{photo: The Stamper family rests a moment, each in their private world. Vivian Stamper (Sarah Grace Wilson, left) samples from Wallace Stevens’ poetry while patriarch Henry (Tobias Andersen, right) does some reading of his own. Leland (Karl Miller, middle), is awakes to visions of older brother Hank (P.J. Sosko, standing) and cousin Joe Ben (Andy Paterson, seated) on the slopes amid the timber.}

It’s been a whirlwind week of rehearsals, interviews, performances and photo calls as we prepare for the historic unveiling of Aaron Posner’s world premiere adaptation of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion.

The play, set in Wakonda, Oregon in the early 60s, pits the fiercely independent Stamper family against their tight-knit coastal logging community, focusing on the relationship of two Stamper brothers whose loves, losses and rivalries pull them into a fierce duel for dominance against a backdrop of Oregon’s magnificent, dripping, coastal forests.

{photo: Older brother Hank Stamper (P.J. Sosko) sizes up his little brother Leland (Karl Miller), who has just returned home from the civilized, highly intellectual world of the Ivy League East Coast to help his family fulfill a logging contract (and plot a little revenge).}

Sometimes a Great Notion asks huge and fascinating questions about the rights of individuals, the relevance of intellectual pursuit and the deep mysteries of the human heart. It gets you right where you live… especially if you live in Oregon.

How does it translate to the stage? This has been the question of the hour for weeks as designers, directors, dramaturgs and actors wrestle with a novel whose sprawling intensity led to it being named #1 in the Seattle Post Intelligencer’s list of Essential NW Books.

And it is a question that is still in the process of being answered as we enter the final hours before opening.

{photo: Designers and carpenters survey the set on the eve of tech rehearsal}

Last night, the preview performance featured the re-arrangement of several significant scenes, changing the placement of intermission and sending stage managers and house managers into a whirlwind of small behind the scenes adjustments to keep everything running smoothly. Performers have been in the theater for 5 hours of rehearsal before each evening’s preview, squeezing in every last opportunity to settle this play into their bones before Friday’s sold out premiere. Some of their fingers still have ink smudges from the fresh sheets of dialogue they are tucking in to the cracks of well-rehearsed scenes as adaptor/director Aaron Posner hones Kesey’s sprawling epic into a tightly crafted and highly ambitious work of theater.

There is an extraordinary level of excitement brewing about this production; from the Oregonian, which joined the cast for a field trip to the muddy backwoods of Lewiston to watch loggers in action; to PDX Magazine, whose editor remembers her own logger grandfather; to OPB News, which featured an interview with adaptor/director Aaron Posner on the Friday morning radio broadcast. Down in Eugene, Tripp Sommers of KLCC at Lane Community College called to chat with Aaron about growing up in Eugene and meeting Ken Kesey back in the day.

{photo: Ken Babbs and Ken Kesey with the Merry Prankster bus Further (courtesy Ken Babbs)}

Oregonians from around the state have written in to the PCS website to share their own remembrances of Kesey, including one letter sent from the Washington County Jail, recalling a meeting with Kesey at a gas station. “I told him that I really liked his patches,” the writer recalls, “I will always remember Kesey as the guy with a smile and cool patches.” The remembrances range from cautionary to colorful, but all share a real sense that to have met the man was to be permanently touched by his unique perspective of the world.

Ken Kesey was, after all, a true wild child of Oregon literature, and as a state we seem to have retained our deep fascination with the man and his Dayglo, rough and tumble worldview. As Aaron has pointed out in interview after interview this week, Kesey was fascinated by the theater, and considered his entire life to be a work of performance.

What would he think of this production? I think he would appreciate its wildness, its energy and the way scenic designer Tony Cisek has captured the scale and majesty of the Oregon woods (without stooping to faux greenery or trick timber).

{photo: The view from the top platform of the set- a dizzying 15+ feet from the stage floor}

I think he would groove along with Jim Ragland’s bass guitar and mountain dulcimer score, which drives the play to its galloping, haunting conclusion. And I think he would appreciate the honesty and searching intensity with which the performers have approached their characters. Each actor has had to bravely face some aspect of the play that grates against their own sense of civility or decency. Aaron keeps pushing the actors to fight their own complacency, to stay uncomfortable with the secret places the play asks them to go. Kesey, who spoke of “staring unflinching into the abyss of the new American wildness,” would have gotten a kick out of the bounding ambition of this production that leaps (sometimes literally) into every nook and crevice of the stage, pushing out past the proscenium to touch audiences with laughter, shock and even tears.

The fiercely independent Stamper family seems to strike a chord with Oregonians… whether they are native born or new transplants recently arrived in search of the state’s fabled creative energy and self reliant spirit. Perhaps it is because the two brothers at the heart of the play (the reticent, unflinching Hank and the questing, discontented Leland) navigate a tricky terrain all too familiar to Portlanders on the cusp of an urban/rural divide.

{photo: The Brothers Stamper: Older brother Hank (P.J. Sosko) surveys the damage after little brother Leland (Karl Miller) ends his first day of back breaking labor as a ‘choker setter’ at the Stamper logging site.}

It is heady, deeply personal stuff, and the post-show conversations swirling through the lobby sparkle with intimate memories of grandfathers brave and uncouth, mothers whose beauty mixed uneasily with their intellect and siblings whose fierce loyalty to each other was only matched by the ruthlessness with which they plotted each other’s destruction. Arching over it all is the heady sense of having had a personal encounter with literary history, and with a legend whose voice has deeply affected our perceptions of what it means to be an Oregonian.

I invite you to see this play, to map it against your own memories of the novel, of Oregon, of life back before yesterday became today. And when you’ve seen it, join the conversation, whether online in our discussion forum or at one of the many public events around Kesey and his novel being planned for the month of April.

It is, after all, your reaction to the play, in that darkened room and after, that will bring this heady tale of the Oregon forest to life.

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