Stage&Studio

Dmae Roberts opens up the audio vault with Talking With The Wind: The Mystery of Opal Whiteley. This half-hour documentary was first produced in 1986 with playwright Dorothy Velasco and tells the story of a young woman from Cottage Grove, Oregon who became the center of an international controversy when critics declared her diary a hoax.

Olga Kravtsova is a Russian-born movement director, performer, and interdisciplinary artist artist who lives in Portland. She is opening a new solo show called “Harvest of Woman” which she describes as a “raw excavation of women’s unseen labor, endurance, and survival.”

Donald Horn, the founder and managing artistic director of Triangle Productions brings back an encore production of "That's No Lady." The show is a loving tribute to the life and accomplishments of Walter Cole, otherwise known as his alter ego, the legendary Darcelle. The show also honors Cole's life partner for decades Roc Neuhart (Roxy).

When Scarlett Johansson took on an anime character role in a live action version of The Ghost In The Shell in 2016, Actor, writer and comedian got the spark to perform as Scarlett Johansson. Asian American groups instantly protested a white actress taking on the beloved character from  a Japanese cyberpunk story based on a manga series saying it was a "whitewashed" role. Johansson defended it saying that an actor had a right to play any role. And that’s the premise of actor Chris Grace’s new show Chris Grace As Scarlett Johansson

Laura Lo Forti and Damaris Webb have run the Vanport Mosaic Festival as co-directors for ten years which in itself is an admirable achievement built on trust, hard work and mutual friendship, each respecting the others desire for art, activism and community engagement.

Playwright Sara Jean Accuardi is about to set sail on her World Premiere production of The Storyteller. Accuardi has had her plays produced in Portland at Shaking the Tree Theatre, Theatre Vertigo, and more recently Artist Repertory Theatre.  She’s had productions in other parts of the country such as the Playmakers Repertory Company, The Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, and Victory Gardens to name a few.

Dmae talks with Jane Vogel Mantiri (Indo writer/actor and founder of Advance Gender Equity) and Samson Syharath (theater artist and co-founder of Theatre Diaspora) about their journeys with cultural diaspora. Both are performing personal solo plays dramatizing their explorations into family secrets and the effects of war and myth on their own identities. They premiere their separate shows at the 2025 Fertile Ground Festival, a city-wide festival starting April 4-19th featuring all local theater works.

In 2015 famed playwright of verbatim” or “documentary” theater, Anna Deavere Smith created a solo show called “Notes From the Field.” Drawn from more than 200 interviews with students, parents, teachers administrators, Smith played multiple characters who talk about the school to prison pipeline. “Notes From the Field” is even more pertinent today

Simon Tam is one of the few, if any, rock musicians to have received a major award from the American Bar Association. Co-founded in 2006 as an all-Asian American dance band paying homage to 80's music, the Portland-originated The Slants were denied the right to trademark their name. Tam had to fight a case all the way to the US Supreme Court in order to get the band name trademarked.