RISK IN REP

 

Remembering Peter Fornara’s Remarkable Theater Company

 

By Charles Deemer

(To appear in Citadel of the Spirit, edited by Matt Love)

 

 

            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 Portland’s Director of Cable Communications for several decades, was a young actor in the 1978 theater season represented by this program, a participant in and witness to Oregon theatrical history. This is the program of the Fall, 1978, theater season of Peter Fornara’s The Production Company, an ambitious and remarkable season of plays that has not been matched by any Oregon theater company since then for its reach, risk, energy, achievement and circumstances of creation.

 

            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 Portland. This means that after the play on Tuesday night, the American Buffalo set must be struck and replaced by the set for Cabaret the next night, and so on. There’s no rest on Saturday night either, even though Sunday is dark: the set must be struck and the stage made ready for Sunday services, which includes putting in place a large heavy cross, because this church building still has a small, practicing congregation.

 

            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 Portland his home. The circumstance was the sudden availability of CETA grants to fund Fornara’s extraordinary and ambitious notion of what regional theater could become.

 

            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 United States federal law enacted in 1973 to train workers and provide them with jobs in the public sector. The program was designed to work with low-income people and the long-term unemployed as well as to provide summer jobs to low-income high school students. The intent was to impart a marketable skill that would allow participants to move to an unsubsidized job. But arts groups and individuals, perhaps figuring they were as “low income” as anyone else, applied for grants – and began receiving them.

 

            In Oregon, the Eugene Theatre Company was one of the first recipients of a CETA grant. Nyla McCarthy was a member of the company, and when she moved to Portland, she was surprised that Portland theater had not taken advantage of the new funding resource. She says she gave Fornara the idea to apply for a CETA grant for his own theater company.

 

            In 1978 over $2.5 million in CETA grants was given to Oregon arts organizations, half a million of it to theater arts, and a healthy amount of this to The Production Company. Putting theater artists on the payroll changed the landscape dramatically and fueled Fornara’s vision.

 

            Jim Caputo was a recent high school graduate in 1978, ready to start theater studies at Portland State University. He had a radio show on KPBS and did a story on Fornara’s summer production of American Buffalo.

 

            “I was completely blown away,” Caputo remembers. “I’d recently done Picnic at Franklin High School, but this was a completely new kind of theater experience for me. I wanted to be a part of it.”  The teenager let his admiration be known to Fornara and was offered a job – to be prop master on a CETA grant. Caputo joined the new Production Company payroll.

 

            “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 University of Oregon, “artists were able to do theater 24/7 without taking menial day jobs. We could live and breathe theater. There was time to explore a role. CETA provided an environment much like subsidized theater in Europe.”

 

            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 Portland from Seattle to go to Reed in 1970,” says David Olson, who had roles both in Cabaret and Marat/Sade, “the only Portland theater artist I’d heard of was Peter Fornara.”

 

            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. Portland theater veteran Ron Hansen was a singer in Marat/Sade and also had a major role in Cabaret. “In Marat/Sade, you couldn’t wear clothing unless it was appropriate to the period. People made their own costumes and no one wore underwear.” Indeed, the periodic flash of genitals from the large cast of inmates was a shocking parameter of the performance. “Peter didn’t want acting,” says Hansen. “He wanted you to be real. He wanted you to be.” McCarthy adds, “Peter wanted to challenge the audience and its thinking,” and he chose plays and directed accordingly.

 

            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 Portland theater for a quarter century – and he agrees with Hansen. “Theater was more vital and engaged in those days than now. Fornara was amazing. He was reckless, spirited, and yet well grounded in theater craft and history. He knew how to break a play down. He knew how important it was to make a show. Those were great days for Portland theater, with an enduring value that hasn’t been matched overall since then. I believe Fornara, more than anyone else, stands for the best of what Portland theater has been.”

 

            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. Portland theater, in Hansen’s turn of phrase, was changing from something to see to something to be seen at. The times were changing – and suddenly, especially for me.

 

In 1984 my tenure as playwright-in-residence at the New Rose Theatre ended unexpectedly when artistic director Gary O’Brien left the company after a disagreement with his board of directors. I had been O’Brien’s boy, and his departure meant I was gone, too. Suddenly I was a playwright without a home (which, in fact, is the natural condition of playwrights, but I had been spoiled). I became depressed. To make matters worse, my father died. I felt as if the roots of my personal and professional lives had been yanked out from under me.

 

            I was in New Jersey settling my father’s affairs when the phone in his apartment rang. It was Peter Fornara. To this day, I’m not sure how he tracked me down. He said he’d heard I no longer was associated with the New Rose. Would I consider being the playwright-in-residence at his new Cubiculo Theatre? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Of course I would!

 

            Fornara could have waited until I returned to Portland to make the offer. Perhaps he knew how much the position would mean to me under the circumstances. He made me feel much better, rooted again in my professional life.

 

            “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 Portland theater could become when artists were employed and had the time to develop their craft without distractions. In the fall of 1978, Peter Fornara brought his vision to reality with four serious plays in repertory. Anyone who saw them would be changed and spoiled forever, hoping against hope that this moment of theater, in which audiences in play after play were challenged as well as entertained, might become commonplace in Portland and not a rare, distant explosion in the theatrical universe. Although saying Peter Fornara cannot be replaced does justice to his genius, it says nothing encouraging about the subsequent life of Portland theater.