‘Memory activism’ on display in ‘Precipice’ solo play at Portland’s Vanport Mosaic Festival

The new solo play “Precipice” was conceived by actor and self-described “memory activist” Damaris Webb. It’s part of the offerings of the Vanport Mosaic Festival she co-founded 10 years ago. The play, like the festival itself, centers on remembering and reclaiming history and telling the stories of people who have been marginalized or forgotten. We talk with Webb and playwright Chris Gonzalez about this new work and what they hope audiences take from it. “Precipice” is presented by Third Rail Repertory Theatre and runs through June 1 at CoHo Theater.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with the new solo play “Precipice.” It was conceived and performed by the self-described “memory activist” Damaris Webb. It’s part of this year’s Vanport Mosaic Festival, which is now celebrating its 10th anniversary. The play, like the festival itself, centers on remembering and reclaiming history, and telling the stories of people who’ve been marginalized or forgotten. “Precipice” is presented by Third Rail Repertory Theatre. It runs through June 1 at CoHo Theater.

Damaris Webb joins us now, along with the playwright Chris Gonzalez, who formerly worked at OPB. Congratulations and welcome back to both of you.

Chris Gonzalez: Thanks for having me, Dave.

Daramis Webb: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: Damaris, early on in the play, your character puts on a yard sale. There are various objects that she seems like she intends to sell that are sprinkled around the theater, but then your character is unable to let people buy any of the stuff that is ostensibly for sale. Why not?

Webb: Yeah. In that particular moment, the questions that come up around the curiosities that the people purchasing pose, which we don’t hear, right? So those curiosities begin a remembrance by Damaris that then makes these objects, these artifacts, these possessions very alive as a memory holder. And the connection to that past, present, future of an object is too much for her to release at that time.

Miller: How much life is imbued in the objects that you, yourself, the Damaris I’m talking to, have held onto from your childhood or from earlier back in your family’s history?

Webb: I definitely am an animist and feel that if I’m lucky enough to know the stories of the objects, not just what it is, but a story connected to it, then it becomes to me, part of my family. So I have a bit of a challenge in deciding what can be let go of and hopefully given a new life with somebody else or to make a new memory for somebody else. But I am lucky enough to know the stories of so many of the artifacts in my home that I feel a deep connection to.

Miller: Chris, I understand that as part of the writing process, the creation of this play, you lived in Damaris’ house for a few weeks when you’re collaborating. What impact did that have on you and on the script?

Gonzalez: Well, I certainly felt immediately that Damaris has this memory activism aspect of her practice; it also comes from the fact that Demaris has an incredible memory. She has a huge memory, so she can walk you through the entire house and bring you into every single inch of that house. And the history of it really merits reckoning with in a dramatic context.

So I was kind of overwhelmed by the house when I lived there, in the stories of it. And I was like, oh, yeah, this merits a lot of grappling with. I wanted to do that by being led by Damaris and having her voice lead it, but just being in the silence of the home as well and experiencing the history. There were a lot of things that I saw in the house that Damaris hadn’t seen. There were certain letters from some certain relatives that she had had that she had never opened that she allowed me to look at. There were a lot of books and things in little nooks and crannies, so I was able to see some things that hadn’t also been seen, then bring that to Damaris and then have her have a new experience of it as well. So we kind of went back and forth.

But it was a pretty incredible experience. It truly is very much like a museum.

Miller: And that’s one of the lines in the show. Damaris, you say, or your character says – although that the line seems a little bit porous – that your home is more a museum than a house and that you’re a docent there. And the line, it gets a laugh, but it also feels like it gets at something that’s true. If your house were a museum, what would the theme of the collection be?

Webb: Oh, that’s a good question. I can answer that on one level. Well, I am a curator. I think we all are in our lives, and how active we curate how we want to attract more and to be seen, or be able to be supported by a certain way of looking into things. So there’s that aspect of curation and what gets brought to the forefront. There’s a whole cache collection in the basement that might not ever get up to the windows, but they’re there.

