Review: THE PAVILLION at 100 Lives Repertory

Now onstage at 100 Lives Repertory, THE PAVILION is a play about time – the Narrator will tell you so at the outset. It’s also a play about scope. Craig Wright's poetic script opens with the creation of the universe and narrows, with breathtaking precision, to the story of two people at their 20th high school reunion in Minnesota. This expansion and contraction of perspective, which continues throughout, is one of Wright's great gifts: the ability to operate at universal and human scale simultaneously.

Kari (Annie Kehoe) and Peter (Alex Lathrop) were voted "Cutest Couple" back in the day, but they haven't spoken since he left suddenly after learning she was pregnant. Now Kari is in an unfulfilling marriage to the local golf pro, and Peter is doing the middle-age-man thing, i.e., dating someone too young and not quite right. He wants to rewind the clock. She'd rather pretend he doesn't exist. We aren’t rooting for a love story here, but we are hoping each of them will find some way out of the quiet desperation they've made of their lives. That their struggles are so ordinary is exactly what makes them sting.

The rest of the reunion is populated by equally ordinary people: a marijuana-smoking mayor, a world-traveling closeted lesbian, a jaded clergyman, and other assorted townsfolk still trading the same gossip they did at eighteen. All of these roles, plus the Narrator, are played exquisitely by Brooke Totman. She moves between characters with such ease and specificity that the stage genuinely feels full, while as the Narrator she delivers philosophical gut punches on the unrelenting forward march of time, the fragility of life, and the ethereal nature of happiness. The pavilion of the title is both the real location where the reunion takes place and a metaphor: "a temporary shelter for the human project."

Like Wright's other work, THE PAVILION is metatheatrical. As an audience member, you become part of the story merely by witnessing it. The play meditates on the long consequences of our actions, a kind of temporal butterfly effect. No matter how desperately we may want to return to the moment before everything went wrong, you can’t step in the same river twice. Wright's script is full of reflections and observations so evocative you’ll want to sit with each one long after the lights come up. He also knows the value of a well-timed joke, which pulls the play back from the philosophical edge, grounding it in the very real lives of these very human, very flawed people. Expansion and contraction.

THE PAVILION closes 100 Lives Repertory's inaugural season. In just three productions, this company has established itself as an essential home for thought-provoking, emotionally resonant work. They’re currently building a new performance and community space in a warehouse in inner SE PDX, an especially worthy endeavor at a moment when arts funding is stretched thin.

THE PAVILION runs through June 7. The theatre is tiny, just around 30 seats, so only a couple hundred people will get a chance to see it. Do yourself a favor and be one of them. Details and tickets here.

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