Sowelu Theater
Portland, OR
503.730.9066
What Others Say About Us
 |
| Grace Carter and Joe Stoddard from The Hero |
Reviews: The Hero by Luke Heyerman
The Oregonian says: "The set -- just a pair of fabricated rocks set on a bare stage -- hardly could be more stark. Yet perched upon them, ready to surround us, are a lifetime's worth of love and fantasy, expectation and disappointment, memory and regret.
In Sowelu Theater's spare, dreamlike production of The Hero, a play by former ensemble member Luke Heyerman, we might be in the desert, as the soldier himself tells us, or in a garden, as another insists, or merely in his mind playing out its last bittersweet reminiscences. His wife might have been a mermaid once, or paralyzed, or neither. The man and woman with them might be ghosts or mythic ideals. The facts hardly matter. What matters is the elliptical dialogue, which is shot through with emotional conflict yet feels meditative and mournful, and the physically expressive performance style, which hovers between dramatic gesture and modern dance to suggest further layers of experience and meaning.
Seen in a preview performance, the show's most compelling feature was the grace and tensile strength of Lorraine Bahr as the hero's alternately beseaching and challenging wife. But visual and sound design also added to an overall effect that was strikingly poetic, evoking an inner life at once heroic yet dashed upon the rocks."
—Marty Hughley
Willamette Week says: "Heyerman's new play The Hero is a haunting tale of a soldier's final battle with his demons.
Lost in the desert, perhaps the Sahara, he confronts the memories of his sad wife, a beautiful mermaid he once lured to land.
The cast includes Michael Fetters, one of the most promising actors in town. Sensitively directed by Barry Hunt, it lives up to a line by Saint-Expury, which says, "it is only with the heart that one can see rightly."
—Steffen Silvis