Above Hells Canyon, which I've never seen until now. Quite a view. Very rugged.
My friend Nick who works at Powell's Bookstore in Portland is a playwright. He's published numerous works for the stage over the years, and some of them anthologized in a collection available from his bookstore.
Red and I got to the opportunity to see one of the his plays a couple weeks ago just after I got back from California. The Twilight Theater Company, a new group in North Portland, staged a production of his drama Driving Under the Influence. I booked tickets for opening night when I saw Nick post about it on Facebook.
The production was in what used to be part of the Twilight Room, a dive bar on NE Lombard near Pacific University. It's not a quarter of the city that we get to very often, so I booked tickets for the opening night online and we took the opportunity to test out a Thai restaurant nearby that Red found.
Inside the little theater we sat on stools behind Nick and his wife Katherine, as well
as Adam and Marie, who arrived with them. They'd all left their kids with a sitter back at Nick and Katherine's place. It was good to see all four of them again.
The play is about a group of twenty-something friend in college, three young men and three young women, and it follows them from their college years up until marriage (and divorce), up to the point when they are about to start having kids. It has some very funny moments and was very entertaining to watch again.
I had actually seen this play before, with Nick, about seven years ago at our old Alma Mater in Salem, where he was doing a visiting artistic residency. That's the kind of thing you get to do, if you are artistically talented and you work very hard, as Nick has done over the years. His success has been well-earned.
After the show I told him that I found the production at Twilight to be superior to the previous one, probably because the cast this time was a little older. Their acting reflected life experience in a way that the performances of the college students could not yet articulate.
"I remember being in college like that, and trying to act, and having no idea what I was supposed to do," said Nick, after that show. We all live and grow. Salem seems a long time ago to me now, in a way it didn't even a year or so ago.
Red remarked that Nick laughed at some of his own lines, as they were delivered by the actors that night. I teased him about that on Facebook the next day. He said he didn't remember if he did. A good sign, I suppose, when the author gets into his own material and doesn't even notice.
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