This ripped-from-the-headlines play recounts the time, in 2010, when a bigoted community in Mississippi canceled its high school’s prom because a lesbian student wanted to bring her girlfriend as a date—and she wanted to wear a tux, no less. In the play, and the Ryan Murphy Netflix joint, four Broadway stars descend on the town to set things gay. This local production is put on by Stumptown Stages and directed by Patrick Nims. —Matthew Trueherz

Most painters would tell you that the events of their own life significantly influence their canvases. McLaughlin, a painter based in Massachusetts, has made this notion—painting as an organic recording device—his central artistic pursuit. This show’s title, Säntis Bindle II, references the mountain in the Swiss Alps and the idea of a life on the move. The show collects 10 years of paintings that blur lines of abstraction and representation; they wonder aloud, so to speak, about how painting affects experience, and in turn how painting might change the way we understand experience. —MT

Portland artist Derek Franklin is after a tragic beauty. The paintings in his current show, The Poet’s Lips, strive to evoke “memory caught in a spotlight mid-formation that then dissipates.” They are like overexposed snapshots, a swirl of whitewashed almost-images. Is that a salad? Is that coupe of champagne over there? Exciting and embryonic, the not-quite-scenes are pure potential held forever in that moment. Spared the harsh reality of coming into focus, the ugliness of development, they have at the same time been cut off from becoming anything at all. —MT

Musician, writer, Torah teacher: Alicia Jo Rabins is a quintessential Portland multihyphenate. Back in graduate school, she spent two years researching the lives of famous and obscure biblical women. Not content to limit her curiosity to the confines of a master’s thesis, she began translating her favorite characters into song; the endeavor became an indie-folk song cycle and storytelling project called Girls in Trouble that’s been running for more than 15 years. Here, Rabins and a full band will play songs from Girls in Trouble’s fourth studio album, Red Thread, which won’t be released till later this year—but attendees of this show, itself part of the Portland Jewish Music Festival (May 6–17), will receive a private listening link. —Rebecca Jacobson

That’s not a typo—while you could call this St. Johns street fair a “bazaar,” the nearly 20-year-old festival at the end of the St. Johns Parade overdelivers on the label. Over six blocks of booths sell everything from cotton candy and boiled peanuts to underwear, earrings, and no doubt pottery. There are also two distinct beer gardens, hosted by local breweries Stormbreaker and Occidental. And a heavy lineup of live bands play at two stages all day long. Highlights include Forty Feet Tall and Black Shelton and the American Dream. Alan Sparhawk, longtime frontperson of the influential indie-rock band Low, headlines. —MT

If one wanted to be reductive, they might point out that the musician and revolutionary performance artist Jibz Cameron is Dynasty Handbag. However, until this set of performances at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the pair have never shown up to the same place. In a new memoir, Hell in a Handbag (DOPAMINE/Semiotext(e)), Cameron covers the radical path to developing her alter ego, which she once described as “highly dressed-up, and a failure at womanhood.” Cameron will also be in conversation with Sara Jaffe at Always Here Books on Sunday, May 10. —MT

When an author known for children’s books publishes something (anything) else, it’s almost always marketed as their “first book for adults.” Besides its awkwardly salacious undertone, the label is more than a little patronizing. Perhaps the feeling stems from society’s patronizing attitude towards kids? Perhaps a more genuine engagement with children and their literature could benefit the rest of us? That, at least, is the idea Mac Barnett puts forth in his “first book for adults,” Make Believe (Little, Brown), which The New York Times called in an only mildly patronizing review, “A New Manifesto for Children’s Literature.” Barnett will be in conversation with Portland artist Carson Ellis, who illustrated the book’s cover. —MT

As an audience member in Open Space’s Kenton studio, you’re at belly button level with the dancers. If you’re in the front row, you’re so close you may want to tuck in your feet to keep out of the way. That proximity is one of the pleasures of seeing the contemporary company, whose work is athletic, fluid, and characterized by complex partnering and contact work. Up next: Do You See Me?, a full-length piece (80 minutes, no intermission) about coming of age, with choreography by artistic director Franco Nieto, alongside contributions by the full cast of seven, and live vocals by Onry, a Portland Opera tenor who in 2020 went viral for joining a Portland State student on the national anthem. —RJ

Portland Opera is setting up in the Keller with its full orchestra and chorus for a single night to perform Giuseppe Verdi’s famous requiem. Composed as a Latin mass, in 1874, the opera has in modern times become perhaps the most famous (and famously beautiful) celebration of grief. It was performed in Holocaust concentration camps, at Princess Diana’s funeral, and September 11 memorial services. Here, the local opera company presents the show as a universal acknowledgement of fear and grief in an increasingly uncertain time. —MT 

Multihyphenate drag superstar Monét X Change got her first big break on RuPaul’s Drag Race. She’s returned to the show more than once, and was a co-winner of All Stars in 2018. But her career has expanded far past reality TV. She’s in town on her High Heels, Bad Knees tour, performing an hour of stand-up about, apparently, the troubles of being a queen in middle age (36, if you’re wondering). —MT 

