PORTLAND, OREGON, UNITED STATES, September 13, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ — In 2019, Artistic Director for the socially-focused Red Door Project Kevin Jones produced a show called “Hands Up” featuring dramatic monologues that represented the experience of African Americans with the criminal justice system. The stories the actors performed were first hand accounts of actual experiences with racial profiling. One night, during one of the talk-backs that followed every show, a white man stood up and announced that he was a Portland police officer. The room grew tense and excruciatingly still. Finally, the officer said, “I want every cop I work with to see this show. How can this happen?” From that surprising question, a relationship was forged that culminated in a sister show to “Hands Up,” called “Cop Out: Beyond Black, White & Blue” which featured the lived experience of police officers. The two shows eventually merged and became The Evolve Experience, being performed September 22st – 24th at Portland’s Winningstad Theater.
“I felt it was important to merge the two pieces,” Jones says. “I want audiences to experience both points of view at the same time, which can be really challenging and even dissonant at times. But that’s where the real work takes place – right at the intersection of our deepest divides.”
When Jones mentions the “the work” he is referring in part to the facilitated conversation that immediately follows the dramatic portion of The Evolve Experience. “The talk-back is the whole reason for putting up the production,” Jones declares. “At the Red Door Project we see theater as a tool for creating social change, especially when it comes to criminal justice. Theatre has the power to make us feel and react, and we use those reactions in the facilitation to help audiences understand why they feel and react the way they do. Our goal is to create change one audience at a time, one person at a time.”
Red Door Project co-founder Lesli Mones, who facilitates the talk-back, believes learning to track our reactions in real time is essential to The Evolve Experience. “Our fundamental goal is to help people to grow their self-awareness, to become curious about their reactions and what fuels them. So, the entire production is designed around telling potent, truthful stories that are likely to elicit strong responses. We don’t try to conjure any specific reaction from people, we just ask them to consider, to be interested in, and to reflect upon the responses they do have, whatever they are. It can be incredibly powerful – and transformational. We’ve seen many people come away from an event with a significant shift in their self-understanding.”
Red Door was founded twelve years ago in Portland, Oregon as a legacy project based on the work of two-time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright August Wilson (Fences, The Piano Lesson). Wilson used the idea of a Red Door to symbolize a threshold people can cross to enter a world that asks them to drop their differences and begin the process of healing.
“The show we are doing at the Winningstad this Fall is our best yet,” Jones asserts. “What began as a series of monologues representing the radically different perspectives between the police and African American citizens has now become a dynamic, living conversation that drops audiences on the threshold of August’s Red Door. The choice to cross over…is entirely up to them.”
The Evolve Experience will be playing at the Winningstad Theater in Portland, Oregon September 22nd through September 24th.
Tickets are available on the Red Door Project website
Patrick Walsh
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