Fighter Girl: The Musical
by Catherine Garvin and Arlie Conner

Festival Performance Dates: Jan 22 at 7:30 pm, Jan 23 at 2:00 and 7:30 pm and

Jan 24 at 2:00 and 7:30 pm
Venue: Portland Center of the Performing Arts, Brunish Hall (1111 S.W. Broadway)

Single Tickets: $17 - $35. Call 1-800-745-3000 or online at ticketmaster.com
Flash Your GrOw Button and Save: $5

Fighter Girl: The Musical is a bold and electrifying story based on a young Portland girl’s naïve dream to change the world by getting her song on the radio. "Sparrow" wins a songwriter showcase in L.A., but her girl band breaks up and her mother won't let her go alone. She's determined get there somehow, but then her mother becomes ill and everything changes. Desperate to help raise the necessary funds for her mom's treatment, instead Sparrow finds herself robbed, accosted, and lost in downtown's famed Shanghai Tunnels. Barely escaping to the Burnside Bridge, Sparrow reunites with her family and ends up changing the world with her music after all, right here, in Pioneer Square. As cutting edge and inspirational as the town in which it's set, Fighter Girl will ROCK its way into your PDX heart.

Brooklyn Bay presents
Collaborations in Space: the Art and Science of Ensemble Improvisation
created by Melanya Helene and Marc Otto

Festival Performance Date(s): Jan 29 and 30 at 7:30 pm.
Venue: The Brooklyn Bay (1825 SE Franklin St)
Single Tickets: $10 - $15 Call 503-258-9000 or online at www.thebrooklynbay.org
Flash Your GrOw Button and Save: $2

How do we communicate with each other? What is really happening in our interactions? What is it we respond to - react to? In an improvisation based in mindfulness, what exactly is happening between the performers? And between the performers and audience?

This piece seeks to awaken and deepen our understanding of human interactions through the integration of Mindful Improvisation and Interpersonal Neurobiology. The evening will include demonstration, discussion and an opportunity to experience first hand how our minds naturally work together.  This work-in-progress is intended to become a full installation piece in 2010. 

SexyNurd: Rockstar Trapped in a “Nurd’s” Body
by auGi + Pema Teeter 

Festival Performance Date(s): Jan 22, 23, 29 and 30 at 7:30 pm
Venue: Curious Comedy Theater (5225 NE Martin Luther King Blvd)
Single Tickets: $10-$15. (Free with Tandem ticket) Call 503.205.0715 or online at www.sexynurd.com         
Flash Your GrOw Button and Save: $3

RockStar fantasy supernova—auGi—belts, pleads, power chords, and PowerPoints his way out of the basement of his country-boy youth in his one-man, autobiographical comedy, SexyNurd. But can he ever escape his nurd-boy image?  SexyNurd is an irreverent, heartfelt autobiography of a teenage boy’s attempt to escape from the middle of nowhere by becoming a rock star. The only problem…he’s a nerd. Thirty years later, auGi is still Robert Plant trapped in Woody Allen’s body—simultaneously railing against and milking stereotype to fuse comedy, storytelling, motivational satire, personal photos, and rock ‘n’ roll to see if he can shed the nerd image once and for all. If you didn’t have a motley view of rock stardom before the show, you just might when it’s over. Veteran of L.A.’s Improv, The Second City, NBC’s Last Comic Standing, Portland’s Mortified and Live Wire, auGi workshops SexyNurd in progress.  Directed by Brad Fortier.

*WARNING* Exposure to 80’s prog-rock, hip thrusts and untamed back hair may cause heart palpitations

Action/Adventure presents

Carnies: A Musical Work-In-Progress
by Devon Wade Granmo and Mont Christopher Hubbard

Festival Performance Dates: Jan 31 at 8:00 pm

Venue: Someday Lounge (125 NW 5th)
Single Tickets: $7  Buy tickets online at www.brownpapertickets.com

Flash Your GrOw Button and Save: $2 per ticket

Two teenage lovers try to escape their small town life by joining a traveling carnival, only to discover a world of degeneracy, drug use and constant melancholy. Madame Maxine's carnival does things the old way, but things are changing, and the corporation Funco wants to buy them out in order to gain complete control of the Western Circuit. There are love triangles, fights with 4-H-ers, evil local politicians and a psychic Age and Weight Guesser. Carnies is a musical about the changing rural landscape, a dying way of life and the fight between Old Weird America and New Homogenized Plastic America.

