Somewhere between Shakespeare and a karaoke night, The Bed Trick slips between eras and tones, asking what does it mean to be “okay” with sex, in all its dubiously consensual forms, and what does it mean to be rewritten by it? The in-show pre-show gave us Elizabethan neckpieces and harp plucks whenever Shakespearean language appeared, but the world of the play was aggressively modern… messy desks, miscellaneous ramen cups, and purple beanbags. The text kept bouncing between direct quotations and painfully real present-day speech, and the tension between those registers carried through each scene. 

The play is very funny–my favourite character is the dad with a cardigan and an excellent booty wiggle–but it’s also full of tiny heartbreaks. Lines like: “The way he was mad at me kind of scared me… it was all kind of unbearable” or “I think you’re using a lot of buzzwords to overpower me right now” landed like bruises. The play orbits a trio of dormmates trying (and failing) to grow up at the same speed. Harriet’s naive brightness and Lulu’s mean-girl jadedness rubbed against each other in the best way, while the virginal Marianne’s slow reveal–that she’s named after the girl her father wished he’d married–brought a quiet ache.

Playwright Keiko Green builds these emotional trapdoors so that laughter suddenly tips into reflection. Willis’s monologue about his long-term girlfriend Lulu, “Can I breathe without her?” was beautiful in its sincerity: the sound of an eighteen-year-old trying to justify staying with someone he’s already outgrown, because the alternative… being alone, being himself… feels impossible.

Then the intermission cracked open with “I Wanna Know What Love Is” blasting through the theater, turning into audience karaoke, and somehow it fit. The show circles and circles that question: How do we know what love is, and who taught us how to recognize it? It’s hard not to notice the narrative that much of our moral compass comes pre-loaded. Half of our beliefs about love and wrongdoing aren’t beliefs at all, just old scripts we’ve been quoting from. These hand-me-downs–a little Shakespeare here, a little Greek tragedy there, a little Bible verse, a little parental folklore–were stitched together long before we knew we were wearing them.

If the writing traces the myths we carry, the designs give those myths a room to rattle around in. The set’s lived-in clutter and specific sound choices made every emotion feel amplified. On one side of the room, Lulu and Marianne’s birthday dance party pulsed with light, motion, and the deep thud-thud of the bass, while Harriet stayed trapped in a stark rehearsal for a play that wasn’t even a mainstage. Marianne cruelly teases her for “missing out,” and it was a reminder of how heightened everything feels at eighteen, when every decision feels like it could define your whole life. Every choice is a life-defining one.

Green’s The Bed Trick suggests that the morals we cling to don’t appear out of nowhere. They’re shaped by the adults we watched, the stories we absorbed, the systems we quietly agreed to participate in. It’s funny and painful all at once, watching even the parental characters come to terms with the parts of themselves that never stopped being eighteen. 

The second act swells darker. The mother enters in skintight leopard print and lipstick on her straw, half-drunkenly confessing that maybe… the bed trick was bad?… her voice guttural and raw. Her admission isn’t just personal; it’s generational. It’s the moment where the show stops asking “What happened?” and starts asking “Why did we think this was acceptable for so long?” There’s a cyclical quality to everyone’s choices: Marianne and Willis emotionally cheating, Lulu kissing Harriet, power dynamics looping and mutating…but each scene feels like people trying to rewrite their own scripts, to figure out what consent means after a lifetime of watching bad examples. 

By the end, apologies come easily, maybe too easily. Throwing the cast into intentionally hokey period costumes inside that broken-windowed, suspiciously missing-chaired dorm room is a great bit (Shakespeare’s ghost showing up to collect royalties) even as the monologue takes a swing at his romantic manipulation. Still, the ending leans on his blueprint: a soft-edged, modern fantasy of emotional resolution where everyone understands each other just enough to get home. And maybe, just maybe, that’s the contemporary version of “all’s well that ends well.” Yet it left me with a faint ache… a reminder that someone, somewhere, is always deciding what “well” should mean. So much of what we call “resolution” still traces back to the sources we claim to have outgrown: Elizabethan comedy promising harmony, church logic promising forgiveness and absolution, myth promising a moral. These inheritances settle quietly into us, shaping instinct long before reflection, and they still whisper rules about what a “good” ending should look like.

