Portland Center Stage

Alison Hallett | The Portland Mercury [Review 10 Feb 2011]

The first scene of Jordan Harrison’s futura is wonderful: A professor (Lori Larsen) lectures on the history of typeface, introducing various fonts and explaining their aesthetics and evolution. It’s interesting material, presented engagingly, and a natural fit for letterpress-happy Portland. But wait—what’s that noise thrumming in the background of the professor’s speech? It’s “ozone stabilizers”? Uh oh. We’re in the future.

Ben Waterhouse | Willamette Week [Review 09 Feb 2011]

Jordan Harrison’s dystopic sci-fi drama takes its name from Paul Renner’s sans-serif typeface, employed by Volkswagen, HP and, until recently, IKEA, but its subject is more PMN Caecilia, the default font on the Kindle. Harrison fears a future where the flow of information is controlled by corporations whose customers surrender their literary heritage and freedom of expression in the name of convenience. The bogeymen here is Amazon, which has no qualms about stealthily deleting works from its customers’ e-readers, or maybe Google, whose ubiquitous free online applications could make Orwellian surveillance a cinch. Harrison sees no silver lining to the Cloud.

Marty Hughley | The Oregonian [Review 09 Feb 2011]

“I’m here to disappoint you with a lecture if you’ve come for a spectacle.” So says the Professor, who indeed does deliver a collegiate lecture for the first third of Jordan Harrison’s play “Futura,” which opened Friday in Portland Center Stage’s Ellyn Bye Studio.

But that lecture, which the Professor calls “From Pen to Pixel: a History of Typography,” is surprisingly riveting material, almost revelatory in the connections it draws between history, technology, shapes on paper and the nuances of written expression.