Artists Repertory Theatre presents
The Hillsboro Story
created by Susan Banyas

Festival Performance Date(s): Jan 22, 23 at 7:30 and Jan 24 at 2:00 pm
Venue: Artists Repertory Theatre’s Alder Stage (1515 SW Morrison)
Single Tickets: $8 - $10 Reserve seats at 503-241-1278 or online at www.artistsrep.org
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The Hillsboro Story opens in Hillsboro, Ohio on July 5, 1954 when the "colored" elementary school went up in flames. The fire sparked a "school fight" led by five African American mothers that became the first test case for the Brown v. Board of Education decision (May, 1954) in the North. Ms. Banyas was in the third grade, and the memory of those times sparked this cultural detective story -- a performance weaving spoken word, movement, monologues, and visual images, backed by an evocative original music score by jazz composer, David Ornette Cherry.

Triskaidekaphilia (Just My Luck)
by Jim Radosta

Festival Performance Date(s): Jan 27 at 7:00 pm

Venue: The Woods (6637 S.E. Milwaukie Ave)
Single Tickets: $13. Call 800-494-TIXS or online at http://www.fertilegroundpdx.org/Calendar.html

Flash Your GrOw Button and Save: $3

One-man show meets "poor man's cabaret" meets karaoke contest in Triskaidekaphilia (Just My Luck), a series of comedic yet poignant monologues interspersed with cheeky karaoke performances. Longtime journalist and Oregon native Jimmy Radosta shares stories about growing up gay in the small (minded) town of Salem; his escapist fantasies fueled by an avid devotion to pop culture; his abrupt shift from late-blooming closet case to "professional homosexual" as editor of Oregon's queer newsmagazine, Just Out; and his ongoing quest to turn life's lemons into Limoncello. The show's title derives from "triskaidekaphobia," the superstitious fear of the number 13. (Not recommended for the easily offended.

Many Hats Collaborations presents

Truth and Beauty
adapted by Elizabeth Klinger; created in collaboration with Betsy Cross and Jessica Wallenfels

Festival Performance Dates: Jan 22, 23, 28, 29 and 30 at 8:30 pm

Venue: Shaking the Tree (1407 SE Stark St. Portland, OR 97214)

Single Tickets: $15. Call 800-494-TIXS or online at http://www.fertilegroundpdx.org/Calendar.html

Flash Your GrOw Button and Save: $3 per ticket

Based on the memoir of the same name by Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty spans the fifteen-year friendship of two prominent female writers through gripping physical theater and imagery. When levelheaded, hardworking Ann is thrown together with gregarious and eccentric cancer survivor Lucy Grealy in graduate school at the Iowa Writers Workshop, their connection is instant and bottomless. Lucy’s young life has been full of hospitals, peer abuse and familial neglect; Ann was raised within the security of a loving family and austere Catholic school. But somehow, the women find in one another a missing piece of themselves. As artists, roommates and friends, Ann and Lucy see the world in one another, rendering a relationship more intimate than lovers.

Depicting a partnership by turns enchanting, suffocating, competitive and destructive, Ann’s deft portrait of her true other half manifests in movement and dialogue in this three-person adaptation. Multiple characters test Ann and Lucy as they struggle to balance personal and professional pursuits while rising to fame in the new American literature scene of the 1980s. Together they weather multiple operations to outmaneuver eradiated tissue in Lucy’s jaw, as her never-ending quest for beauty shapes her ever-changing face. But when repeat disappointments turn Lucy’s desire to obsession, even Ann cannot save her from herself.

Physical theater artists Betsy Cross and Jessica Wallenfels are joined by Joe Spencer in this 90 minute piece adapted and directed by Elizabeth Klinger. “Truth and Beauty” continues Many Hats Collaboration’s commitment to creating challenging new work.