Sitting in a Portland audience, as a Portland theatre artist, I know that we are constantly negotiating which stories get told and who gets to interpret them. This play felt less like a judgment and more like an invitation–not to declare what is right, but to notice where our sense of rightness even comes from. The Bed Trick leaves you buzzing. It’s about cycles of desire, consent, and storytelling, and how every generation keeps trying to crawl out of the same tangled bed, hoping this time, maybe, we’ll get it right–or at least realize the rules were never neutral to begin with.

Before the seams disappear: Four readings from the 2026 Fertile Ground Festival

At this year’s Fertile Ground Festival, early drafts by Josie Seid, Rich Rubin, Sara Jean Accuardi, and erin rachel revealed the pleasures of watching theatre think out loud.
By Daye Thomas
May 8, 2026

PORTLAND AREA
Theatre

Fertile Ground has always felt less like a festival and more like eavesdropping on Portland theatre artists thinking out loud. No one sees the same festival. You catch fragments. A first showing of a full-length draft of a musical floating between grief and bookstores. A political docu-play where actors hold up sheets of paper like evidence. Shakespeare rewritten through the fashion industry, poetry, and fishnets. Adults playing children in memories that refuse to sit still.

The pleasure, and for some the frustration, of Fertile Ground is that the seams still show. This year, I chose to view productions in early reading stages. I love productions at this stage because you can watch artists negotiating, in real time, how much structure, imagery, and meaning the audience needs fed to them. Whether an image can hold meaning on its own, or if someone needs to step in to explain it afterward.