Miller: Just like a museum has the areas where the people can’t go, that’s just the holdings.

Webb: The archives.

Miller: Yeah, the archives.

Webb: The holding and the archives, but then they’re all holding their stories because I know them.

Miller: You said you’re an animus earlier. Is it fair to say that’s not exactly just a metaphor? I mean, you hear them yelling their stories down from the basement?

Webb: I do. I feel that. I mean, that sounds a little crazy-making, but it’s a holding to support. It’s a container, right? And the refuge of this fort, of this home, to vibrate those stories in interaction with each other. But then to just say it like a simple curation … My father worked for USAID. And he had [inaudible] in Tanzania, where I was born, and then in Botswana, my mother along as well. At that time, they collected artifacts from all of their travels. So then they all had stories as well. And I would joke that our home was a combination of Sears and early Africa [laughter] as a kind of aesthetic of the home, which, to me, they were equal and they still are to a certain extent.

That interplay between the two aesthetics, of culture, of past, present and future, I feel they’re all happening simultaneously. There’s all the levels happening at the same time. And then when we look in a kind of wider scope of our national and worldwide amnesia, seemingly, of many of the events that have happened, not even that far back, we keep going in the cycle of repetition – which seems to have a very pointed desire to not include and to erase our humans’ stories. Not like a storytelling, but this is my story, my history, your history, and that the weaving of all of those entwined are not as delineated for our brains to be able to hold. This is this object and here is its contours, and that’s the end of that. I feel strongly that it is not.

Miller: And I take your point that there’s not a clear line between the individual and the collective. But it did make me wonder by the end of the show, if you think, personally, it would be “easier” to let go of some familial objects, if we were better as a society at holding on to our collective history? As you just said, we’re living in times of collective amnesia. There’s a lot in the play about the land history of Oregon, the Donation Land Act, how Irvington – the neighborhood you live in and for three generations in Portland – came to be, and how much we’ve forgotten even about more recent history.

Is there a connection for you between holding on to your family’s objects and the societal letting go of this history?

Webb: I think so, yes. I think that our trauma, collectively, no matter who you are, of not being able to meet with these stories is, in a large part, our salve of holding on to possessions and yearning for more. I would offer that suggestion at least.

Miller: Chris, one of the lines that hit really hard – and I was in the audience yesterday, so were you, and I want to talk about that – led to a gasp from some people around me. Damaris says that she’s trying to stop the stopping by keeping the stuff. Can you unpack that line for us?

Gonzalez: Sure, yes. She’s referring to the fact that that’s sort of the design inspiration for her house, the sort of existential quandary … it’s often phrased like, you die twice. The first, when you die. And then the second, when you have your name spoken for the last time. So Damaris, as a steward of these objects and as a steward of the house, is sort of at the gates of that moment when things pass into that second. She’s trying to stop that second stopping by continuing to name the things and continuing to keep the names alive, which is a huge task which raises this question of, is having a lot of things that you’ve inherited a privilege? It is a great privilege. It’s an inheritance.

There’s a burden aspect to it, because it’s so overwhelming and it’s deeply emotional. So it’s beautiful. I mean, her house is truly, truly, truly a beautiful place and she is holding all of this stuff. So the question that gets posed in the piece by one of her relatives is, so who are you disentangled from all of that stuff? And that’s part of the existential kind of groundwater of the play.

Miller: Chris, what role does art play in communal remembering?

Gonzalez: Well, I think for something like “Precipice,” there is an aspect of the process which was extremely important in this, which is that I did not write this play in isolation in a room. It was deeply bound up with oral history, which is another thing that is a huge part of Damaris’ artistic practice. Vanport Mosaic organizes so much around the idea of memory activism. So, I think for me, the art is about distilling and transmitting Damaris’ specific memories, attachments and difficulties in letting go. And the more specific, as they say, the more universal.

