Fuse Theatre Ensemble To Head Into 2024 With An Updated Space, Season, and Events Schedule

Fuse Theatre Ensemble has announced that it will be going into 2024 with an updated space, season, and events schedule. Fuse has revamped their seating, added concessions, and added a weekly late-night event schedule, in addition to announcing their 2024 season. 

Fuse's recent remodel works to make the space more comfortable for people of all abilities. Fuse's space is tucked behind Common Grounds Coffee on SE Hawthorne. Once you enter the coffeeshop, you'll know you're headed the right way when you see the new mural Fuse has commissioned for the entry to their space. The mural by San Francisco-based artist Danyol Leon depicts Queer literary icons, including Tony Kushner, Jackie Curtis, Paula Vogel, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and William Shakespeare. The mural uses Leon's signature style, which is known for its pop-influenced mixed media art which utilizes bright colors and posterized figures to explore intersectional identity. 

Once you enter the space, you'll see a new chandelier and get a glimpse of new lighting throughout the main space. You'll then follow the hallway along to the new concession stand.  While coffee and food from Common Grounds are still welcome in Fuse's space, the new concessions stand will offer beer, wine, cider, and seltzer as well as bakery treats. Finally guests will enter the theatre proper, which features new seating, including couches and lounge furniture, with tables and lamps to set your drink at. Starting in 2024, closed captioning will be available at all mainstage performances. 

Along with the theatre remodel, Fuse will offer a late night schedule, with events every Thursday-Sunday. Late night events will include karaoke, comedy shows, tarot readings, queer film nights, improv, burlesque and more. The weekly schedule can be found on the website and is posted outside the theatre every week. 

Fuse will also offer a full season of mainstage shows. 

The company will produce the world premiere of Great White Gives It Up by Ajai Tripathi. A follow-up piece to Tripathi's Great White Gets Off, which closes out the 2023 season, Great White Gives It Up follows Bert and Sandeep as they attempt to discover if their relationship will last by seeking guidance from key figures in India and Ireland's independence movements.

In April, Fuse will present two Fertile Ground offerings, The Play About My Father by Kate Mura and a reading of The Night I Kissed Oscar Wilde by Rusty Tennant. The Play About My Father is a autobiographical one-woman show about a New Jersey community rallying around the Mura family after a freak accident in 1988. The Night I Kissed Oscar Wilde follows Bosie, a 16 year old boy caught in a bedroom underneath Kevin Spacey, as he is questioned by the police. 

Following Fertile Grounds, the OUTwright Festival will begin, with the feature presentation Blonde on a Bum Trip by Mikki Gillette, which will perform at Reed College. Blonde on a Bum Trip is a backstage comedy that follows the trials and travails of pioneering trans actresses Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, and Jackie Curtis as they claw their way from off-off-Broadway theatre to Warhol superstardom. The festival will also include a workshop production of The Mighty Marching Meerkats by Bets Swadis as well as five readings of new queer scripts. 

In July, the Atelier Festival goes into its second season, with four workshops by local playwrights. The Atelier Festival seeks to provide a space for new Portland playwrights to workshop and present new plays, with Fuse's support.  

In October, Fuse will present The Arsonists by Jaqueline Goldfinger. The Arsonists sees a father-daughter arson team burn their relationship to the ground, and then rise from the ashes. It is a lyrical, heartbreaking, and darkly funny play with music about the eternal bond between parent and child.

The final show of the season will be The Tempest by William Shakespeare, with a twist. The play will be presented with only two characters who are stranded on the North Pacific garbage patch. All other characters will be played by puppets made of trash, imagined by the shipwrecked as they succumb to insanity.

In recent years, audiences have called on the theatre to evolve to suit ever-changing society, and the company is answering that call. Each of these shows will run under 90 minutes allowing Fuse to finally create a model that allows the company to pay artists minimum wage. For years, Fuse (along with other small theatres across the country) have been trying to raise more and more money in order to simply pay minimum wage. Frankly, capitalism just doesn't work with a traditional theatre model. Asking for less time from artists who almost always are working other jobs by creating shorter content that leans into modern modes like micro-learning and micro-entertainment is one of the biggest paradigm shifting leaps Fuse has taken in years. 

Fuse is happy to welcome in this new stage in its growth and hopes to see new faces as the team broadens their horizons with late night events, concessions, more accessible seating and a season featuring 14 shows, workshops and readings of original works from playwrights around Portland. 

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