in which an aging celebrity shares his remembrances with his adoring public.