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."