Portland Offers a Calling Card

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When a city stakes a claim to sophistication and social significance, a few indispensable items had better be in its possession: a major-league sports franchise, a newspaper that has taken a few scalps among local politicians, restaurants offering ethnic cuisines more recherche than Italian and Chinese. And, above all, a couple of first-class performing-arts troupes and a glistening new place for them to perform in. Until this year, Portland, Ore., comfortably qualified on the first three counts but was a little shaky on the last. Not only did its proudly refurbished downtown lack a local equivalent to Manhattan's Lincoln Center or Washington's Kennedy Center, but Portland actually qualified as the biggest U.S. city without a large-scale resident theater.

Not that it had not tried. Reputation-civic leaders started back in 1976 by romancing the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (O.S.F.), then based in the quiet college town of Ashland 285 miles south, to expand up north. The Portland suitors proposed installing Ashland's classical company in a funky former burlesque house or a renovated Masonic temple, but the facilities proved faulty, and eventually the whole idea died.

The city thereupon reconciled itself to the need for a new theater, and in 1981 voters approved a $19 million bond referendum for an arts complex. The theater, designed jointly by three architectural firms, would be beautiful: an elegant brick-and-glass exterior, a sweeping spiral staircase, luxurious lobbies and, far above the seats inside, a twinkling dome suggesting a planetarium. By then, Portland leaders hoped one of the city's own burgeoning theater companies could fill the intended 900-seat space. But one prospective tenant folded, and in 1986 a study for a local foundation concluded that no other Portland-based candidate could survive the demands of a first season.

So, with construction under way and a crisis in the making, Portland renewed its overtures to O.S.F. Officials there were committed to staying in Ashland yet interested but edgy about the prospect of adding a second operation. Says executive director William W. Patton: "We knew this was either the logical next step or a way to endanger everything we had done up to now." Among O.S.F.'s demands: enough local financial support that the two operations would not have to compete for resources. Portland came through, at last attaining its cultural calling card. Last month its new Center Stage opened with a robust version of Shaw's Heartbreak House and a bank-sponsored gala costing an estimated $25,000.

The honeymoon was at times as bumpy as the courtship. The architects and the board of the arts complex insisted on a picture-frame proscenium stage, a style popular at the turn of the century but widely rejected by directors today in favor of a more open stage that thrusts forward into the seating. Ashland officials protested the proscenium but lost. So for Heartbreak House they built a playing area in front of the permanent stage (at a loss of 50 seats) and artfully camouflaged the proscenium with dark masking in the hope that playgoers might not notice it.

Ashland's festival and the Portland troupe are bound to be a bit out of sync. About 90% of Ashland audiences are tourists who come from more than 150 miles away and stay several days, so the optimal schedule is a rotating repertory offering up to nine plays a week among three theaters. Portland will play mainly to local subscribers with successive shows, each in an uninterrupted run. Artistic director Jerry Turner vowed that there would be no + Shakespeare in Portland's inaugural season and that no play would transfer from one site to the other. He relented in order to share between the two the costs of staging Shakespeare's relatively obscure romance Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Also included in Portland's five-play inaugural subscription season will be the West Coast premiere of the off-Broadway hit Steel Magnolias, opening this week, plus Moliere's The Miser and Ted Tally's Terra Nova.

To judge from Heartbreak House, Portland's troupe, like Ashland's, will offer moments of novelty and insight within conventional stagings, accessible to the mainstream. The opening show, directed by Turner and stylishly spoken, played up Shaw's drawing-room comedy and muted the gloom in his vision of a bourgeoisie adrift toward World War I. Yet through keen attention to the text's use of sound, from bursts of laughter to claps of thunder, Turner adroitly prepared the audience both for the buzz of aerial bombs in the final scene and for the characters' pathetic unpreparedness. Portland's and Ashland's storm-tossed courtship has yielded a marriage of true minds.