single ticket prices || bring a group || subscription prices and benefits|| seating chart

Subscribe online today- Seating is first come, first served so the sooner you buy, the better your seats. Buying your season tickets online is as easy as 1,2,3. We’ll walk you step by step through your package options in our easy online ordering process. In just a few minutes you can secure your dates with the gangsters, rakes, rock stars and eccentrics who make up our 2008/2009 season.

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Or gather a group for your favorite shows: It only takes 5 couples to qualify for great group discounts. Group tickets go on sale August 1st.

The Plays

Guys and Dolls Buy Tickets Now!
A Musical Fable of Broadway, Based on a Story and Characters of Damon Runyan, Music and Lyrics by Frank Loesser, Book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows; Directed by Chris Coleman
September 23 – October 26, 2008, Main Stage

“No matter how terrible a fellow seems, you can never be sure that some girl won’t go for them.” - Miss Adelaide

How could a bunch of rough and tumble gangsters end up singing about “the boat to heaven” in a Times Square mission? Anything’s possible when love is on the line, and never more so than in Guys and Dolls, one of the greatest American musicals of all time. Based on Damon Runyon’s gritty tales of the 1930s NYC underworld, bursting with colorful characters, and with a score that features iconic hits like “Luck Be a Lady” and “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” Guys and Dolls promises to light up the night.

R. Buckminster Fuller: THE HISTORY [and Mystery] OF THE UNIVERSE Buy Tickets Now!
Written and Directed by D.W. Jacobs, from the life, work and writings of R. Buckminster Fuller
October 14 – December 7, 2008, Ellyn Bye Studio

“Everything you’ve learned in school as ‘obvious’ becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.” - Buckminster Fuller

Does humanity have the chance to endure successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how? This is the question framed by Buckminster Fuller, the engineer, designer, poet, and philosopher who, among other things, was Mensa’s second president and invented the geodesic dome. Join us for an unforgettable journey inside one of the most remarkable minds of the 20th century in a one-man show that blends videos, lectures, poetry and a healthy dash of humanist humor. A hero of the sustainability movement, Bucky framed many of the great ideas of his time and ours. This is your chance to get to know the man behind the world-saving mission.

A Christmas Carol Buy Tickets Now!
Adapted by Mead Hunter from the novel by Charles Dickens; Directed by Cliff Fannin Baker
December 2 – 28, 2008, Main Stage

“God bless us every one.” - Tiny Tim

What do you value most? And is it what’s truly important? Take time with your family this holiday season to renew your answers to these essential questions alongside Tiny Tim, Ebenezer Scrooge and a sleigh full of ghosts and magical creatures as we remount this warm and engaging adaptation of the Dickens classic. In this version, Scrooge’s nephew Fred stands in for the spirit of the season, expressing what we all love about the story when he says to Scrooge; “[This] is a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers in life, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

World Premiere
Apollo Buy Tickets Now!
Written and Directed by Nancy Keystone
January 13 – February 8, 2009, Main Stage

“Nancy’s work has always had visual flair and wild imagination. [For Apollo]- utilizing juxtapositions of movement, multi-media, text and sound- she transformed her work from an exciting idea to a brilliant new theatrical world.” - Chris Coleman

If the brilliant collage artists Robert Rauschenberg had created a play, this is what it might look like. One of the most adventurous productions ever offered on a PCS stage, Apollo is an epic, multimedia examination of post WWII America which explores the birth of the U.S. space program, its employment of former-Nazi rocket scientists, and their surprising intersection with the Civil Rights Movement. Using the U.S. mission to the moon as a symbol of our country’s greatness, Apollo probes deep into the question: what did we sacrifice to become the America we are today? And was it worth it? Through a kaleidoscopic array of theatrical methods (movement, text, video projection, music), Keystone reveals the costs and ambiguities of human aspiration and progress.

