Portland Center Stage

Marty Hughley | The Oregonian [Review 20 Apr 2012]

Bathed in dusky blue light, imposing archways frame the stage. In the background sits the facsimile of a crowded roofline, studded with the soft-serve-like domes of Czarist Russian architecture. Add just a few seconds of movement—laboring peasants, followed by their upright aristocratic betters—and we know where we are and how things work. This is a society of grandeur (for some) built on toil (by many), set and solid in its ways.

Aaron Scott | Portland Monthly [Review 20 Apr 2012]

Just as every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, to quote the opening sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, every theatrical adaptation is unhappy in its own way, too. Not to say that there aren’t many wonderful adaptations, but just that the adaptation process is a struggle that, much like a family, involves fights, oversights, and sacrifices, from which few exit unscathed.

Matthew Korfhage | Willamette Week [Review 18 Apr 2012]

Tolstoy’s masterpiece Anna Karenina is a uniquely difficult novel to adapt into a play. It is a long and somewhat baggy affair that constantly swings between two contrasting main plots stitched within a broad quilting of Russian aristocratic life. One is a tempestuous tale of a woman (Anna) swept into impossible adultery with a noble but trifling military fop named Vronsky; the other is a much slower, more philosophic journey toward settled contentment by a landed gentleman and armchair lefty (Levin) who doubles for Tolstoy himself.

Barry Johnson | Oregon Arts Watch [Review 16 Apr 2012]

A few days before opening night of Portland Center Stage’s grand fast-forward through “Anna Karenina” (hey, 700+ pages of Tolstoy condensed to under 3 hours of stage time!), I read a lengthy story by Rachel Swan in the East Bay Express about how theater is shrinking. From her vantage point in a major theater center, San Francisco and environs, she’d watched as the Recession trimmed budgets, cast sizes and ambitions at the theaters she covers, some of the biggest and most respected in the country.