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.
Daye Thomas
2025/26 PATHWAYS Cohort Member
Daye Thomas (they/them) is a theatre artist, cultural organizer, and planning analyst whose work centers on storytelling, equity, and connection. They currently serve as Engagement Director for Corrib Theatre, which is the Irish theatre in the PNW, and are on the board of Roots and All Theatre Ensemble, a QTBIPOC dance-theatre company, who recently commissioned Daye to co-write their first-ever musical for Stage Fright Festival, ‘You’re the One In Here’! Over the past eight years, they have worked across sound, devising, directing, engineering, stage management, and performance–basically every theatre job except lighting. Beyond the stage, Daye helps out in community with Concerned Artists of the Philippines (Portland), coordinating arts-based workshops, kultural performances, grassroots fundraising, and cross-cultural partnerships, with a focus on research and education. They are excited to join PATHWAYS amidst their diverse background, as they often wrestle with how to capture the complexity of identity, politics, and art.