Eliza Jane Schneider To Premiere Her New One-Woman Show At Portland's Fertile Ground Festival

Eliza Jane Schneider, the woman responsible for all the female voices on Comedy Central's South Park, is creating a new multi-media performance bringing to life people living homeless throughout the world. The show will premiere in January 2017 at Portland's Fertile Ground Festival.

Schneider spent years of her life traveling the world and busking with her violin. On her travels she recorded conversations with people on the streets. Those recordings form the backbone of Displaced, her newest one-woman show, created in collaboration with Portland's CompassWorks theatre.

Displaced pairs the words of people living on the fringes with Schneider's own original music, performed live on stage. With her Viper Fiddle, voice, guitar, and digital looping, Schneider creates the soundscape her characters inhabit.

Those characters include a girl in Lagos who has run away from an abusive mother, a mother who takes her children back-to-nature in New Zealand, a gay man living homeless in Liverpool, a young woman sleeping under a bridge in San Diego, and many others. Sean Kennedy, of New York Magazine, wrote, "Schneider doesn't so much act as literally summon each person right before your eyes."

Schneider's last show, Freedom of Speech, based on her travels throughout the United States, won the "Best Solo Show" Award at the NYC International Fringe Festival.

Schneider is collaborating with CompassWorks' Artistic Director Bruce A. Hostetler to craft Displaced. CompassWorks is a Portland performance company dedicated to creating new work through interviews. In January 2013, also as a part of the Fertile Ground Festival, CompassWorks premiered Feral, an original work based on over five hundred interviews with people living homeless in Portland. Artistic Director Hostetler wrote Feral, and will work with Schneider to refine the script for Displaced. He will also direct the staged reading in January.

Displaced will play only six performances at the one hundred seat Abbey Arts theatre in the Portsmouth neighborhood, so tickets are limited. The show is being produced as a part of the Fertile Ground Festival, a city-wide festival of New Works, January 19 to 29, 2017. www.fertilegroundpdx.org

Tickets are available at www.fertilegroundpdx.org and www.boxofficetickets.com