Performing Arts Best Bets: Portland Playhouse's "Christmas Carol," Liminal's strange "SANTA," and Bodyvox's cyborg spectacle
By Jonathan Frochtzwajg | For The Oregonian/OregonLive
November 25, 2014 at 3:30 PM, updated November 25, 2014
Welcome to Best Bets, a weekly column in which the Oregonian's arts desk separates the wheat from the chaff of upcoming theater, classical and dance performances. Here are our picks for Nov. 28-Dec. 4.
If Portland theater were high school, Liminal Performance Group would be that one smart, weird kid who gets into philosophy years before his peers, toting around a Nietzsche tome and starting a sparsely attended avant-garde-film club. The performance-art troupe's work is distinctively intellectual, frequently multi-media, and sometimes very good, such as Liminal's experimental yet empathetic staging of "Our Town," one of 2013's best shows. If Liminal could rejuvenate Grover's Corners, we're betting it can breathe new life into Christmas with "e.e. cummings' SANTA," a work loosely adapted from an allegorical cummings one-act in which Kris Kingle and the Death swap jobs. Dec. 4-21, liminalgroup.org