Meet the playwright: Bess Welden

In an area as heavily populated per capita with artists as Portland, the definition of an artist can be as elusive and intangible as the work the port city produces. Is it the skinny hipster hanging at the local coffee shop smoking cigarettes? Maybe it is the unemployed, night-stalking, drug-hazed derelict with visions shouted at those who pass by? Is an artist the loner who sits all day and night in a domicile etching a dream of a legacy? What about a stay-at-home mother?

Bess Welden poses this question in "Hausfrau", a play she wrote with Annette Jolles and Nicole Chaison that was performed in February at the Portland Stage Company. The drama addresses the daily challenges in the life of a playwright, actress and mother in Portland. When I caught up with Welden on Saturday, I saw that her vivacious excitement for life and theatre matched the often exasperated but electric mother she played in "Hausfrau," a piece she based on Nicole Chaison's self-published quarterly of the same name.

Chaison's quarterly is available at local bookstores and coffeshops and her book based on the quarterly, "The Passion of the Hausfrau," was recently published by a division of Random House and available on bookshelves in early June.

In many ways, Welden's play morphs into a biographical piece. She said theatre has been in her blood since she her childhood in Ohio, when she would organize performances with neighborhood kids. Her great uncle, Ben Welden, was a Hollywood actor in his time.

After debating the reality of being an actress herself, she pursued her passion as an undergraduate at Oberlin and received her masters from the National Theatre Conservatory in Denver. From there, she was New York bound.

"For me it was about doing it and making it happen," she says of New York. While fellow actors and actresses were rubbing shoulders and trying to get 'ideal' roles, she took what came her way; and when she didn't get roles, she created her own, giving birth to the playwright inside her. The plays she wrote and performed in New York were mostly solo shows, she said. Welden said that despite her successes as a playwright, she sees herself foremost as an actress.

In New York, she met her husband, David Hilton, and together they moved to Portland, a place they have called home for over seven years and where they are currently raising their two kids, Leo, 12, and Elinor, 9.

This gave birth to the dichotomy of an artist and a mother.
"Hausfrau" follows the struggles of a stay-at-home mother in a series of 'epic' adventures similar to the odyssey$a Dubliners for moms. Throughout the play, the mother, happy with her life, is simultaneously distraught that her own vision of being an artist and a writer are dissipating. While addressing serious topics, the one-woman show had the audience laughing out loud in at situations we had all been through or seen.

Eventually, the housewife makes a work of art, but the true brilliance of the drama is not the housewife's ability to rise above her lot in life and create art, but to absorb the challenges of her everyday life and create art from it. It is uplifting for its heroine and all those like her. It is a message to not despair.
Welden said she started working over the idea for Hausfrau in the Spring of '07.

In May she submitted what she had written to Portland Stage Company's Little Festival of the Unexpected. After receiving feedback at the festival, she was invited to a two-week retreat at Bard College to further refine the work.

"It was huge in giving us the space to work on what we learned from the little festival of the unexpected," said Welden of her retreat. She said her first full-draft was not completed until December of 2009. After that there were still many revisions and edits. "There is no room for extra weight when doing a solo work," she said.

And then the play was performed in the upstairs of the Portland Stage Company in February to a series of positive reviews. Welden said she and Annette Jolles are working to have the play performed in other venues around the country.

I recommend that housewives around the state look for more news from Welden and the works surrounding "Hausfrau."

Hausfrau

A mother's job is tireless, thankless and endless, but then again, bringing a life into this world is probably the most rewarding experience of all.

This is the theme of the new comedy "The Passion of the Hausfrau" by Bess Welden, Annette Jolles and Nicole Chaison. Bess Welden brings an unending passion and energy to the show in a solo performance that is enlivened with imitating the reactions of her kids and husband.

This play is a must for every mother, because not only is it highly entertaining, but it shows that the battle of being a housewife is not singular.

Welden's enthusiasm and stress level are as real and palpiable as the hard seats in the theatre. My occasional conversations with my sister, a mother of two young children, could be played almost verbatim from the scenes where Welden relates epic trips to the grocery store.

And the title itself is the sensitive subject of reality. Some woman happily take the label of the housewife and thrive in this role, but some work brutally hard to have another label, any other label, because somewhere they feel it compromises their dreams.

This is the type of mother the play focuses on. And then, with a slight of hand, the play brings the dreaded label housewife, into a peaceful resolution with youthful dreams and aspirations before motherhood. Indeed, the housewife becomes a character compared with Joyce's Bloom and Homer's Odysseus.

The point here is that the play is real and works real stories and dialog into a confused and convoluted world. It is well worth a view.

Peer Gynt

A medley of bright colors, elaborate costumes, giant papier-mâché puppets and marionette dolls stole the show at Portland Stage Company's "Peer Gynt" on Saturday night. The production's appealing aesthetic shook out a colorful, puppet based-theme that tied together Norwegian folklore and a feeling of having stepped through the looking glass.

The opening prologue presents Solveig, who is Gynt's eventual love, in a yellow dress all alone in a dark stage with a doll that looks like Gynt; another doll is moved above Solveig to imitate her actions. Solveig's pensive waiting, portrayed stoically Sally Wood, between childhood and adulthood symbolizes the questions that Peer Gynt's long journey resides in.

The start is stark, dramatic, sad and full of childhood innocence, an innocence that Gynt searches for, rather than confronts, becoming the albatross around his neck.

Noah Brody plays Gynt with the necessary high energy and boyish exuberance. He is feisty yet gullible, heroic yet foolish and a lover yet selfish. The play itself works in sorting out these parameters in adventures around the world with trolls, wealth and common town folk.

Anita Stewart, who doubles as director and set designer, has done marvelous combining the two roles to make a strange and wonderful world. Each new scene has a magical quality brought about by colors and puppets both small and very large.

[Solveig, played by Sally Wood, stands alone and pensive on the stage in the opening prologue. Photo: Aaron Flacke]

But the play itself drags a bit. It may be because "Peer Gynt" was originally a dramatic poem, or because "Peer Gynt", like Shakespeare's "The Tempest", may be Ibsen's attempt to connect with his audience in a very personal and autobiographical way, but, like "The Tempest", it feels awkward and at times forced.

[Peer Gynt is wined and dined by the troll community that hopes to steal him for their own. Photo: Darren Setlo]

This brings the Epiblogue to ask, at the risk of sounding like a traitor to the classics, a certain question: Why not cut these productions down? There is a purism that prevents the classics from being edited, but the second half of the nearly three-hour Gynt production saw a noticeable reduction in the audience.

On this note, the Epiblogue wants to jump on a soapbox: in a world of instant music, YouTube and hollywood films, it seems that an audience doesn't always have the attention span it might have had before multimedia. Instead of insisting an audience appreciate the old style, why not give the story in an hour and a half? The story stays intact, the action is quicker and everyone is happy. That's our thought and we'll consider yours.

That said, the Portland Stage Company performed another feat of precision and talent in Peer Gynt. Their productions are consistently well acted, directed and designed, and here they have succeeded again.

The show is a wonderful stimulation to the visual palette and will be running until Feb. 22.