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THREE TIMES THE THEATER < CHARLES DEEMER TAKES THE BITTER WITH THE SUITE IN A PORTLAND< BARROOM
Oregonian, The (Portland, OR)
October 9, 1988
Author: BOB HICKS - of the Oregonian Staff
Estimated printed pages: 5


OK, so Saturday nights can get pretty hot and heavy at a neighborhood bar. But at Petticoat Junction, it seems like the roof is ready to blow off.

Whoa. What was in that last beer?

In one corner a fast-talking old drunk is being chewed out loudly by his frustrated son, who's spent weeks tracking him down. A few tables away a moralistic former convict is doing a slow seethe as his smarmy roommate spouts cynical garbage about women.

Across the way a boozy husband and wife -- in the last stages of splitsville -- are airing their intimate and embarrassing dirty laundry for everyone within earshot: Seems they're both haunted by the ghost of a genius physicist who slept with one and wanted to sleep with the other.

And perched happily on a stool, taking it all in, is a broadly smiling Charles Deemer.

These days Deemer is orchestrating battles in a barroom.

You could call it 3-D soap opera. Deemer calls it simultaneous-action theater -- that hectically experiential new genre of which he's a leading exponent and practitioner.

What's going on in this industrial Northwest Portland bar is ``Cocktail Suite,'' a trio of environmental plays that Deemer, the Portland playwright, has written to interlock and be performed at the same time.

The bar-and-cafe setting seems ideal for Deemer's ``unstaged'' plays. Previous efforts have been performed in the Pittock Mansion, on the stern-wheeler Columbia, in a Southern California bank. Another, written to be performed at a bed-and-breakfast inn, was stopped at the last minute by zoning regulations.

Why a tavern this time around?

``It's really hard to find a Pittock Mansion you can use,'' Deemer commented last week after a preview performance. ``It's really hard to find a stern-wheeler. But bars are all over the place. It's your generic theater space.''

At Petticoat Junction -- where ``Cocktail Suite'' was to open officially Saturday night -- the drama comes in beery flashpoints of heightened naturalism, suddenly focusing on the last barstool or the table by the dartboard. That argument you overhear might actually be a barroom conversation, and the woman who sits down in the next chair might be an actress or might be another customer.

There's no stage here; actors and audiences intermingle freely, though they don't talk to each other.

``It's a lot like TV acting,'' noted actress Bonnie Ross, who has been in all of Deemer's Portland simultaneous-action shows. ``The audience is right up in your face; you just have to be natural. You don't want to be bigger than life.''

Ross, who plays a social worker who falls for one of the homeless men she's supposed to be helping (``that sweet misunderstood lush,'' she comments laughingly) also likes the interlocking continuity of the show. Whenever she leaves one scene, she immediately moves to another in one of the other plays, and always with a purpose that carries over from one play to the next.

``You don't have the chance to go backstage and rest, and you miss that,'' she said. ``But it's nice just to be going all the time.''

The three plays -- ``A Chateau for Mort,'' ``Lonely and Horny in the City'' and ``The Contract'' -- can be seen as separate shows or in any combination. An audience member could, for instance, follow ``tavern owner'' Barbara Irvin as she moves from a major role in ``Mort'' to supporting scenes in ``The Contract'' and ``Lonely,'' getting her complete story but missing the full narrative of any one show. Or a person could wander about freely, going from flare-up to flare-up in the different staging areas and trying to make sense out of the whole thing.

``I hate to think these shows are competing with one another,'' Deemer said. ``I like to think of them as a whole. And if this thing works, the whole is greater than the parts.''

In his heart of hearts (and pocketbook of pocketbooks) Deemer would like to see audiences attend at least four times -- to see each of the three shows separately, and then to get an overview.

This is, after all, a commercial venture. Deemer, cast and crew have put together a cooperative company called Counterpoint to develop and perform simultaneous-action plays and run them long enough to keep ticket prices reasonable.

Tickets to ``Cocktail Suite'' are $12 -- a far cry from the high-priced fare for ``Chateau de Mort'' and ``Bateau de Mort,'' which were short-run benefit affairs.

Both ``Chateau'' and ``Bateau'' were written on commission, with instructions that they be murder mysteries. ``Cocktail Suite'' gives Deemer the chance to work in simultaneous action without worrying about whodunit.

``I like the form a lot,'' he said. ``But I'd never worked in the form in a way that was continuous with my other work, that wasn't a commissioned show. Ordinarily, I wouldn't write a soap-opera mystery.''

``Cocktail Suite'' certainly has its melodramatic moments, and a lot of repeated dialogue designed to clue in audience members who've just arrived from one of the other plays. But Deemer sees a more serious intent in his intricately logged script.

All three plays are about the relationship between men and women and their difficulties in understanding one another.

For preview audiences, said Deemer, the most popular character has been Mort (Chris Thompson), the homeless charmer of ``A Chateau for Mort'' who woos Ross' social worker. ``I wanted to create a Damon Runyan, John Steinbeck sort of character,'' Deemer said. ``A guy who drinks Night Train and who's witty, but who still screws up.

``I have a very strong sense that one of the plays is about young men, one is about middle-aged men and one is about old men,'' he said.

``In every play,'' Ross added, ``somebody asks someone, `What do you want from me?' And of course, nobody knows. Also, in every play, somebody says, `He makes me laugh.' ''

``And,'' said Deemer, ``alcohol is sort of an unspoken character in all three plays. It's ugliest in `The Contract.' ''

Though Deemer professes not to play favorites, he also sees the lean ``Contract'' as the most pungently philosophical of the trio. At the center of this tale of a marriage fallen apart is a long argument about quantum mechanics, a subject that fascinates Deemer for its specialized, revolutionary sense of relativity.

Quantum physics includes the notion that any act of observation alters the thing being observed. Therefore the ``common experience'' of an audience, each member of which observes from a different perspective, doesn't exist.

Why then, Deemer wonders, pretend that everyone ought to look at the same stage at the same time? In the new physics he finds both inspiration and explanation for simultaneous-action theater -- an argument that is sound scientifically, if open to debate aesthetically. Yet Deemer would like to prove his case with the classics, by writing a simultaneous-action version of Anton Chekhov's ``The Seagulls,'' with new material written to follow the characters' action after they go off Chekhov's stage.

Certainly matters of time and space are exceptionally important to simultaneous-action theater -- and not just for the audience.

``That's the kick about this script,'' noted Ross, discussing how the actors know when they're supposed to be doing what in which play. ``There aren't page numbers to follow, and there aren't scenes. There are times.''

Or one time -- but a time packed with action. THEATER Cocktail Suite Author: Charles Deemer Directors: Charles Deemer, Gerald Moran Where: Counterpoint Theatre at Petticoat Junction, 1036 N.W. Hoyt St. When: 8 p.m. Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays Tickets: $12; adults only (248-0875)

Photo of CHARLES DEEMER
Edition: FOURTH
Section: LIVELY ARTS
Page: B01
Index Terms: Theater Review
Copyright (c) 1988 Oregonian Publishing Co.
Record Number: 8810070370

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