American Premiere
How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found Buy Tickets Now! 
By Fin Kennedy; Directed by Rose Riordan
January 27 – March 22, 2009, Ellyn Bye Studio

“You are who you can prove you are. You are what people think and that’s the easiest thing in the world to change.” - Mike

If you had to disappear from your life, who would you call first? In this thrilling new play, a young advertising executive reaches the breaking point and decides to drop out as quickly as possible. So he digs up a shoestring relation in a seedy corner of the country who can give him a quick and detailed lesson in the art of escape. The mission? To dispose of everything that defined his former self. It’s an adrenaline-charged, apocalyptic journey to the edge of existence. Like a live and intense Blade Runner meets Memento, How To Disappear will have you questioning everything that makes us who we are in the 21st Century.

The Importance of Being Earnest Buy Tickets Now!
By Oscar Wilde; Directed by Chris Coleman
February 24 – March 22, 2009, Main Stage

“Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?” - Jack Worthing

How do you have your cake and eat it too in Victorian England? Well, if you are an attractive man of means like Jack Worthing, its pretty simple: create a double life. Mr. Worthing’s double life (he is known as Jack in the country, but “Ernest” in town) unfolds without a hitch until he decides to come clean and propose to the love of his life, one Gwendolen Fairfax. The snag: while Jack is on his knee, Gwendolen reveals that she could only marry a man named Ernest. What’s a rake to do? With dialogue as effervescent as any comedy in the English language, this classic will have you rolling in the aisles.

World Premiere
Crazy Enough Buy Tickets Now!
Written and Performed by Storm Large; Directed by Chris Coleman
March 31 – June 7, 2009, Ellyn Bye Studio

“Over the top, and out of control… and all she ever said was ‘ain’t life beautiful.” - Storm Large

What do you do when the doctor whispers into your nine-year-old ear that by the time you’re 20 you’ll be confronting the same visions that haunted your mother? For Storm Large (Portland rock legend and star of last season’s Cabaret), answering that question has been a lifelong journey. This world premiere production weaves music and story into a ride through the darkest alleys and brightest vistas faced by the human mind. As hard as nails, as fragile as a raindrop, and as sexy as your most unrepeatable dreams- Crazy Enough will be an event that lingers long into the night.

Not recommended for those under 18; strong sexual content and language.

Frost/Nixon Buy Tickets Now!
By Peter Morgan; Directed by Rose Riordan
April 14 – May 10, 2009, Main Stage

“I gave ‘em a sword. and they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.” - Richard Nixon

Can a lightweight, has-been talk show host lead the most infamous political figure of his time to publicly acknowledge his guilt? That is the central question raised in Peter Morgan’s delicious drama about a series of televised interviews that former president Richard Nixon granted British journalist David Frost in 1977. The New York Times described the play as “proceed[ing] with the momentum of a ticking-bomb thriller and the zing of a boulevard comedy…structured as a prize fight between two starkly ambitious men in professional crisis, Frost/Nixon makes it clear that the competitor who controls the camera reaps the spoils.”

Grey Gardens Buy Tickets Now!
Book by Doug Wright, Music by Scott Frankel, and Lyrics by Michael Korie; Director Mark Cuddy
May 26 – June 21, 2009, Main Stage

“If you can’t get a man to propose to you, you might as well be dead.” - “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale

Fresh from Broadway where it was nominated for ten Tony Awards in 2007, this new musical from Doug Wright (I Am My Own Wife) tells the hilarious and heartbreaking story of two indomitable women, Edith Bouvier Beale and her adult daughter “Little Edie,” the eccentric aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Once among the brightest names on the social register, these two women became East Hampton’s most notorious recluses, living in a dilapidated 28-room mansion with their 52 cats. From the glittering high society of 1940s New York to the tabloid headlines that rocked the Kennedy clan in 1970s, Grey Gardens takes you inside the fascinating world of “America’s royalty,” asking: when should the private be made public? And what are the limits of America’s right to know?

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Portland Center Stage is also supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

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