Portland Story Theater’s love affair with storytelling began as a story circle in the living room. Every month, a group of story lovers gathered together to share their stories. In 2004 Portland Story Theater produced its first performance at CoHo. We went on to perform at Hipbone Studio, The Alberta Abbey, The Alberta Rose, The Fremont, The Old Church, and Nordia House. We also took our Urban Tellers shows On The Road to bring our unique brand of storytelling to the far corners of Oregon, and took our Armchair Adventurer series to the East Coast of the USA and to Europe.
Portland Story Theater’s work has always been to advance, inspire and expand our community narrative, one story at a time – and in doing so, preserve and promote the ancient art of storytelling in a way that enriches modern life, allowing and encouraging people to be vulnerable and present in ways that are crucial to the full expression of our humanity.
The fabulous folks from ArtsWatch spoke at Portland Story Theater’s farewell party. Here are a few words from Bob Hicks. Take a moment and read this beautiful tribute.
A Tribute to Portland Story Theater
by Bob Hicks of ArtsWatch, October 2024First and foremost, as you all know, these are two very good and generous people. I began as a journalist, writing about their shows, and we became friends. How could we not? I think we’ve even traded homemade pickles and the like – a sure sign of friendship.
Second, what they’ve done with Portland Story Theater is a remarkable thing – a form of theater that’s both very contemporary and very, very old. Storytelling, I think, is at the root of all things human, or at least of human civilization, and over the centuries there have been many ways of doing it – not just with words, but with paint and chisel and music and movement and more. The Urban Tellers stories, and Lawrence’s rambling and enveloping Armchair Adventures, hark back in many ways to the first stories we know of – the tales of gods and creatures and frightening encounters and loves and losses told by wandering Greek poets, the stories of old scriptures, the lone voice around a fireside at night, spinning a story of ghosts or heroes or long journeys or perils overcome. One person telling a story that might not be factual, and yet might be truthful. There is deep value in such a telling, stripped to its basics, without costumes, lighting, amplification or multiple performers: just a story and a storyteller and an audience to take it in.
Over the years I’ve followed Portland Story Theater from Hipbone Studio to Alberta Abbey, The Fremont Theater and The Old Church, right up to the pandemic and the shutdowns and the long wait, wondering when and whether Lynne and Lawrence might pick things up again. We have our answer now, and regretful as we might be, I also can’t help but feel happy for them that they’ve decided to end this chapter and move on with their lives. Thank you, deeply, for those years of mind-expanding pleasure.
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I took a little time to look back on some of the things I’ve written about Portland Story Theater over the years. This one’s from a 2013 performance at Hipbone:
“’There are eight million stories in the naked city,’ Jules Dassin’s 1948 police-procedural movie “The Naked City” and its long-running television spinoff famously declared. ‘This has been one of them.’
“Portland Story Theater’s Urban Tellers series might say the same – in the case of last Saturday’s show, right down to the naked part.
“It’s not that the tales are about crime and punishment, although a (mostly) comic brush with the law pops up now and again when Urban Tellers get together. No, it’s the fascinating anonymity of it all: just ordinary people living ordinary lives in an ordinary city, getting together to swap their sometimes extraordinary personal tales. We’re all interesting. Our stories just need to be unlocked.
“And people love to watch and listen to the unlocking. If defining culture is a matter of locating hot spots – where do people congregate in swarms, not because they have to but because they want to? – the Geiger counter starts clicking at 18th and Burnside on Portland’s east side.”
The “naked” part, by the way, came from Urban Teller Aaron Hartling, who, as I wrote, “opened the evening with ‘Naked Guy,’ his story about how a shy and gangly teenager turned into a devoted nudist, partly to shed his discomfort over being taller than everyone else in his class. … Now he’s a life model, often posing – naked, natch – for drawing classes at Hipbone.”
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Or this one, from 2012, also at Hipbone:
“I wanted to see a guy standing alone on a bare stage, talking for three hours about another guy who did an extraordinary thing a long time ago. The two guys are the great if semi-forgotten Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton and his ardent Portland champion, storyteller Lawrence Howard of Portland Story Theater.
“Three hours? You’re not supposed to be able to get away with that sort of thing. The contemporary solo show is a cut-to-the-bone thing – usually 90 minutes max, designed to wrap up before the audience’s patience runs out and the performer keels over in a dead faint.
“Yet … three hours with Shackleton and Howard was just fine, thank you very much. The evidence was clear: put together a good story and a good storyteller in a congenial atmosphere, and you can create compelling theater all night long. As one enthusiastic onlooker exclaimed while heading for the door sometime after 11 p.m., ‘That coulda been longer!’”
