Act 1

It was almost a warning. “You’re familiar with our process?” asked Rebecca Lingafelter, one of Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble’s founding members. Muffled not-quite-screams floated into the hall outside the black box theater at Reed College. Lingafelter is directing the company’s next production, set to open in June. At this January workshop, the group was just starting on Telephone, Ariana Reines’s patchy and fragmented play about the history of its namesake and the effects of so-called electric speech on humanity.

“Have you observed a Suzuki workshop?” Lingafelter asked. 

Inside the small theater, five glistening actors in mismatched sweats stomped loudly and recited lines that, instead of corresponding to each other, made a wild din propelling their choreography. The actor and theater teacher Maria Porter, leading the workshop, told the group to keep their spines moving. “Let’s try the text on top of the shape,” she said, “and then the open sound on top of the transition.” Whatever they did next seemed to satisfy the request. 

Another exercise had the actors in chairs, flailing limbs and gibbering at intervals before freezing in poses. Would any of this make it into the play? Probably not, Lingafelter said. “Suzuki is more about training the body to be ready to generate.” 

Drawing from ballet, martial arts, and traditional Greek and Japanese theater practices, Tadashi Suzuki developed his famous series of exercises—now regularly taught at Juilliard—in the 1970s to heighten actors’ bodily control and awareness. 

The other arm of PETE’s philosophy, an improvisation theory called Viewpoints, guides how its plays take shape. There are nine viewpoints. Terms like “duration,” “repetition,” “shape,” and “gesture” are shorthand for collaborators and a mode of analysis. “Shape,” for example, refers to the silhouette of an actor’s body. Putting “the text on top of the shape” might then mean reciting lines while holding a pose. 

Combining Suzuki and Viewpoints is the hallmark of the SITI Company, an avant-garde group Suzuki cofounded in New York with theater director Anne Bogart in the early ’90s. Lingafelter and PETE cofounders Amber Whitehall, Jacob Coleman, and Cristi Miles all trained, separately, with the SITI Company before setting up PETE in 2011 as a kind of alumni group in Portland. 

Whitehall, Coleman, and Miles were in the January workshop. Company members Roo Welsh and Damaris Webb filled out the group, making up the full cast of Telephone. The energy was similar to a sports practice. They ran drills, seemingly unconcerned with their presence as performers. 

The line separating character from actor, onstage from off, is a central thrill of any PETE show. Scripts and ad-libs blur, no matter if it’s Chekhov (they’ve done his four major works over the past decade—“The play will start soon,” actors announced throughout 2024’s production of A Seagull) or a clownish adaptation of Dante. 

As they ran drills, it was hard to say if they were working out or acting. Welsh was solemn and steady. Webb giggled often, but only with her mouth and eyes, while Coleman and Miles laughed with all of themselves. Whitehall cracked a faint smile just once, while shuffling quickly in a straight line and fluidly swaying the top half of her body, a crouched march I later watched Suzuki’s own company perform in a video. She seemed to control every inch of her body, an effect Lingafelter described as an “extraordinary density of presence.” 

PETE works in “compositions,” meaning the play would come together in units created by performers and designers over a series of workshops, everything from costuming to line delivery to lighting. Dramaturge Chris Gonzalez compared the process to cooking with a Crock-Pot. The soup is cooked when the group is no longer staging a production but living inside a world, a vernacular, an idiom they’ve cultivated. 

The results are singular. It’s so over the top that you forget where the top is or was. There is no fourth wall if, as in 2015’s Drowned Horse Tavern, half the audience is seated at long tables onstage, beers in hand, singing sea shanties in the shadow of a plastic white whale.

Still, the company is somehow both the city’s most avant-garde and most accessible. “I like not suspending my disbelief,” says choreographer and dancer Linda Austin, of Performance Works NW, a longtime PETE friend and fan. “There are certain kinds of performance, I think, where you’re not required to do that.” At a PETE show, she went on, “It’s almost like, We’re doing a show!”

Act 2

Telephone stages both a vaudeville reenactment of Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone (act 1) and a monologue based on a schizophrenic patient of Carl Jung’s who famously believed she had a telephone inside of her (act 2). The third act is a hauntingly intimate slipstream of anonymized dialogues with the perforated texture of a dial tone. (“Oh come on. I call you.” “You don’t. I pay attention. You don’t.”) 

