FABLES FOR OUR TIMES: AN EVENING OF TEMPORAL STORIES Comes to Ethos Music Center

Ethos Music Center will welcome back Foxhole Projects after the run of Elemental, this time with a night of crackling speculative fiction and electric dark comedy with Fables For Our Times: An Evening of Temporal Stories.

This staged reading of seven short plays directed by Jed Sutton, will be performed by the authors and an ensemble of Portland actors, on Saturday, January 31, 2026 at 7:30 p.m.

Fables invites audiences into stories where time bends, clones plot, a 19th century shipwreck survivor fights to stay alive, parrots philosophize, and puppies detonate relationships.

Each work contains a “fable” playing with time, technology, and the absurdities of modern life. This staged reading, emphasizes the power of language and lets history, future, and alternate realities collide.

The Plays

Cloning The Colonel by Lou Wynn: A dark comedy tracks an exiled dictator plotting his genetic legacy, only to be foiled by his daughter, a loyal captain, his nurse/bodyguard, and a pop-star ex-wife, and three singing test-tube babies.

Romeo, Romeo by Emily Khoury: A sentient, escaped parrot narrates the fraught relationship between feathered friend and lonely owner, blurring the line between pet and persona. A darkly funny look at captivity, communication, and who’s taming whom.

Post Partum by Nancy Campbell: A new puppy throws a relationship into crisis, exposing fault lines between a seemingly stable couple. A sharp, intimate comedy about love, responsibility, and the chaos of new life.

Punks of Steam by Jessie Yecha: A Victorian time traveler has a meet-cute with steampunk cosplayers, leading to culture shock, mistaken identities, and a clash of eras. A playful, anachronistic romp about fandom, identity, and the meaning of “in character.”

Row, Row, Row by Greg Swanson: In 1865, after delivering smallpox to Vancouver, the USS Brother Jonathan sank, leaving 18 known survivors. This is the story of the 19th survivor. A haunting, lyrical work about memory and the guilty weight of survival.

Orwell’s Last Republic by M.L. Lyons: Young Eric Blair, his older self, George Orwell, and his wife Eileen converse across time, wrestling with empire, truth, and the moral weight of words. An intimate dialogue about the meaning of truth.