The woman next to me last night, for example, leaned over to me and she was like, “well, I’m having to move into a smaller apartment and I’m downsizing my entire place.” Then she started to get really emotional and she had no idea that the show was going to be dealing with that. But there was this specificity of the show of Damaris’ relationship to the memory that all of the objects are carrying in the prospect of needing to let them go, or needing to sell them, or put a price on them, which is really complicated. I think [it] makes people realize, or at least for the woman next to me, it’s an extremely universal thing – we all have appliances, for example, which is something that you know Damaris deals with in the show. We all have possessions and our relationship is extremely complicated to them. We don’t really investigate that.

The show is an invitation and a meditation, in many ways, to examine our relationship to the things that we think we own and the things that we think we can possess for a long time. And there’s a lot of sadness in that. I think that the show, and art in general, is an invitation to come into that kind of space, where it’s like, what is your relationship to the things that you think you know, the things that you think you own, the places you think you’re going, the places you think you’ve been? And I think that the dramatic forms, certainly of a monologue, where there’s no one else that she can literally talk to on stage, there is an inwardness of that that I think is sort of hypnotic. [It] brings people into a meditative space that allows them, hopefully, to feel into the kind of thing that’s beneath all the words and all the intellectualization.

Miller: Damaris, I think I used this phrase in my intro and Chris has used it as we’ve been talking, that you have for a while now said that part of what you’re doing is memory activism, that you’re a memory activist. What does that mean?

Webb: Yes, and that memory activism is resistance. For me, personally, this performance piece is an example of that. But to combat the dominant erasure of stories, we need to remember on an individual and collective basis. We need to remember our stories and share them, and we also need to seek out, listen and witness others’ stories. We see ourselves in others. We learn about the world in others. And by bringing our stories into a mosaic with each other, we can hopefully see a more vibrant and inclusive possibility of a world that we all want to live in and that we are all given opportunity in.

Miller: I want to turn to another of the big themes in the play. What messages did you get, Damaris, growing up about being outdoors or just being away from the Portland area?

Webb: My family would do a family trip to Ashland, Oregon – that was our kind of summer trip. So we would drive down south and there were very specific places that we would stop for gas or for food. And as a child, I didn’t question why one or the other. It’s just this is what we did. Along those kinds of lines, I knew that we don’t go to Coos Bay, for example, but I didn’t really question why that was. And I received the information that unless you had specific business in a particular place, you stay in these known “safe” places along I-5, for example … but skipping over certain stops.

We, at the same time, had this beautiful photo essay coffee table book about the state of Oregon. When people would come to visit, for example, we’d drive up to Mt. Shasta or Timberline Lodge. And I knew from these images and from some firsthand experience how beautiful our state is, but the idea of going there was not a reality for me.

Miller: How explicit, as you got older, were the reasons for those, I guess at first, implicit prohibitions?

Webb: Well, as I began to know more actual history … I mean, I was just at the end of high school, college when Mulugeta Seraw was murdered here. So that is known as a kind of live-time experience for me.

Miller: An Ethiopian immigrant who was killed by white skinheads.

Webb: Yes, and my time of young adulthood was very much during the skinhead era here in Portland, right? So it was known, even for me, just on a firsthand basis, don’t go by yourself or stay in these areas. And as I began to know more about the facts of our great state, that although it was never a slave state, it was founded to be a place that no People of Color could live. So, it’s like, here is a refuge for those after the Civil War who didn’t want to deal with this anymore, they could have their “white utopia.” And it’s not a joke. I mean, this is the truth of the matter. The Donation Land Act gave 640 acres – which is, I learned last night, a square mile of land – to a white married couple who could make it to the Oregon territory by the end of the year. And at the same time, this land was cultivated, homed, possessed by a whole other people, but just the manifest destiny came and said, “Nope, this is ours now and this place is being made for us.”

