RISK IN REP
Remembering Peter Fornara’s Remarkable Theater Company
By Charles Deemer
At first glance, it’s a typical no-budget program put together by a struggling theater group: a sheet of paper folded once, cover on front and season calendar on back, with the play particulars (cast, crew, etc.) on the inside pages, everything typewritten and machine copied in black, white and gray. A simple graphic on the front cover, a neutral theater mask, adds a small touch of class.
The program belongs to David Olson,
and he treats it with care because it’s an important artifact. Olson, who’s
been
The four plays listed on the cover begin to tell the story: Cabaret, Marat/Sade, Joe Egg, American Buffalo. These four plays – a dark musical set in Nazis Germany, an even darker music drama set in an insane asylum, a disturbing family drama and a tough-edged story of street thugs – would make for a remarkable season at any time because they lack the variety typical of commercial theater selections. All these plays are serious. All have dark visions of human experience. Today a theater company might add one of them, even two, to its season – but four “heavy” plays in a row? Never!
Then we
turn over the program and look at the schedule. These plays are being performed
not in succession but in rotation! Consider the first week of October, 1978:
Tuesday, October 3rd is American Buffalo; the next night, Cabaret;
the next, Joe Egg; Friday night, Marat/Sade; Saturday night, Cabaret again. All
plays are performed at the same space, The Production Company’s stage at the
Centenary Wilbur Church in inner
southeast
Such a
remarkable season could never happen without the visionary to say it was
possible and the practical circumstances to make the vision real. The visionary
was Peter Fornara, artistic director of The Production Company, and one of the truly
remarkable talents to have made
CETA grants
were not created to fund the arts – but artists learned how to take advantage
of them. The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (or CETA, Pub.L. 93-203)
was a
In
In 1978
over $2.5 million in CETA grants was given to
Jim Caputo
was a recent high school graduate in 1978, ready to start theater studies at
“I was
completely blown away,” Caputo remembers. “I’d recently done Picnic at
“In the
glory days of CETA grants,” says Jan Powell, who starred in Cabaret and now is
finishing up her doctorate in theater at the
Not all actors and artists associated with Fornara’s company had grant support but a nucleus of full-time theater employees made possible such extraordinary feats as the daily changing of sets and the rehearsal of plays during hours when typically actors would be at day jobs. But this was subsidized theater, not professional theater, and the distinction is important. The Production Company did not need to “please an audience” in order to survive the way commercial theaters must. Indeed, under the leadership of Peter Fornara, the company first and foremost challenged and shocked its audiences. For Fornara, the best theater faced the social and political issues of the day. Theater must do more than entertain.
Peter Fornara, who died in 1994 at age 49, had long been a fixture on the local theater scene before co-founding The Production Company with actress Gaynor Sterchi.
“When I
came to
When people remember Fornara, they begin by talking about his intensity.
“Peter was a wild man,” Olson continues. “He’s also the only one who could have pulled off such a theater season. No one else had the balls or the energy.”
Tall and lanky, Fornara commanded attention whenever he entered a room, and when he was on stage, a gifted actor as well as director, you couldn’t take your eyes off him. Drama critic Bob Hicks wrote this about Fornara in a 1991 revival of American Buffalo: “Fornara has a face someone stepped on, leaving an odd, wounded beauty: Something inside this well-worn leather wants to nurture and make things right. Stringy, slumped and capable of fierce outbursts, Fornara's businessman-crook has an almost maternal instinct that's hard to repress.”
Olson
remembers how Fornara could become impatient at rehearsal. “He’d come forward
and start manipulating me like a puppet, moving my arms this way and that for
the gesture he wanted.” Fornara was also a stickler for details.
If Peter Fornara was an intense, demanding director, he also was someone most actors wanted to work with. “Hundreds showed up for his auditions then,” notes Hansen. “There was a much stronger sense of community than now.” Jan Powell adds that “many of us were ex-hippies. We were used to communal living, doing everything together.”
The audience, Hansen points out, was a part of the community then because theater was affordable. “You could see Marat/Sade for $5. You could hang around after the show and dance to the theater band. Sure, this was amateur theater but amateur shouldn’t be a bad word. These were great productions.”
A nostalgic exaggeration? Perhaps not.
Bob Hicks, now senior critic at the
Oregonian, has been observing
I can’t
write about Peter Fornara without telling a personal story. By 1984, much had
changed. CETA had died two years earlier at the hands of politicians who
considered it scandalous that the arts had benefited from the program. A new
Portland Performing Arts Center was going to host theater, a plan vigorously
opposed by Fornara, myself, and other theater artists in the community. We
correctly predicted how many local theater companies would go bankrupt as a
result.
In 1984 my tenure as
playwright-in-residence at the
I was in
Fornara
could have waited until I returned to
“Peter could be cynical and profane,” Jan Powell says, “but he had a huge heart. He had great generosity of spirit.”
And he had
a vision of what