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 ringside seat for the full diverse and colorful panoply of the American experience that is our 2009/2010 season.
Why Subscribe? You’ll save up to 30% off regular prices, get great discounts on additional tickets for friends, and never miss a performance with our easy exchanges and virtual valet email reminders. Get Started Now.
Download our season brochure {pdf 11.2 mb}.
The Plays
Ragtime
Book by Terrence McNally, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, and music by Stephen Flaherty
Directed by Chris Coleman
On the Main Stage
September 22 to November 1, 2009
E.L. Doctorow’s sweeping novel comes vividly to life in this Tony Award-winning musical, set against the backdrop of the ragtime craze in New York City. In it, three disparate families intertwine: a wealthy white couple; a Jewish immigrant father and his motherless daughter; and an African American ragtime musician who teaches them all about the surprising interconnections of the human heart, the limitations of justice and the unsettling consequences of dreams permanently deferred. Historical figures like Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan and Emma Goldman also inhabit this stirring epic, but it is American popular music that carries the story, including marches, cakewalks and — of course — ragtime.
Ben Franklin: Unplugged
Written and performed by Josh Kornbluth
In the Ellyn Bye Studio
September 29 to November 22, 2009
“This ‘Ben’ is healthy, hilarious and wise…a hilariously disarming, enchanting, and ingenious tale.”
— Rob Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle
Gazing into the bathroom mirror one morning while shaving, Josh Kornbluth realizes that he looks remarkably like the guy on the $100 bill. Like any good Jewish son, he immediately calls his mother. From there he becomes obsessed with what it means to be a founding father, especially when your own father/son relationship (Ben had an illegitimate son named William who was a British loyalist during the Revolutionary War) is more than a bit strained. Part “History Detectives” and part embarrassingly hilarious autobiography, Kornbluth’s resulting investigation of the man behind the famous spectacles will take you from the hallowed halls of academia to Kornbluth’s richly comic interactions with his mother Bunny and Aunt Birdie, sharing along the way his discoveries about America’s history, family foibles, and the surprises beneath the surface of even our most familiar American tall tales.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Special Holiday Offerings
Not part of any subscription package (including flexpasses), but subscribers received early ordering privileges.
A Christmas Carol
Adapted by Mead Hunter from the novella by Charles Dickens
Directed by Rose Riordan
On the Main Stage
November 24 to December 27, 2009
Already a Portland holiday tradition, this original adaptation by Mead Hunter asks the timely and reflective questions: What do you value most? And is it what’s truly important? At the holiday season, 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.”
The Santaland Diaries
By David Sedaris
Adapted for the stage by Joe Mantello
In the Ellyn Bye Studio
December 3 to December 27, 2009
The woman at Macy’s asked, “Would you be interested in full-time or evening and weekend elf?”
I said, “Full-time elf.” I have an appointment next Wednesday at noon.
Based on the outlandish, and true, chronicles of David Sedaris’ experience as Crumpet the Elf in Macy’s Santaland display, this hilarious cult classic features comic encounters during the height of the holiday crunch. NPR humorist and best-selling author of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris has become one of America’s pre-eminent humor writers. PCS brings a holiday favorite back to Portland as a special Studio Theater presentation.
“Priceless observations, both outrageous and subtle. Destined to hold a place in the annals of American humor writing.”
—The New York Times
______________________________________________________________________________________
Snow Falling on Cedars
adapted for the stage by Kevin McKeon
from the book by David Guterson
On the Main Stage
January 12 to February 7, 2010
Adapted for the stage by Seattle’s Book-it Repertory Theatre (the people who brought us Pride and Prejudice), Northwestern author David Guterson’s haunting story takes place in 1954, on a Puget Sound island so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. The island’s white and Japanese-American communities have lived in quiet but uneasy peace, even through the dark days of WWII internment camps and widespread anti-Japanese war hysteria. But when Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with murder and it turns out that his wife’s spurned white lover Ishmael holds the information that could set him free, the island’s secret prejudices, jealousies and ancient grievances threaten to boil over into an act of injustice from which there can be no return.
