CENTER STAGE BY STEFFEN SILVIS --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It would be impossible to consider the last 25 years of theater in Portland without Peter Fornara and Ric Young. They were a latter-day Hengist and Horsa who battled against hobbyism in the name of art. Both began their stage work here in the 1960s, becoming the driving forces in the '70s and '80s. Both were visionaries hailed for their originality and innovations, creating work that is still discussed. Both were candid to the point of truculence, perfectionists who thought nothing of closing a show that had already opened to overhaul it. Both had followers and ignorant detractors, and both were famous libertines who died prematurely of AIDS.
Fornara was the brooding, streetwise intellectual who scorned artifice and strove for a naked honesty on stage. He became associated with Shepard's gritty Buried Child and True West and laid bare the unadorned potency of Shakespeare's words. Young, on the other hand, was a fabricator of Decameronic dreams and vaudevillian terrors, an artist versed in fin de siècle decadence, which he expressed in Wilde's Salome and Dumas' Camille.
Fornara refused to use stage makeup, claiming it got in the way of his acting. When asked what a costume design might need, Young would answer, "More jewels, always more jewels." Their approach to casting complemented their philosophical differences. "The first thing I want as a director in choosing an actor is intelligence," Fornara said. "I like to use people I'm sexually attracted to," countered Young, "and I like to work with powerful people."
Fornara was a one-man moveable feast who craved a company. He started many excellent theaters, though none lasted long. Young, on the other hand, became synonymous with his theater, Storefront. To this day, there is nothing in Portland to rival it. Young was the Diaghilev of Burnside who embraced all the arts. He collaborated with Ursula K. LeGuin, Henk Pander and filmmaker Bill Reinhardt while promoting the exceptional work of performers like Wendy Westerwelle and Leigh Clark. Storefront was an intrinsic component in Portland's art scene, so much so that Mississippi Mud's editor, Joel Weinstein, once said, "I'd like to think of the magazine as a literary version of Storefront--biting and provocative." Fornara became Portland's theatrical Jeremiah and the scourge of proud amateurism. "We've evolved somehow to the state where it is morally correct to produce theater without substance," he said. "I'm committing some kind of sin for presenting theater with substance." Would that there were more such sinners today.
Two extensive interviews with the artists appeared in Willamette Week in early 1982, when they were both at the height of their powers. Later that year, the first mentions of AIDS appeared, casting a pall over the theater community. Toward the end, Young, very ill, sat among his fabrics and feathers for his friend Pander, who painted a haunting portrait of him entitled Prayer Before the Night. Fornara was surrounded by colleagues Gaynor Sterchi, Sam Mowry, Michele Mariana and others who joined Fornara in making an audio-tape version of King Lear. After their deaths--Young in 1992, Fornara in 1994--voices rose that the still-unnamed main stage at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts should be named in their honor (the honor finally fell to a wealthy patron). Yet Young and Fornara hardly need static memorials. Their energy and dedication to the art of theater remains in those who worked with them or watched them at work. Shaw once said of William Morris, "You can lose a man like this only by your own death, not by his." Fornara and Young are still very much alive on Portland's stages.
Technical Data
Dimensions: 80x130 pixels (0.01 MegaPixels in total) Size: 3KB *96dpi 24 bpp, source file: ..\Family Tree Photos\Peter Fornara 1987.jpg