So my Black grandparents, when they first came to Portland, couldn’t buy in Irvington because of the restricted covenants in housing and in getting a lease. So, as I began to know that … And yet, growing up here, going to school here in public school, I never learned about the Vanport that way. We learned about the Oregon Trail but not the specifics of the Donation Land Act, for example. So then when you start to unpack and unravel that, a larger picture comes up.

And for me, to be a Black homeowner in Irvington of three generations hits hard. There are not that many of us left. So what is that legacy? How do I help support that? How do I tell the story of that? Many people are like, “well, you could just sell your house and you could move wherever.” And somehow that feels like not quite ready to do that, or don’t know if that is the best way to continue to tell the stories that are not being heard and to honor those who have come before.

Miller: Chris, I’m curious, as somebody who grew up on the other side of our country, on the East Coast in Western Massachusetts, and spends, now as an artist, a lot of time in New York City, what has it been like for you to learn this history?

Gonzalez: I feel that Oregon – and we speak to this in the play – there’s a vastness in a majestic height and quality and epic scale to things here in Oregon that I find certainly very beautiful, but it’s got that sublime aspect where there’s terror in it as well. It’s scary. The sheer amount of incredible wildlife that’s here, it’s beautiful and it’s also terrifying. If you even just look at the coast and how beautiful it is, and then you’re like, oh, all the volcanic activity beneath our feet. There’s this interesting juxtaposition between the beauty and the terror.

Miller: A lot of what you’re talking about is woven into the play.

Gonzalez: Yeah, especially when it comes to the context of, how do you fortify yourself against that in terms of where you live? The idea of a fort … I live in a fort, which is like, keep that bad stuff out there and keep this good stuff in here. We try to connect that to this idea of home, which is, what is the barrier between yourself and that big haunted wood outside? And what is your relationship to it when it starts to break down and then you are exposed to that larger home that encompasses you, which is, in this case, the state of Oregon?

Miller: Damaris, I mentioned this is the 10th year of Vanport Mosaic Festival. What are your hopes for the next 10 years for it?

Webb: I hope that more and more stories are celebrated, surfaced and engaged with. I hope that our efforts, through memory activism, which includes many different disciplines – walking tours, performance exhibits, community conversations always, making alive the different physical places that memory and events have happened and that are significant to our community – allows for a deeper civic engagement, community organizing and vision for our city that is more inclusive.

Miller: Chris, before we say goodbye, in the program for this show, I noted that another show you wrote is opening next month in Portland at Reed College. It’s called “Aw, Hell” and the description really caught my attention.

This is part of it: “Using Dante’s ‘Inferno’ as a catalyst, we abandon hope and enter the messy, disgusting, offensive truth of the human condition. ‘Aw, Hell’ is a journey down the drain in which we act regrettably, break vows, lie to ourselves and end up boiling in a river of blood.”

What else should people know about the show that’s opening at Reed about a month from now?

Gonzalez: People should know that Damaris is going to be in that show too, and she’s amazing in it, yes. So people should know that for sure. And it’s with the Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble. Damaris was in a couple other shows, “A Seagull,” as well as “The Americans,” with them as well. And now she’s an official company member, which is pretty special.

It’s a devised piece. It’s similar in the collective method and process that we used to make “Precipice.” So it’s a piece that only this group could have made, at only at this time. It’s really funny and it’s got clown in it, but not the scary kind of clown that you might be thinking – good, cool, interesting clown. I feel like I always have to qualify that. People always are like, “oh, clown.” I’m like, “but it’s the good kind.”

No, it’s gonna be really fun and epic. It’s certainly very, very epic, and very, very silly and crazy. And you have to come

Webb: “Aw, Hell”

Miller: “Aw, Hell.” Chris Gonzalez and Damaris Webb, congratulations again and thank you very much.

Gonzalez: Thank you for coming.

Webb: Thank you.

Miller: Their new solo play is called “Precipice,” conceived and performed by Damaris Webb, written by Chris Gonzalez.

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