Later that afternoon in January, Whitehall, Miles, and Webb performed a table reading of Telephone’s second act, “Miss St’s Hieroglyphic Suffering.” They sat near a window in a small classroom, Webb at a desk and Whitehall and Miles on the floor. Lingafelter perched over a script at a nearby table with a thick highlighter in her fist pinned against her face. 

Miss St, Jung’s asylum-bound analysand, maunders for thousands of words, stringing together nonsense, intellectual repartee, and moments of profoundly human pathos with discomfiting grace. Much of the script is in all caps. “The scary part is that you start to understand this madwoman,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, reviewing the original production in 2009. “Not that you see what she sees, but you feel the conviction of a hermetically sealed world that exists in isolation on its own self-referential terms.” 

PETE split this person into three actors, so they might speak to each other (themself) properly. They began as an incantatory glitchy chorus: “I AM THE LILAC NEW-RED SEA WONDER AND THE BLUE.”  

Individual voices rose above the group as they read. Whitehall’s started soft, then swelled. “You never know what will come out,” she took a truly solo line, eyes flickering, devious. Then: “LISTEN TO ME.” 

Splitting from the group, Webb forcefully recounted accruing her “ONE THOUSAND MILLIONS.” 

Miles, desperate to get her point across, declared herself “THE FINEST TURKEY / IF YOU PLEASE.” 

The group synced up toward the end. Miss St tells us she’s been locked up for 14 years, “SHUT UP,” she clarifies, “SO THAT MY BREATH COULD NOT COME OUT ANYWHERE.” 

Lingafelter let out a satisfied mmmmh and the group circled to dissect the text. “She feels like a riot, or a protest, or an uprising,” Miles told the group. Lingafelter felt it was more about being understood than advocacy. “I have this access to this other thing,” she said, assuming the role of Miss St. “I’m not crazy. It’s obvious.” She’s proving her status, Lingafelter went on. And pausing intermittently, Whitehall interjected, “to see if the message went through.”

Act 3

At the end of the week, the company invited a small audience to a performance of compositions—brief vignettes that might make it into the final production. A dozen or so of us gathered in the theater’s small bleachers. A table was set very close. The room went dark and a seafoam-green cord of light illuminated the edge of the table, on which sat a soup can tied to a string: a telephone. Plainly visible, a man used a magnet below the table to move the can. And, scene. 

I stopped taking notes because the man, now with more cans on more strings, held one out to me and shook it, wordlessly locking eyes. About six of us held telephone cans, when a series of phone-ringing sounds began to play. Some close, some far off. Some were digital ringtones and others had the old-timey sound of a genuine bell. Stage designers smirked, studying our reactions. One modulated the different rings with a row of switches. Our “phones” didn’t “work,” clearly, but it’s hard to hold a phone and hear a ring without trying to answer it. 

Later on, Welsh and Coleman, playing Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, performed a musical overture that opens the play. Working like foley artists, they made sounds with tubes and teapots that tracked with distortion and humongous echo into the headphones we’d all been given before the scene. Then they weren’t so much talking as making noises that alluded to speech. Their voices sounded underwater or within a dream, just out of grasp, the record of speech that isn’t quite the real thing. 

This remote, mediated communication was just as fraught as a voicemail, a cryptic text from the other room, or a DM heavy with subtext. The phones we’re glued to today are not the phones Bell and Watson invented. A smartphone is to a landline what FaceTime is to face-to-face conversation. Yet we use the same word. We accept so many forms of communication as equal—calls, texts, emails, voice memos, Snapchats, comments, likes, emojis, memes, swipes right or left—and ignore what’s lost in the transfer.

The play riffs on a real vaudeville dialogue Bell and Watson performed in the late 1800s to promote their invention, grasping its grand scale immediately. “Our / device,” Bell says—hear the obscuring clip of that dial tone—“The telephone, it seems to me / Watson, should make bigotry impossible. / It shall. And render war unlikely, if not / impossible.” But then he puts too fine a point on it: “People will understand / one another.” 

PETE is uniquely adept at staging these moments, in which you comprehend something that’s impossible to articulate. It’s no sleight-of-hand Vegas shtick. It drips, skillfully, with earnestness. You think you know who they are, or what character they are playing. They’re telling you constantly, in a fanciful vaudevillian style, even. But whatever the direct message of the production at hand, a larger sentiment ever present in their methods and theatrics, in fact, is expressed directly by this experimental ensemble’s numberless experiments, which is the extreme effort it takes to faithfully communicate anything at all.