The Holidays Are Coming—Time to Get Primed for Family Drama

Enjoying the illusion of summer on a late afternoon, I sit on a third-floor deck at Milepost 5 chatting with members of Hand2Mouth Theatre. The group rents rehearsal space at this intentional, creative community, and, it's getting close to curtain time for their latest show Everyone Who Looks Like You, which opens November 6. The piece was actually showcased this past May, after which the group gained a better sense of their performance and what it could be. After dialoging with that audience six months out, and taking a brief hiatus this summer, Hand2Mouth Theatre is ready to bring us a "hallucinatory on-stage family" just in time for the holidays.

This intimate company has a track record of producing some intense, provocative work. They first got on my radar a few years ago with their production Repeat After Me. It was a powerful slice of Americana displayed through dance and song, music and movement, imagery and idols. That piece stuck with me so much so that I was eager to see it months later at TBA:07. By then, the work had morphed into something slightly different - different energy, different volition—but powerful all the same. This is how Hand2Mouth operates—deeply wedded to their creative process, always transforming, learning, rearranging. (The group also gelled as a company as a result of their approach to pulling off Repeat After Me.)

The small, core ensemble has created more than fifteen original works in the last nine years—with performances and productions in Seattle, San Francisco, Montana, New York, Mexico, and Portland. They've received grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and Multnomah County Cultural Coalition. Their collaborative work in Mexico City with La Comedia Humana, entitled Dos Pueblos, embodied the spirit of the team, especially for company member Erin Leddy. "The Mexico collaboration allowed any momentary doubt to evaporate. The work there and my experience within another culture allowed us to work and build something with others that truly changed how we felt about one another. We learned how to better tell personal stories by leveraging our own experiences, by grabbing images and moods from everywhere, and recreating and inventing boundaries. There were no rules, and that was exiting."

Creating new stories and boundaries—and then breaking those molds—to shape experience is definitely what Hand2Mouth has been able to achieve with recent works. In fact, it's the foundation of Everyone Who Looks Like You. "We as a collective have so much personal knowledge. We are able to excavate there, within, and not search too much elsewhere, making this a deeply personal piece."

Key members of the group initially came up with the concept for the piece and, with a vote, quickly got everyone in the group onboard. The team then took a few months to do individual research, deeply intimate, personal research, asking themselves things like, "What's exciting? What pathways are open?" to see just what could be unearthed. They then came together to share their insights and ideas, and from that conversation developed etudes—small studies that became brief scenes, scenes that once were shared with the whole company, sparked further ideas and scene creation.

"We used the various etudes to build upon in order to create a common vocabulary. We wanted to create our work in the most open way possible, which was to be the most useful, personal approach especially for a piece of this type, with its magnitude of the personal, focused on family intensity," Leddy tells me, reflecting on the group creative process. "We really like watching things organically arise." Once the material began to take shape, though, they actually enlisted a team of dramaturges focused on language and uniformity "to find connections between the stories." That analysis helped push certain ideas in different directions. A group artist-residency retreat (Hand2Mouth makes sure each work enlists one residency session) at Caldera enabled the group to dive even deeper and engage in what Leddy calls "kind of a mind blowing struggle—we truly let go and really allowed something intense to occur." Then, they went on summer break.

Jonathan Walters is Hand2Mouth's artistic director, who Leddy says "adds order and shapes things." He offers to our conversation that the new production is a "huge leap forward and a step into the unknown, stylistically" for the group, a leap that he is proud to be part of. "This is a really powerful show about family and we are pulling out all that we know...we are unafraid of avoiding slow spaces in the piece, spaces where the audience might feel uncomfortable. There's a demand for attention for long stretches of time. The reward that comes from this hyper-intimate, vulnerable piece is potentially amazing." (People I know who saw the previous incarnation of Everyone in May were consistently moved to tears throughout the performance.) Walters explains that the years the ensemble has together, the intimacy they have created through their own processes, only adds to the on-stage family roles and dynamics in the new piece. "We are a team of co-conspirators. We all have buy-in. We are all doing. Nothing is done without context." One main goal of the piece is to compel the audience to pay attention. "It's what we do best, in a certain way, and that way seeks validity adding to the experience, for us, for our audience." Walters was influenced by time he spent in Poland with a unique theatre company, one that had hoped to continue to operate as peer collaborators, but fell apart as its artistic director "squashed, rather than encouraged—he was threatened by the strength of the performers" and failed to channel that energy effectively.

Harvesting emotional strength is what Hand2Mouth does best, and communicating that to the audience in a realistic, valid way is indeed a challenge. But however challenging that task, how difficult the topic to present, they manage. They provoke. They shock. They demand. They break boundaries. They remove walls. Walters reinforces: "We want to speak directly to people. We want them to feel drawn to our work, to bond to it." Some people may characterize such provocation as "poking the bear" but Hand2Mouth truly wants to connect, to be honest, to create a collective experience. It's easy to get swept away in their work.

Everyone promises to present our notion of family in a dreamlike state. Things and themes appear, disappear, re-appear. Surrealistic stories and sense memories create the scenes and give birth to characters on stage. "There's a meditative quality. Yeah, it's dreamlike, quieter, slower," Leddy notes. "We radically rethought this work," adds Walters. "The very nature of this work is outside of the mainstream. Sense memories allow us to tell a larger story." Leddy and Walters are both excited about the personal they hope to communicate. They've already done a great job of imparting the passion they possess for their craft during our evening conversation. Hand2Mouth Theatre is engaged, nay, entrenched in a collaborative creative process like no other company in town; the impact of their most recent efforts is to be seen, and soon.

Everyone Who Looks Like You
Thursday through Sundays, November 6 through 22, 8 p.m.
$15 General Admission
$12 Students, Seniors, Working Artists
$25 Opening Night Party on Saturday, November 7
www.hand2mouththeatre.org

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 Photos © 2009 Kenneth Aaron Neighborhood Notes