Eugene Weekly

The Very Little Theatre is among the oldest community theaters in the country. Quietly successful, the unassuming venue boasts some of the most reliable ticket sales in town. From them we’ve come to expect the earnest Arthur Miller drama, British farce and classic musical comedy — comfortable chestnuts staged by a representative slice of the Eugene community. But a new spirit is moving within the aging, wood-paneled walls. Recently elected VLT president Jay Hash is a mere 31 years old, and he presides over a fresh theater board looking to shake things up. Continue reading →

Ellie Greenwich is the boss. A master songwriter, Greenwich had a hand in composing buckets of Top 40 hits, such as “Chapel of Love,” “Hanky Panky,” “Da Doo Ron Ron” and other baby-boomer jams. Continue reading →

Claire, Jason, Warren and Deb are just four ordinary New Yorkers, but their lives intersect in the most extraordinary ways as they search with classic longing for love and fulfillment in a very modern setting. Ordinary Days is a contemporary musical by up-and-coming American composer Adam Gwon. According to Charles Isherwood of The New York Times, “Mr. Gwon writes crisp, fluid and often funny lyrics that reflect the racing minds of the four New Yorkers on a nervous search for their immediate futures.” Continue reading →

According to the National Survey of High School Biology Teachers, 13 percent of American high school bio teachers explicitly teach creationism in the classroom. Sixty percent give evolution very little class time and 17 percent don’t even touch the subject at all, wanting to avoid the whole controversy. These statistics speak to the state of radical religious interference with education, which gives a ’50s play new relevance in the 21st century. Continue reading →

A witty, often biting examination of neighborhood integration, white flight, gentrification and just how far we have not come in the last half century, Clybourne Park is playwright Bruce Norris’ 21st-century response to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, in which a black family plans to move into a white neighborhood. Norris’ play, now at Oregon Contemporary Theatre, takes Hansberry’s tale of balancing assimilation and heritage full circle as white professionals return with grand plans to the neighborhoods their grandparents fled. Continue reading →

Lavish parties, love, murder, truth and ennui: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 tale of the amoral moneyed class continues to raise questions in a new century. Tangled up in someone else’s messy, selfish love triangle, Nick Carraway is simultaneously dazzled and disgusted by the wealthy residents of Long Island. His questions of money, power and what some people expect to be able to buy in this world are particularly apt in 2014.  Continue reading →