Puddletown Theatre Collective strives to create shows that pay artists more than a pittance • Oregon ArtsWatch
Chase Davidson has worked in theater for a couple of decades, including in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and as a touring performer in a Broadway musical. And all the companies he’s seen and worked with have one thing in common: “Hardly any of them are operating as they should,” he declares.
The primary problem: the prevailing business models make it near impossible to afford a life in the theater. Since moving to Portland during the pandemic, Davidson has been pondering how to change that. He’s founded Puddletown Theatre Collective: “a Portland-based, artist-led theatre company dedicated to immersive, site-specific storytelling, meaningful artistic collaboration, and accessible professional theatre.”
This Sunday at downtown Portland’s First Congregational Church, the company debuts with its first production: a free, single concert reading of composer Adam Guettel’s (A Light in the Piazza) award-winning 1994 musical Floyd Collins. In recounting the national obsession over the desperate struggle to free an indigent Kentucky man trapped in a cave in 1925, the show raises issues of class, media exploitation, and greed that resonate today — and touch some of the very issues that inspired Puddletown’s creation in the first place.
Immersive Ambitions
Davidson’s passion for musical theater ignited during his suburban Atlanta childhood by his choir director grandmother. While studying the art form at Boston Conservatory, he was cast in the first national tour of Duncan Sheik’s popular musical, Spring Awakening, performing more than 700 times over a two year run.
In Atlanta, Davidson worked with a theater company, Serenbe Playhouse, which staged immersive productions on a shoestring budget, often outdoors using natural backdrops and other unexpected spaces. One production of Miss Saigon even chartered an actual Huey helicopter for the musical’s (in)famous climax. Then there was the Titanic by the lake….
“It was some of the most exhilarating work I’ve ever done,” he remembers. “You seem to feel more invested, having the open sky above you.”
Then came the double whammy of the Covid quarantine and “a bad relationship,” which spurred Davidson to start over in fresh surroundings. He moved in with a cousin who lived in Portland, where he teaches voice and has performed in cabaret settings, including with the celebrated Darcy White.
Trickle Down Theatrics
Davidson wanted to get back to that kind of immersive theater, which he said Atlanta audiences embraced. He realizes that several Portland area theater companies also perform in unusual, outdoor and immersive settings. But he also wanted a company that did something else.
“I want to make that kind of theatre here,” Davidson wrote on the company website, “and I want the people who make it to be paid properly for doing it.”
That’s rarely the case in American theater these days. The profession’s well-chronicled financial struggles and pervasive inequality have prompted increasingly desperate reconsiderations of its prevailing business models.
Like a lot of theater artists, Davidson has seen this unfairness firsthand. He’s “been toggling back and forth between food service and theater” over the past couple decades, and noticed how in both fields — and so many others — “in every single industry, trickle down seemed to follow,“ to the detriment of the workers who make them happen, artists and otherwise. He wants Puddletown to be different.
“As an LLC, Puddletown allows working artists to maintain ownership of the organization and have a direct voice in its direction,” according to the company’s business plan. “The structure also gives us flexibility in how we collaborate, compensate artists, and grow over time. It allows us to explore ideas such as profit-sharing, project-based leadership, and artist-driven decision-making in ways that can be difficult within more traditional structures. At the same time, through our fiscal sponsorship with Fractured Atlas, supporters can still make tax-deductible contributions to help fund our work.”
Ironically for a company devoted to new and different theater economics, Davidson found sources for Puddletown’s business structure by looking backward, to the kind of cooperative arrangements used by first traveling commedia dell’arte companies to Shakespeare’s players, on down to late 19th and early with century repertory troupes. Artists divided the proceeds of their labor without the expenses of middlemen, or buying and maintaining expensive buildings, all of which have driven costs and therefore ticket prices (but not artist pay) so high as to make theater increasingly inaccessible to audiences and artists alike.
“I grew up working class,” Davidson says. The family could afford to take their musical-obsessed progeny to New York to see a few Broadway shows only once during his childhood. “In the past 20 years, prices have really gotten out of control. I’m just doing my part to make theater as accessible as can be” by making admission to this debut performance by donation only, free for those can’t afford more, while encouraging all who can to please donate. He’s not afraid to use “the ’S’ word” — socialism — to describe the company’s approach.
“It’s almost like kind of a trust system,” Davidson says. “If you come to the show and really like it, give us what you think we’re worth and what you can afford.”
Notes from Underground
Those themes of inequality and impoverishment run through Puddletown’s premiere production. After his family farm failed during the Dust Bowl, the real Floyd Collins ventured underground to set up a tourist attraction, because he saw no other means of escaping grinding, generational Appalachian poverty. It’s a story that resonates in our increasingly impoverished and unequal American economy.
But the primary impetus for choosing the musical was emotional. “It’s a show that tugged at my heartstrings,” Davidson says.
Though reportedly hampered by its (since revised) book, Floyd Collins won praise from prominent critics, especially for Guettel’s tuneful, bluegrass- and country-tinged music. The score’s “quasi liturgical but not blatantly religious” qualities, Davidson says, should play well in the woody chapel at First Congregational Church, which is better known for concerts than theater.
Given the central character’s immobility, the relatively intimate Portland venue should also suit the story better than its previous vaster settings, like New York’s Lincoln Center. This concert reading (that is, minimal staging, with actors reading dialogue from scripts, accompanied by live performances of the songs) includes 10 performers, including a seven-piece chamber orchestra conducted by company music director and veteran Portland theater musician Stephanie Smith.
Of course, while using impromptu spaces like churches saves on costs (Davidson says Puddletown rented the building for a night for a mere $1500), it also drastically limits production elements like theatrical lighting and big sets. To compensate, Davidson will rely on what he calls “the future of theater”: projections, which can be much cheaper and more flexible than big set pieces and props. He was so impressed by the digital wizardry the church’s lighting director, Stephen Eggers, had deployed in a recent concert featuring music and images from Legends of Zelda that he hired Eggers to run lights and create projections for the show. “It feels like we’re actually in the cave,” Davidson says.
Davidson realizes that as a startup, Puddletown can’t yet aspire to the scale of extensive immersive productions he enjoyed in Atlanta. And he doesn’t rule out eventually performing in a conventional brick and mortar building, especially during Western Oregon’s rainier months. He also wants Puddletown to perform non-musical plays, like maybe the stage adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery (performed at a Beaverton Masonic lodge a few years back by Experience Theatre) in a vacant house, say. And he has his eye on Urinetown as a good fit for Portland, with — again — those class issues that “are never not relevant” in America, he says. But while he’s imagined “probably five seasons of shows” for Puddletown already, we’ll have to see if the fledgling company’s business and artistic models will work in Portland after this weekend’s “little test run” for the company’s principles. Davidson is optimistic, not least because the company’s debut happens on an auspicious date.
“The night of the show is actually my 41st birthday,” he says. “The fact that it all came together so well and we’ve gotten this far gives me a lot of hope for the future.”
Puddletown Theatre Collective presents a concert reading of Floyd Collins at 8 pm Sunday, October 18 at Portland’s First Congregational United Church of Christ, 1126 SW Park Ave. Admission free with suggested donation. Tickets and info.
