• Log In
  • Producers

    • Buy Tickets

    Event Details

    Welcome to "The Festival Within the Festival!" Nearly all of our shows now have EXPANDED pass-holder access and some have a SPECIAL DISCOUNT RATE by using a promotional code within "General Admission!" We at PDX Playwrights are honored to once again uphold our reputation for robust creativity with an outstanding offering of new readings and performances as part of Fertile Ground. We invite you to explore a vibrant garden of new work taking root: from the challenges of immigration to a vaudeville jukebox musical. With 20 plays of varying lengths among 13 shows and a wide assortment of topics and forms, PDX Playwrights offers something for nearly everyone. Roam from a wild examination of the cultural layers of bullfighting (the winning play from our workshop collaboration with CoHo Theatre) to provocative 10-minute pieces from our Epic Shorts: Strange Burdens contest—to mention but a few.

    Sink your toes into this rich dramatic soil and you’ll get a sense of the impressive variety of voices sprouting in our work. Our delectable baker's dozen of matinees, twilight, and evening shows run Tuesday, April 16 through Sunday, April 21, 2024. We hope the thrill of encountering these new plays will produce a festival within you.

    Tickets to PDX Playwrights performance events are only $15 each. Again, many of our shows have a special discount using a promotional code within the General Admission purchase. All of our shows will appear at Chapel Theatre, 4107 SE Harrison St, Milwaukie.

    **********

    Joan in the Desert
    by Louise Wynn

    So what do we do when a hero, a saint, or a martyr shows up? We don't burn them at the stake anymore. But what we do to them is as cruel. In Joan in the Desert, a two-act play by Louise Wynn, we see that innocent young girl confronted, in 2024, by the mob, the medical system, and the court. She does meet some good people who take her as she is, but also people who treat her with scorn, and some true believers. As in the 1400s, she is still accused of being a fraud—at best insane. The mob will love her until she declines to perform the miracles they require. The doctors, like the religious and political figures of the 1400s, see her as a threat to their power; she is for them only an interesting specimen. The judge is helpless in the face of her conviction. What will happen to Joan?