Theatre

Inside the Wilsonville Public Library’s Oak Room, Wilsonville Stage transformed a meeting room into Isabel Hastings Hoyt’s memory-filled New York parlor. The Golden Age became an intimate, funny, and unexpectedly moving encounter with literary history, freedom, and the stories we choose to preserve.

A Tennessee Williams play revealed itself less as a mystery than as a meditation on memory, testimony, and truth. Performed on Lakewood’s intimate Side Door Stage by Thesmophoria Presents, Suddenly, Last Summer offered an unforgettable afternoon of independent theatre.

A wartime assignment, a skeptical journalist, and a household of unforgettable women. “The Cover of Life” uses humor, warmth, and quiet humanity to reveal why some stories cannot be understood until we take the time to truly listen.

A soaked princess swims a moat, gets mistaken for a chambermaid, and quietly destabilizes an entire kingdom simply by refusing refinement. Broadway Rose Theatre’s “Once Upon a Mattress” embraced physical comedy, theatrical chaos, and surprising tenderness beneath its fairytale absurdity.

For several hours, Keller Auditorium ceased to feel like a theater in downtown Portland and became something suspended between architecture, memory, and illusion. Beneath chandeliers, curtains, and shadow, “The Phantom of the Opera” transformed physical space into a world that seemed temporarily detached from the city surrounding it.

A matinee performance of “Witch” at Clackamas Community College led back to the real story of Elizabeth Sawyer, executed for witchcraft in England in 1621. More than four centuries later, her story continues to echo through theatre, raising questions about fear, reputation, and how societies treat those living at the margins.

On a 2:30 p.m. matinee in Tigard, I moved confidently through Agatha Christie’s snowbound maze, convinced I was closing in on the answer. I wasn’t wrong about the clues—only about which ones I chose to trust.

Performed without announcement, Scene 5 of ‘Almost, Maine’ shifted into a study of intimacy, panic, and the risk of naming what already makes sense between two women.

In Clackamas Repertory Theatre’s Dial M for Murder, a carefully designed London flat held more than a clever murder plot. Beneath its soft drapes and shadowed doorways, Margot and Maxine’s relationship became the emotional truth of the story.