The four productions I caught this year approached that balance very differently. Josie Seid’s House of O trusted poetry and rhythm to build an expansive theatrical world out of Othello and high fashion. Rich Rubin’s White House Enemies List assembled historical evidence into a warning about political memory and institutional resistance. Sara Jean Accuardi’s The Compulsory Best Friendship of Limmy and Wags fragmented memory and parenthood into overlapping emotional impressions, while erin rachel’s Unbound stretched toward an ambitious musical vocabulary of grief and connection. Together they made for a strange and satisfying stretch of theatre.
* * *
House of O by Josie Seid
Vanity, possession, branding, exoticization, desire… Othello already lives close to performance and image, so placing it on a runway only sharpens the blade.
Through this reading, models and lovers and manipulators all move through the same narrow corridor of spectatorship. Everyone watches each other constantly. Small gestures become loaded. Even in a reading with minimal staging, a tiny eyebrow twitch between actor Bobby Bermea (reading as the fashion mogul Ibu Othello) and Beth Thompson (his polarizing new bride) communicated more chemistry and tension than pages of exposition.
The language arrives first. Seid’s script pulses with rhyming couplets, bursts of poetry, and lines that snap suddenly into contemporary speech: “So you woke up today and chose violence, right out the gate?” one character asks. At another point, Othello’s head designer Niara Iago mourns, “You and me. We. So how the fuck did we become three.”
The text moves musically, sometimes rap-adjacent, sometimes lyrical, sometimes devastatingly blunt. Characters speak in aphorisms. Their language shapes the world. “Though I hate to begin, I must. For righteousness is greater than trust.”
Fashion becomes shorthand for consumption: “ethnic and exotic and hip,” characters spit as descriptors of African fashion, reducing people into aesthetics and marketability. The piece’s parallels to Othello never felt forced because fashion already thrives on performance, ownership, desirability, and replacement.
Tessa Mae’s performance was a highlight, her Iago radiating unprocessed jealousy from the beginning. Dressed in a colorful vertical-striped t-shirt dress, fishnet socks, and white Nikes, she spits resentment at Othello’s new bride’s “vertical pursuit of horizontal promises” The possessiveness felt immediate and physical, less like a slow corruption and more like a wound already opened before the play began.
What lingered most for me, though, was the play’s relationship to stillness. The language swells outward and then abruptly cuts itself open with quiet. Time stretches. As this cut-throat piece evolves, both the language and the characters seem to run on their last breath. Those moments trusted the audience most fully, and the actors, with hardly any rehearsal time, really demonstrated the potential of this script.
At times, the density of the writing seemed difficult for actors still physically finding the text in their mouths. But honestly, that became part of the pleasure of watching it at Fertile Ground. You, as an audience member, feel looped into something fresh and new, and can feel the production reaching toward a theatrical vocabulary larger than realism. Even unfinished, House of O already feels thrillingly alive.
* * *
White House Enemies List by Rich Rubin
Another of the strange pleasures of Fertile Ground is how quickly artists shift roles within the same weekend. The day before watching Rich Rubin’s White House Enemies List, I had watched Josie Seid presenting her take on Othello. The next afternoon, she sat beside me as director of this stripped-down political docu-play. Fertile Ground’s scale allows artists to move fluidly between playwright, director, collaborator, actor, and audience member, often overnight.
To mark each scene, Seid had actors hold up sheets of paper reading “The First List,” “The Reaction,” “Why me?” “Methinks the Gentleman Doth Protest Too Much,” and more. Dressed almost entirely in red, white, and blue, with John San Nicholas standing apart in a dark suit, the cast visually echoed the production’s uneasy relationship to American political spectacle. The structure resembled evidence being entered into a courtroom, and the simplicity worked best early on, when the production trusted the escalating absurdity of Richard Nixon’s 1971 “Enemies List” to speak for itself.
At first there were twenty names. Then hundreds.
The show repeatedly returned to ordinary people targeted through audits, intimidation, surveillance, or public humiliation: journalists harassed, political opponents catalogued, an orphanage volunteer audited for years. The production builds through accumulation, trying to let the absurdity slowly curdle into horror. But watching this in 2026, I found myself unsettled less by the escalation itself than by how commonplace it already felt.
Several performances grounded the material nicely. Lolly Ward’s understated central performance gave the production emotional steadiness amidst its barrage of historical detail. Taya Dixon, who consistently excels at heightened character work, made Lyndon B. Johnson a particular standout, while Matt Pavik’s Nixon was a delightful surprise for me as someone unfamiliar with his work. He balanced paranoia and self-importance with just enough awkwardness and shaking jowls to keep the audience laughing even as the material darkened. That tension between humor and institutional cruelty became one of the production’s strongest theatrical tools.
There was also an interesting generational divide in the room. At a 2 p.m. weekday performance, many audience members carried a recognition of the names and references being invoked, reacting audibly before I understood their significance. Watching the production as someone without lived memory of Nixon’s presidency made me aware of how political theatre changes depending on who already carries the history inside their body, and how differently the material might land for younger audiences less connected to that political moment.
Near the end, the production’s contemporary parallels became more explicit, asking what happens when institutional resistance disappears and nobody says no anymore. I found those moments somewhat less effective than the quieter historical details, which trusted the audience to build the bridge themselves. Still, White House Enemies List remained both sharply researched and unexpectedly funny, using humor to make political history feel immediate rather than archival. I left the reading more informed, and grateful to see a Fertile Ground production turning outward toward systems, governance, and public consequence instead of purely personal storytelling.
* * *
The Compulsory Best Friendship of Limmy and Wags by Sara Jean Accuardi