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This, from 2017, at Portland Story Theater’s final performance at the Fremont Theatre, which was shutting down:
“PST’s Urban Tellers series is built on a group process in which participants meet over a period of several weeks with Duddy and Howard, shaping their stories and figuring out how to tell, not recite, them. It’s a little more like controlled improv than a one-person scripted play, with a definite shape and momentum but the actual telling unfolding in the moment. Stories are about 15 minutes each, with six in a standard program, and it is Howard and Duddy’s task to help the storytellers find the tales they want to tell, and then shape them. A few storytellers are writers or performers. Most aren’t. They’re just people, telling their stories.
“Last week’s Fremont finale included stories from someone who came from Venezuela and has German family background; someone from Indonesia; a man from Chile; an immigrant from China; a man from Palestine; and an immigrant from Ecuador. The tales they have to tell are as various and similar as their situations and personalities. What brought them to the United States, and Portland, might have been love, or school, or economic possibility, or family, or any number of accidents or decisions. They feel variously at home and at a loss, longing for their old homes. Sometimes they travel back and forth. They describe struggles of language, intimidations and repressions, new challenges and new joys. Each has made a new life – coincidentally, four of the six are now teachers.
“At a national moment in which immigration is a flashpoint, with the federal government cracking down on quotas and stirring up a rising tide of populist resentment, the telling of these simple, complex, personal tales is of more than usual importance.”
I hardly need add – and yet I will, because it’s important – that this xenophobia is even stronger now than it was then, heightened by a right-wing crusade against immigrants that has been adopted and in some ways even led by the Republican candidate for president and his running mate. In a time like this, stories such as the ones told by these Oregon newcomers are crucial to hear.
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And finally this, from 2013, about Lawrence’s first performance following his surgery for throat cancer. I was honored that he and Lynne agreed to allow me to tell this difficult tale in print, and a bit in awe at Lawrence’s ability to face this critical point in his life with courage, fortitude, and even a sense of humor:
“In an otherwise familiar scene last Friday night at inner Northeast Portland’s Hipbone Studio,” I wrote, “something unusual happened. Veteran storyteller Lawrence Howard walked onstage wearing a little microphone clipped behind his ear. This was odd, because even in a whisper Howard’s easy baritone ordinarily reaches the farthest corners of a room. He fidgeted with the gadget a bit, clearly unaccustomed to the vagaries of artificial amplification. He’d had a little throat procedure, the crowd was told casually, and didn’t want to strain his voice.
“Then he started talking, and any clumsiness faded away. ‘My mother’s name was Gloria Howard,’ he said calmly but potently, ‘and she died in January, just a couple of months ago. She was 86 years old.’
“With those simple words, Howard kicked off Portland’s fifth annual Singlehandedly! festival of long-form solo oral stories. A shaggy bear of a fellow who seduces listeners with his wry ramblings and then grips them with the incisive tension of his tales, Howard is one of the city’s most celebrated practitioners of this age-old craft.
“On Friday night he was undergoing his own unfolding tale of endurance, a story beneath the story. And if he didn’t tell that story, it’s understandable, because he’s not sure yet how it comes out. But like so many good stories it’s an adventure, filled with obstacles and determination, and it’s dogged by a shadow of mortality.
“… A helluva story, all in all. And it had a poignant moment early on when Duddy walked through the crowd and gently readjusted Howard’s microphone – his voice was a little too boomy – then smiled and walked back to her seat. “Legacy of Limericks” lasts about an hour, which is an hour of being all alone onstage, speaking the entire time, and even if you’re speaking softly, which much of the time you’re not, it’s an exertion. Howard felt the exertion keenly, and no wonder: only four days before he’d been feeding through a long tube inserted in his nostril.”
The story goes on to tell of his trip to the doctor, the discovery of cancer centered at the base of his tongue, very close to his voice box, and the subsequent nine-hour surgery, and the long incision in his throat to reach the cancerous cells and lymph nodes, and the “million tubes” for feeding and breathing, and the pain drugs that made him loopy, and the eventual, welcoming “Jewish soul food” of chicken soup and matzo balls.
“Duddy and Howard made a little joke about the neck scar, which reminded them of the jaw bolts below the ears in movie depictions of Frankenstein’s monster. ‘My tumor’s name is Frankie,” Howard said, “and Frankie has left the building.’”
“All of this was on Howard’s mind last Friday,” I continued, “as he prepared to tell a bunch of dirty limericks to a roomful of friends and strangers. ‘An hour before the show I thought, ‘Oh God, what am I doing? What was I thinking? I just want to go home and take my pain pills and go to bed,’ he said the following morning, after a long night’s sleep. ‘But then my friends started to show up.’
“His friends, in fact, started to pack the place. ‘The whole time I was up there I was just high on the energy of the crowd. It was great.’ Then came the standing ovation, mostly from people who didn’t know the backstory at all.”
Time now, I think, for another ovation from Lawrence and Lynne’s friends. Thank, you, both of you, for your talents, for your generosity, for your friendship, and for your love.