YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG! Will Debut at Portland Playhouse

Feeble Flame, a Portland theater company founded by Ora Fruchter and Sarah Smith, will premiere its first signature production, You're Doing It Wrong!, in The Studio at Portland Playhouse, October 23–25. Supported by a Jim Henson Foundation Family Grant and the Regional Arts & Culture Council, the forty-minute handmade puppet comedy follows a bird who can't seem to figure out how to build a proper nest, but is fiercely determined to protect her egg anyway. It's a story about trying, failing, and finding your own way, drawn directly from Fruchter and Smith's personal experiences.  

At the center of You're Doing it Wrong! is Bitty, a bird with an egg, nowhere to put it, and no idea how every other bird makes nest-building look so easy. On her quest to try to learn how to function like the other birds, she is thrown out of one nest, falls headlong into another, learns to dig from a prairie dog named Bub, is chased by a snake, and is frequently interrupted by a foolish gardener. Finally, through her determination, creative problem-solving, some help from the audience, and a bit of good luck, Bitty creates the home she has been looking for. 

The show is a visual delight, featuring vivid characters with huge personalities, whimsical sets that seem to have lives of their own, and even a shadow sequence that goes underground. The show is rooted in physical comedy, using moments of slapstick humor, silly sound effects, and absurdist arguments between living characters and inanimate objects. Underneath sits something harder, which the show holds rather than views at arm's length: being human is a daily exercise in accepting that we will not get things right. Bitty, a bird mother who cannot work out where to put her egg, has to improvise a home out of nothing while ferociously protecting the only thing she has. She fails almost continuously. She is also the most resilient character on stage.

The puppeteers get it wrong too; intentionally built into the show are moments when the performance falls apart, and the audience is asked to help put it back together. Fruchter designed and built the tabletop and rod puppets, Smith designed the scenery and props, and the original score is by conductor and composer Raúl Gómez-Rojas, Music Director of Portland's Metropolitan Youth Symphony.

Fruchter and Smith met picking up their children from preschool and immediately recognized they were cut from the same cloth: two theater artists at some distance from the path they had trained for. Both had spent years away from that work — puppetry, physical theater, clown, direction — while raising their kids Alma and Gideon, both now seven, who remain the first and most honest audience for any new idea. Fruchter and Smith founded Feeble Flame to make the work they've been missing.

“As a kid I thought I was supposed to know how to do things before I tried them, and that making a mistake was dangerous,” said Fruchter, who has been creating puppet theater for adults and children for twenty years and has performed at La MaMa and St. Ann's Warehouse. “Bitty tries and fails and tries and fails, and she is amazing. She looks like a hero to me, and she is the kind of hero I want my son learning from.”

“It can be challenging to find community when you are uncertain of your own self-worth,” said Smith, whose Portland work includes projects with Portland Playhouse, Third Rail Repertory Theatre, and the Oregon Symphony. “I made this show because I'm looking for an answer to the question: Do we have a place and a true purpose in community if our needs are demanding and our skills are considered obscure?”

Access is central to the work. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, and the run is built for audiences who do not always find live performance easy: a visual guide to the show is published in advance, and audience members can leave and come back at any time.