Having recently seen Accuardi’s The Storyteller on the same stage at ART, I was struck by how strongly Compulsory Best Friendship continues her interest in memory as something fragmented, overlapping, and emotionally slippery. Inspired by an IVF embryo mix-up, the play follows two girls and their families across shifting periods of childhood and adulthood, less interested in the mechanics of the mistake itself than in the unstable emotional realities that emerge afterward.
Scenes arrive in fragments. Conversations overlap. Childhood recollections blur into adulthood. The production asks the audience to assemble continuity from snippets rather than straightforward chronology, often creating the strange sensation of watching memory happen in real time: partial, repetitive, unfinished.
There is also a surprising amount of humor throughout the piece. The elevator pitch reads as serious, but as seen through the title of the play, Accuardi finds comedy in the tiny territorial instincts that emerge between both the children and their parents: competitiveness during childhood games, awkward negotiations over the naming (or re-naming) of their swapped children, quiet jealousy over developing mother-daughter relationships, and the dawning realization that the families involved may not actually like or understand each other as much as they are trying to pretend. The audience laughed often, even as the play circled more complicated questions about identity and belonging. One mother insists her experience of birth is “not any less real,” and the line quietly reframes the play’s larger questions about what makes parenthood authentic in the first place.
Adult actors portraying the girls across multiple ages created an intentionally heightened theatricality that honestly kept me at a slight emotional distance, even while the scenes themselves remained clear and often charming. Still, Jacquelle Davis and Kaia Maarja Hillier carried an easy chemistry that made the central friendship believable across the play’s shifting timelines and emotional registers.
Jonathan Hernandez grounded the production whenever scenes threatened to float too far into reflection. As various side characters, he brought warmth, silliness, and an ease that gave the piece additional texture without disrupting its emotional rhythm.
Watching Compulsory Best Friendship as part of LineStorm’s tenth anniversary season felt like a reminder of how many skilled playwrights Fertile Ground allows audiences to encounter mid-process. Even in this early draft, updated right up until the morning of performance, Accuardi’s instinct for humor, emotional contradiction, and interpersonal awkwardness felt consistently sharp.
* * *
unbound: a bookish musical by erin rachel
Unbound was the most fully realized workshop production I attended during Fertile Ground, and the most expanded performance draft writer erin rachel has presented to date. Performers carried scripts but frequently abandoned music stands, moving through extensive choreography, audience interaction, and elaborate emotional arcs. By the end of the night, we had been in the theatre for nearly three hours.
The show circles abandonment constantly. Children left behind. A dead (ghost) wife. People emotionally stranded inside their own bitterness. Characters searching for refuge in books, stories, performance, or each other. A red balloon followed several characters throughout the production, moving through the space like a manifestation of loneliness itself.
At one point, someone asks in a kumbaya-circle: “What about good feelings?”
“Sure,” another responds. “If you still have them.”
There is a genuine sweetness underneath Unbound, even when the material leans heavily into grief, darkness, and resentment. Ashley Song carried the emotional center of the production as the just-divorced Jane, with an openness that helped ground its sprawling structure, while Paulina Jaeger-Rosete as Jane’s coworker and good friend Jude repeatedly cuts through the heaviness with consistent dry humor and restless energy. Their performances gave the production much of its momentum, particularly as the show drifted through increasingly dense emotional territory.
Musically, the cast sounded beautiful. There was also an admirable ambition to how fully staged the production already felt during Fertile Ground. Leiana Petlewski’s movement direction gave the reading a constant physical life, particularly in moments where gesture and choreography communicated emotional information more clearly than the script itself. One especially charming sequence saw music director Dan Buchanan leaving the piano bench entirely to briefly embody a character onstage with a ukulele, a small choice that captured the production’s playful blurring of performance roles.
But the production continually struggled with repetition. Songs frequently communicated emotional information that scenes then restated almost immediately afterward, creating a sensation of circling rather than progressing. Motifs returned insistently without always deepening. The balloon imagery remained visually clear but emotionally static, and recurring references to “between the rock and sea” occasionally felt more self-conscious than revelatory, especially given the company’s name, Rock City Sea. At one point, an audience member beside me leaned over and whispered “ah, marketing,” a joke that punctured the show’s otherwise relentless earnestness.
By the final stretch, I found myself emotionally and physically exhausted, not because the production lacked feeling, but because it rarely stopped underlining its own emotional points long enough for them to settle.
Writer erin rachel repeatedly hints at compelling theatrical compression. Her lyrics and music speak for themself, and tiny exchanges cut through the surrounding sprawl. “Words!” multiple characters exclaim instead of ad-libbing, seemingly reacting to the production’s own expansiveness. Some of the musical’s strongest moments arrived when it stopped explaining itself long enough for silence, gesture, or music to carry the weight alone. One late song simply allowed Song and Jaeger-Rosete to sit and hold one another, becoming one of the production’s strongest moments of femme friendship.
Because underneath the excess, this draft really holds something moving about artistic refuge, loneliness, and people trying to build spaces capable of holding each other’s pain.
* * *
Fertile Ground remains one of the only places where audiences can watch theatre think out loud. Sometimes that means unfinished structures, repeated motifs, overextended runtimes, actors still physically searching for language. But it also means witnessing artists test, in real time, what still emotionally reaches an audience and what no longer does.
Across these four productions, meaning emerged differently each time: through poetry, historical accumulation, fragmented memory, movement, silence, repetition, humor. Some images landed immediately. Others strained under explanation. But even in their roughest moments, the productions kept inviting the audience into the act of construction itself. The seams still show. That’s part of the point.