What makes PCS’s JAW: A Playwrights Festival possible – and free! – each July?  Contributed support from community partners, which this year included festival sponsors The Kinsman Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Oregon Cultural Trust.

We’re delighted that the Oregon Cultural Trust will again be a partner in producing JAW 2010.  The Trust recently awarded a $10,000 Cultural Development grant to Portland Center Stage, making the playwrights festival one of 48 projects throughout the state to receive funding.

The Oregon Cultural Trust is an innovative, statewide private-public program that raises money to support and protect Oregon’s arts, humanities, and heritage. In addition to creating a long-term, protected endowment, the Trust distributes funds annually through three wide-ranging grants programs. Donors to the Trust are eligible for a 100% Oregon income tax credit for contributions of up to $500 for individuals, $1,000 for couples filing jointly, and $2,500 for corporations. Since Oregon’s cultural tax credit began in December 2002, 13,500 donors have contributed more than $17 million to the Trust.  For more information on how you can support Portland Center Stage and the Oregon Cultural Trust, visit www.culturaltrust.org or call 503-986-0088.

Thanks, OCT!! See you at next year’s JAW!

Chris Murray, Shelly Lipkin and Antoinette LaVecchia bring rabbits to life in Colin Denby Swanson’s A Brief Narrative of an Incredible Birth of Rabbits at Portland Center Stage’s 2008 JAW: A Playwrights Festival.

Hello all! This is Alec Chase, one of the Promising Playwrights from this year’s JAW festival, and let me just tell you what a wonderful festival it turned out to be! The amount of talent that I was exposed to every day left me stunned and open-mouthed.

I cannot begin to tell you how much of a privilege this was to me. Truly, I’ve never had this kind of experience. Rarely am I given the chance to do anything like this, and so to hear that I was one of just six students invited to take part in this festival was so shocking to me. I was nervous, excited, ecstatic and intimidated all at the same time. To be given this kind of opportunity was certainly mind-blowing.

It was astounding how professionally I was treated by everyone! I’m extremely appreciative of how much the Promising Playwrights were included into everyone’s processes. For example, it was very flattering when playwright Marc Acito and director Chris Coleman invited me to join them and their cast and crew at their table during one of their rehearsals. The experience was a wonderful treat.

Certainly, the two weeks that I spent at Portland Center Stage have proven to be the highlight of my summer, and I feel that new doors have been opened. I plan to take the play that I composed at the festival and use it for further purposes. I’ll be a senior at Cleveland High School next year, and as we have a Senior-Directed One-Acts production at my school, I have hopes to use this script for my own one-act. Or possibly, I might take the techniques and knowledge that I’ve learned at PCS and create something completely new.

Thank you all, especially to Matt Zrebski and Michael O’Connell for being such wonderful mentors, to Kelsey Tyler for producing the festival, and to Rose Riordan for leading us all to glory and greatness as festival director. I had a blast!

Thank you for giving me a summer to remember. -Alec Chase

Matt wanted all of us to send in our thoughts on JAW. I just wanted to thank you for giving me the opportunity to be a part of last week. As if getting another chance to write for a reading at PCS wasn’t enough, I got to hang out with a theater full of amazing people. I can’t say which part was better, watching the twelve plays grow towards the weekend’s readings or getting to chat with the hordes of talented artists about those plays. It was one of the most inspiring weeks of my life, I can say that much. Two weeks ago I was planning on majoring in Film Production in college, but I’m going to have to rethink that. Film doesn’t provide environments like a theater. I want to work to find more communities like the one I experienced the week of JAW. – Ivy Knight

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A fun piece posted today by the Oregonian’s Marty Hughley looking back at this year’s JAW plays through the cracked lens of the witty one-liners and minor profundities that sparkled throughout the festival this year. My favorite that he mentions? From Will Eno’s Middletown: “(John, explaining himself to Mary): “I want a lot out of life. First air and milk, and then it just kept going.” Read the rest of Marty’s witty picks right
here.

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Our JAW Playwright’s Festival had its 11^th birthday this year. There were 103 artists, 30 theater companies, and 16 new plays participating in this year’s festival and we had the largest audience attendance ever with almost 3,000 people throughout the week!

Were you at PCS a week ago to see some of the amazing work put on stage during JAW?  We were able to offer the festival to the public for free because of generous people who donate to Portland Center Stage.  If you enjoyed the work you saw last weekend, please make a donation of $10 or whatever you can afford.  It will help us continue to nurture new work and bring you a great summer festival of plays in the years to come.

Read the Oregonian’s summary of JAW here.

It’s your support that will continue to make this possible.

Donate here online or mail in a check to PCS/128 NW 11^th Ave/Portland, OR 97209

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{The assembled JAW Company of 2009}

From Festival Director Rose Riordan:

Some cool stuff that happened during JAW – not the least of which is that total attendance was just shy of 3000 um… and that was for just the readings… not including the other events. That was a 73% increase from last year.

A couple more statistics:

16 playwrights
103 paid artists
30 Theatres in Theatre Fair (200-300 audience members attended)
Lab / Panel attendance = 70 (they were sold out and we had a waiting list for the labs)

We had a line reaching Couch and Davis and the lobby was full for a Friday afternoon reading at 4:00 PM.

We had the following theaters hanging out either all week or for the weekend:
Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Lincoln Center
Yale Rep
Vineyard Theatre

Every show got at least one vote from an audience member and at one point an audience member asked that we program them all into our season.

The woman that Marty mentioned in the article (Donna Tallman) was very sweet and I told her that next year we would have a chair put out for her. She was there an hour early for every reading and stood in line waiting for the best seat.

Some Kudos to Our Staff:
Production/Facilities Assistant Jessica Nikkel produced Made In Oregon did a great job and directed In School Suspension. (Company Manager)Dawn and (Education Director) Kelsey – what can I say? And Susie The Intern aka Kim Morris who some may remember was a short-lived employee in education not only has been volunteering for free since we let her go – she was absolutely instrumental in getting us through the logistics of JAW and doing everything else that had to happen at the same time like casting Ragtime, general auditions and day to day – she really deserves a big big thanks.

Thanks to Graphic Designer Michael Buchino for keeping his area the “Rose Free Zone” but getting it all done anyway. I love that he gets how hyper-focused I get about all the details and “manages me” in the best way possible. And Multimedia Designer Patrick Weishampel’s excellent, dramatic “Carmina Burana/Clockwork Orange” inspired JAW video teaser got over 800 views and did a wonderful job of building excitement for the festival.

And a big thanks to Stage Manager Mark Tynan and the Crazy Enough crew for being accommodating and we all made it work.

But most of all was just all the great work, good will, and fun we had. There are so many people to thank and it’s impossible to note them all – it all begins with the reading committee that reads all year long and meets each and every Wednesday to talk about the plays without the brains and good taste of: Kelsey Tyler, Cynthia Fuhrman, Mead Hunter, Megan Ward, Jessica Nikkel, Brian Kettler, Dawn Young and myself it wouldn’t be possible.

On a final note. I just read something that said a study of the brain revealed that artistic tendencies come from random schizophrenic genes. I think that says it all. And if you actually read this entire email you’ll either be happy or worried about just how artistic you are. I’m doomed me thinks. Who said that? You did! What?

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