Oregon ArtsWatch

ArtsWatch Archive


Breaking: ‘Grimm’ invades Portland Center Stage

By Barry Johnson
June 5, 2014
Theater
Silas Weir Mitchell in 'Grimm'/Photo by: Scott Green/NBC

Silas Weir Mitchell in ‘Grimm’/Photo by: Scott Green/NBC

Portland Center Stage has done a little shuffling of its 2014-15 season and abracadabra presto what should appear but a production of Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain, starring two of the primary actors of NBC’s Grimm, Silas Weir Mitchell and Sasha Roiz. It will be the Main Stage season closer, May 17-June 21, 2015, with opening night on May 22.

Grimm is filmed in Portland, and has been a welcome addition to the city’s creative landscape,” said Center Stage artistic director Chris Coleman. “Since they arrived in town, both Sasha and Silas have been visitors to Portland Center Stage, and so I’ve come to know them. We’ve been waiting for the right timing, and the right project, to work together. And the planets—also known as Grimm’s shooting schedule and our season calendar—finally aligned.”

If you follow the Portland-filmed Grimm, you already know that Mitchell plays Monroe, a reforming Blutbad and pal of the detective played by series star David Giuntoli. If you don’t watch Grimm, maybe you’ve seen Mitchell in one of the several quirky films and TV shows that dot his resume. My favorite Mitchell credit, before Grimm, was his recurring role in the comedy series My Name is Earl. Roiz plays Captain Renard on Grimm, the Chief of Police with an intense backstory. He starred in Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica prequel on SyFy, and he was in Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii, the campy disaster flick that critics loved to hate.

Greenberg’s three-actor/six character play is a tricky bit of theatrical business, not least because it requires the actors to play both their character and one of their character’s parents. A 2006 Broadway production that starred Julia Roberts (in her first big Broadway role), Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper was generally panned. The New York Times critic wrote: “Mr. Greenberg’s slender, elegant play from 1997 about familial disconnectedness and the loneliness of intimacy has certainly never known — and probably will never know again — such fame and fortune. On the other hand, it’s almost impossible to discern its artistic virtues from this wooden and splintered interpretation, directed by Joe Mantello and also starring (poor, luckless lunkheads) Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper.” Yikes! We’ll focus on the “slender, elegant play” part for now.

Lost in the shuffle is Mojada, by Luis Alfaro, the playwright’s take on Euripides’ Medea updated to an immigrant Mexican family in Chicago. The third of a set of similar adaptations, it premiered in 2013. Center Stage is hoping Mojada will be part of its 2015-16 season instead.

Oregon ArtsWatch Archives