When announcing the publication of his own new literary thriller, Double Standard, Portland State University instructor and Propeller Books publisher Dan DeWeese shared on Instagram: “Propeller’s first hardcover release...was pushed to January 2026 due to editorial pickiness, design perfectionism, printer lead time, and, finally, common sense. (It was mostly the author’s fault.)” That design perfectionism includes an eerie close-up of the Space Needle on the cover, and the novel, following a freelance copywriter whose business-trip plans change after he grabs a flash drive left in a hotel bar, travels from Seattle to the Oregon coast and down forest roads. DeWeese appears in conversation with Jon Raymond, another Portland-based writer known for capturing the mist and moodiness of the Pacific Northwest. —Margaret Seiler

Portland dance presenter White Bird’s latest show comes with a lot of potential selling points. If the name Ballets Jazz Montréal doesn’t pull you, know that the historic contemporary dance company is in town to perform its celebrated tribute to Québécois icon Leonard Cohen, Dance Me. Cohen is said to have given the ambitious show his stamp of approval before his death in 2016. Look out for a catalog of hits animated by light and video works supporting athletic choreography. —MT

Why stop at Mars? X, by millennial British playwright Alistair McDowall, follows a group of astronauts and scientists on a research base on Pluto who are supposed to be wrapping up an 18-month stay. Except it’s been three weeks since they had contact with Earth, and they’re growing restless: bickering over contracts and cleaning, killing time with rounds of Guess Who. The sun is billions of miles away, hardly a flicker. It’s “one long night,” in the words of one of the characters. Then the glitches begin. The clocks turn backwards. The captain sees things. Language fractures. This local production closes Third Rail Repertory’s 20th anniversary season, directed by company member Rebecca Lingafelter and featuring a mix of longtime Third Rail actors and newcomers. —RJ

Really, Shelley McLendon and Michael Fetters should need no introduction. In 2010, the Portlanders joined forces as sketch-comedy duo the Aces, and they’ve delivered enthusiastic physicality and nuanced characters, human and not, to audiences since. This month brings a brand-new show at the Siren Theater, the North Mississippi Avenue venue owned by McLendon, a primary mover and shaker of comedy in this city. —RJ

Before his self-proclaimed King of the World status post-Titanic, James Cameron was already King of the Action Sequel, and the two films that gave him that title are screening at the Hollywood in 35 mm. Released seven years after the Ridley Scott–directed Alien, Cameron’s Aliens in 1986 offered a Reagan-era militarized response to an extraterrestrial horror and launched a million think pieces on Paul Reiser’s corporate-ladder-climbing villain and the banality of evil. In 1991, Cameron’s follow-up to The Terminator (which he’d also directed and cowritten) wrapped Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body around a killer robot programmed for good instead of evil, a fictional rehabilitation that I’m pretty sure led to the Austrian bodybuilder’s election as governor of California just over a decade later. Watch for the actor playing ass-kicking pull-up champ Private Vasquez in Aliens to show up in Terminator 2 as young John Connor’s foster mom. (Spoiler alert: Your foster parents are dead.) —MS

The newly opened Foster Theater plays home to this weekend dance festival, produced by local contemporary company push/FOLD and featuring performers from Oregon, California, and Texas. Expect a range of styles, including contemporary approaches from Rosanna Tavares and Volta Dance Collective (both of Los Angeles), Indigenous Aztec dance from Salem’s Ritual Azteca Huitzilopochtli, and a North Indian classical dance form called Kathak from Houston’s Tarika Dance Company. Plus: postshow talks, master classes for advanced and professional dancers, and donation-based professional development workshops. —RJ

The Portland Art Museum’s movie theater across the river is known for sneaking in some pretty sweet preview screenings. Sometimes it’s whatever’s next from A24. Sometimes it involves Q&As with filmmakers. This time, it’s both. At this screening of the forthcoming doc, Paralyzed by Hope, about Maria Bamford’s stand-up career and the mental health struggles she’s faced while building it, the comedian will chat onstage with Neil Berkeley, who codirected the movie with Judd Apatow. —MT

Novak turned her off-Broadway one-woman show Get On Your Knees into an Emmy-nominated Netflix special in 2024. The New Yorker described it as “a ninety-minute reflection on the blow job.” Novak, who cohosts the podcast Poog with Kate Berlant, is a stand-up, but Get On Your Knees involved the choreographed, narrative storytelling that pushes past the wiggle room a stand-up set traditionally allows. The joke around her current tour seems to be a self-consciously empty vamp. “ALL NEW SHOW!” the promotional blurb begins. “IT’S ME WITH MY NOTIONS,” reads an Instagram post. Winging it? Considering Novak rehearsed Get On Your Knees for five years, and minding her hilarious mode of performed neurotics, I doubt it. —MT

Lange’s debut novel, 2024’s Us Fools, was the best kind of modern release: a small press book that manages to make a splash in the national media. It was a “weird” one, per The New York Times, that plugged “the vast, diseased expanse of our country’s history” into one family. Lange’s follow-up, a story collection titled Day Care published by the same Ohio small press, Two Dollar Radio, revels in a similar freedom to ignore expectations. (Read the title story excerpted in Granta.) Stories about a woman obsessed by the landfill she lives near, or told from the perspective of figurines set inside a snow globe, are much more concerned with the machinations of inner lives than plot points. —MT