Previews: GREAT WIDE OPEN at Portland Playhouse

Do you remember what it was like to be 17? Excited, angsty, passionate, confused, and hopeful all at once. And maybe you fell in love for the first time with someone who was oh-so-wrong but also perhaps oh-so-right. If any of that sounds familiar, and especially if you happened to be a teenager in the 90s, Jessica Wallenfels' GREAT WIDE OPEN should be on your radar. The show is getting its world premiere this month as a co-production between Portland Playhouse and Many Hats Collaboration.

Wallenfels, who also choreographed, co-directed along with Charles Grant (a producing director at Portland Playhouse), and is co-producing GREAT WIDE OPEN, describes the play as being about "two teens handling way too much at home who find refuge in one another as they discover love and sex and obsession. Like Romeo and Juliet from the wrong side of the tracks - star-crossed in all the right and wrong ways."

The mission of Many Hats Collaboration, which Wallenfels co-founded in 2005, is to reimagine music and movement onstage. GREAT WIDE OPEN is part of the company's 5 in 5 Initiative, launched in 2019, with the goal of creating five new collaborative works in five years spanning diverse genres and centering underrepresented stories.

But its journey to the stage started long before that. The play is adapted from Into the Great Wide Open, a novel by Kevin Canty that Wallenfels first read and loved in her early 20s. While getting her MFA at the University of Portland under the supervision of Mead Hunter, she decided to challenge herself with an adaptation. "I've often originated new material choreographically or starting with music and then layering the script in later, so I wanted to see what it was like to start with the text first," she said.

Revisiting the novel, she found it "as gripping and gorgeous" as she had the first time, so she started adapting it in 2016. The play had a student production and then went through several workshops and revisions, culminating in an actor-driven devising workshop last July. "I learned how to be a dramatist rather than just a theatre maker," Wallenfels said. "It's a whole different ball game and made me understand events and action in a new way." Reflecting on the process of adaptation, said, "I feel less like a writer and more like someone who arranged a novel for five voices."

That description brings to mind the language of music, which is fitting because music and dance play just as big a part in this play as the script. Wallenfels describes the dance as "actor-driven movement" supporting theatrical expression. "It switches between realistic dialog and wildly expressive, imaginative, outside-of-realism movements." Grant noted that it's "like a musical, with dance [rather than singing] when words aren't enough to express what you're trying to express."

The music is provided by a 90s grunge and riot grrrl-inspired sound design featuring recorded classics and original music by sound designer and composer Eric Nordin. About three months before rehearsals began, the band (Nordin, Katie Sawicki, and Zanny Geffel) got together to start their own devising process. "The live music is specifically the inner thoughts of the two lead characters and it's in a grunge style," Nordin said. "We composed it the way a real band would, which is to get in a room and mess around and try stuff." The rest of the sound design uses snippets of pop songs that formed the soundtrack of teenagehood for anyone who grew up in that era.

Put it all together and you get what Grant describes as a play that "beautifully captures teenage angst and the strong desire and the messiness that goes along with it."

In hearing the creative team talk about the process of bringing GREAT WIDE OPEN to life, it's clear that they all have a profound personal connection to this play about young lovers - Kenny (played by Anthony Michael Shepard) and Junie (Leiana Rousseau Petlewski) - trying to find connection to themselves and each other in this messy world.

"What this show makes me think of is growing pains," Grant said. "It's a coming of age story, but it also makes me reflect about what I was like at 17 and all of the ways I still have to grow up. These two characters allow us to tap into that reminder of what it's like to just love - to have your heart on your sleeve and your neck and your face and your back. I hope it allows people to re-engage without judgement with what it's like to live fearlessly and make impulsive decisions and see what comes of them."

One way Wallenfels hopes to inspire that engagement is by having an ensemble of three actors (Lane Barbour, Beth Thompson, and Bobby Bermea) who represent Kenny's inner thoughts (along with playing all of the supporting characters). "The main character is a 17-year-old boy, but he's represented by three other people of different racial and gender identities, so it's an expression of individuality and personhood and the multiplicity of those things," she said. "The representation speaks to now in terms of gender identity, but also to class, which is a huge factor in the play.

So, what should audiences expect? "It's definitely going to push those nostalgia buttons," Nordin said. "If you are a teenager or if you've been a teenager, it was written for you. It's not all sparkles and rainbows. It feels very real, very lived in."

"It's a visual feast," Grant said, which Wallenfels echoed with "audiences are in for a treat."

Indeed they are. I had the pleasure of seeing an early dress rehearsal. It was fierce

GREAT WIDE OPEN runs at Portland Playhouse from April 12 to May 7. Details and tickets here.

Photo credit: Shawte Sims

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