Nobody ever accused Charles Deemer of understatement.
``When I'm at my best I'm really cultural and careless at the same
time. Reckless,'' said the Portland playwright. ``This is my version of
the Old West.''
``This'' is his newest play, ``Varmints,'' a brawling comedy that has its world premiere Friday night at Firehouse Theater.
``It's yet another attempt to deal with time and space and all those
things that interest me,'' said Deemer, whose fertile imagination has
led him into several ``
simultaneous action'' dramas and a quartet of plays exploring the new universe of quantum mechanics.
Deemer's play is set in 1865 in the eastern Oregon gold rush town of
Canyon City, and peopled with a Pinkerton detective, a one-eyed hotel
manager, a black cook who was once a Shakespearean actor, a mysterious
woman, a one-legged miner and a writer of insipid doggerel who is later
lauded in England as ``the Lord Byron of the West.''
The bad
poet, Cincinnatus Hiner Miller, is the play's only historical
character. Miller -- who went on to fame as Joaquin Miller -- lived in
Canyon City for several years and even was a judge there. Deemer has
made liberal use of his poetry.
``The great test for you will be
to figure out which lines are Miller's and which lines are mine,'' he
said. ``It'll be a great test of your knowledge of doggerel. I've taken
his absolutely worst stuff. I haven't even given him the benefit of the
doubt.''
``Varmints'' began life five years ago, when Deemer was
playwright in residence at New Rose Theatre and Gary O'Brien was
artistic director there. Deemer wrote a first draft of a first act (it
was called ``Oro Oregono'' at the time), then stopped.
But
O'Brien liked it, and so did Steve Smith, Firehouse's producer. When
Firehouse announced that its entire 1988-89 season would be devoted to
Deemer's plays, O'Brien persuaded the writer to pull out the old
manuscript and finish it.
``Quite frankly I'd never have finished this play if someone hadn't said, `Finish the sucker,' '' said Deemer.
The final version is very different from that first draft, said O'Brien, who directs ``Varmints.''
``It's still the same characters and situations, but it's got a larger dimension to it,'' he said.
``There's a more apocalyptic feeling to the ending now. It reminds me a
lot of Jacobean revenge tragedies. Violence, greed . . .''
``And,'' interrupted Deemer with a grin, ``they get it in the end.''
ROTTEN KIDS: Lillian Hellman and controversy seemed to go together like
pork barrels and politicians. ``The Children's Hour,'' her Broadway
debut in 1934, caused such a stir that none of Broadway's leading
ladies would play in it.
``Alice Brady and other actresses were
afraid police would close the play,'' Harry Gilroy French reported
years later in a The New York Times piece about Hellman.
Fifty-five years later such fears seem extreme. Hellman's play -- about
two spinsterish schoolteachers who are accused by their vicious
students of ``sinful sexual knowledge'' -- would hardly cause a cop to
lift an eyebrow these days.
But for audiences, said actress Mollie Chapman, ``It's a very interesting period piece.''
Chapman plays Martha and Sue Ellen Christensen is Karen, the victimized
teachers in director A. Nannette Taylor's revival of ``The Children's
Hour,'' opening Friday at Columbia Theater.
Young Zina Moreno plays Mary Tilford, the girl who starts the gossip and pushes it to the bitter end.
``I hark back to `The Bad Seed' all the time in this,'' said
Christensen. ``She knows the lie is potentially dangerous, even though
she doesn't fully understand what it is.''
More important, added Chapman, is that the lie ``really destroyed several people's lives.''
``Martha is completely, totally unaware of her latent tendencies,'' she said.
The play is like an evil trap.
``Nannette's vision is the spiderweb,'' said Christensen. ``The child
at the center of the spiderweb, and the effect she has on the people
who get tangled in it.''
PREVIEW Varmints Where: Firehouse
Theater, 1436 S.W. Montgomery Plays: 8 p.m. Fridays- Saturdays through
May 27 Tickets: $6-$8.50 (280-6592) The Children's Hour Where: Columbia
Theater, 2021 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd. Plays: 8 p.m. Thursdays- Saturdays
through May 27; 2 p.m. Sundays, May 14-21 Tickets: $7-$8; opening night
$15 (232-7005).
Photo of GRORGIA CACY and HANK CARWRIGHT.