The Receptionist
By Adam Bock
In the Ellyn Bye Studio
January 26 to March 21, 2010
“Not only is this play the beneficiary of stellar acting and direction, it’s also another deceptively mordant comedy. You might nickname this one ‘Torturously funny.’”
— Marty Hughley, The Oregonian
Beverly the receptionist is definitely a woman in charge—she’s the first in the door, she makes the coffee, she has all the pens. Her co-workers … not so much. Beverly holds their lives and schedules together Mr. Dart from the central office arrives unexpectedly and Beverly is left wondering just what sort of company she works for and what her role really is. This darkly comic exploration of a seemingly mundane environment, the office, reunites director Rose Riordan and playwright Adam Bock, author of The Thugs, produced at PCS in 2007. The Receptionist was the hit of Portland’s fringe scene at CoHo Theater in the fall of 2008, and PCS is thrilled to present this stellar work to an even larger audience.
Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps
adapted by Patrick Barlow
from the book by John Buchan
On the Main Stage
February 23 to March 21, 2010
Whodunit meets hilarious in this recklessly theatrical riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic 1935 masterpiece which in turn was based on John Buchan’s spy genre classic. In it a handsome hero (complete with stiff-upperlip, pencil moustache and British gung-ho attitude) encounters dastardly murders, double-crossing secret agents, and, of course, devastatingly beautiful women, all while trying to escape from an accidental entanglement with a deadly group of spies called the 39 Steps. A quick witted and acrobatic troupe of four actors will create dozens of locations and over 130 roles in this rollicking evening of winking wisecracks and wow-inducing stage wizardry.
The Chosen
by Aaron Posner
On the Main Stage
April 6 to May 2, 2010
This award-winning adaptation from the award-winning novel is the coming-of-age story of two boys growing up in two very different Jewish communities — “five blocks and a world apart” — in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the 1940s. In it, Danny, the brilliant and curious son of a Hasidic rabbi, struggles with his longing to know more of the world and his father’s unwillingness to speak to him when they are not studying the Torah. After a heated fight at a baseball game, Danny befriends Reuven, an Orthodox Jew from a nearby neighborhood who becomes a friend and a partner in investigating both their shared Jewish heritage and their wildly divergent family environments and hopes for the future. When Danny’s father prohibits him from speaking to Reuven because of a political disagreement about the nascent Israeli state, both boys learn that the bonds of religion, friendship and community are both more brittle and more binding than they could have possibly imagined.
Mike’s Incredible Indian Adventure
Written and performed by Mike Schlitt
In the Ellyn Bye Studio
April 20 to June 13, 2010
“Bollywood meets Waiting for Guffman.”
— Backstage West
“A feat of brilliance.”
— LA Weekly
Mike directs a Neil Simon play in India. Life crisis ensues. In 1999 Mike Schlitt accepted an offer to direct Neil Simon’s They’re Playing Our Song on a four-city tour across India. The sheer incongruity of it all — Mahatma Gandhi and “Doc” Simon singing and dancing their way through the Great Sub-Continent — was just too tantalizing to resist. Mike took the job, brought along a filmmaker to document the experience, and soon found himself in the throws of a devastating life crisis the likes of which he is still struggling to claw his way out of. Mike’s Incredible Indian Adventure is an epic tale of clashing cultures and gastric distress. It’s a play about a film about a play, chronicling an artist’s wrong turn off the road to success and the strange, surreal and terrifying journey to find his way back
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
lyrics and music by William Finn
book by Rachel Sheinkin
On the Main Stage
May 25 to June 27, 2010
Six kids face off in the battle of their lives. The competition is intense. The words are outrageous. Let the spelling (and the singing) begin! Three adults adjudicate the proceedings: a nostalgic former spelling bee winner, a mildly insane Vice Principal and The Official Comfort Counselor completing his community service to the State of New York. Both tender and sardonic, this hilarious Tony Award-winning musical of overachievers’ angst brings you inside the spelling championship to end them all. From the author of Falsettos and A New Brain.
,,,
subscription prices and benefits || bring a group || seating chart
What Are You Most Excited About?
Share what you are most excited about in the upcoming season in the comment section below and you’ll be entered to win a pair of season tickets to the entire 2009/2010 season!
Loading ...
