The production ‘Recent Tragic Events’ comes full circle for Portland’s Third Rail Repertory Theatre

Twenty years ago, Third Rail Repertory Theatre launched itself onto the Portland theatre scene with a production called “Recent Tragic Events,” set just after the attacks of 9/11. That play, written by Craig Wright, put Third Rail Rep on the map, winning a number of local theatre honors. While many theatres have come and gone in that time, Third Rail Rep is among those that survived the pandemic and other economic pressures. It is celebrating 20 years by reprising that first show, “Recent Tragic Events.” We talk with director Scott Yarbrough, who was also the company’s founding artistic director, about how the play resonates today.

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

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Twenty years ago, Third Rail Repertory Theatre launched itself onto the Portland theater scene with a production called “Recent Tragic Events.” The play, written by Craig Wright, takes place on the evening of September 12, 2001 – meaning one day after the terrorist attacks that changed our world. The production won a number of local theater honors and put Third Rail on the map.

Many theaters have come and gone since then, but Third Rail is among those that survived the Great Recession and the pandemic. It’s now celebrating 20 years by reprising that first show. “Recent Tragic Events” is up once again at the CoHo Theatre in Northwest Portland. Scott Yarbrough directed the first iteration as the company’s founding artistic director and he directed this new one, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.

Scott Yarbrough: Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Miller: Can you describe the premise of the play?

Yarbrough: You set up the main instigating incident, that it does take place on September 12, 2001. It takes place in the apartment of a young ad executive on a pre-scheduled blind date. So the characters are not only dealing with the anxieties of a blind date, but also how the world has felt changed to them. As the play proceeds, the evening evolves or devolves into discussions of free will, choice, and a lot of drinking.

Miller: As I mentioned, this was the first play that your then-new company put on back in 2005. What did it mean to you to put it on 20 years ago?

Yarbrough: It meant everything to us. We chose it as sort of our coming out party, saying within this play, this is the type of work we’re interested in. This is the quality of performance that we want to present consistently. Our intention was really to draw attention to the kind of plays that, as artists, we wanted to see, but were never in a position to be able to make happen.

Miller: So you had to make your own company to put on the kinds of plays that you thought were missing in the theater scene.

Yarbrough: Yeah.

Miller: There is a fair amount of comedy in the play – verbal comedy, physical comedy at times. What was it like to do that in 2005 when 9/11 was much more raw?

Yarbrough: It felt kind of dangerous, and the nice thing is that the comedy really supports the ideas in the play: dealing with anxiety, dealing with unknowns, coping however best we could, which does manifest itself in this extended drinking game at the beginning of the second act.

In some ways, it also allowed an audience to not feel the weight of the day so much and say, “We want to engage with you.” We want the audience to be participating in this in ways that also feel very human.

Miller: Why did Third Rail decide to put this play on again 20 years later?

Yarbrough: I think the first, clearest reason is to celebrate the start of the company, the founding company members, by revisiting this play that really did launch us into the community. Even though it takes place on a very specific day – you could almost call it a period piece – the play is no less potent emotionally or intellectually than it was 20 years ago because in some ways, the characters in the play almost feel naive about the world compared to what we’ve been through as a culture and society in the past 20 years.

Miller: I was trying to put my mind back to 2001. I was also forced to put my mind back to 2005 – or 2001, when I watched it. In 2005, when this first was put on here in Portland, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were still raging. George W. Bush had been reelected in what, in a lot of ways, was a war referendum or war on terror referendum, and the bipartisan turn against the wars had not happened yet. That arguably didn’t happen until Donald Trump ran and sort of smashed a whole bunch of Republican orthodoxies.

Yarbrough: Right.

Miller: It was a very different time. How much was that shift that’s happened on your mind as you went about restaging this work?

Yarbrough: A fair extent, but ultimately the way the play is going to work is if you really lean into the events that the characters are trying to deal with. The trauma of September one feels very relevant today. We didn’t really go back and look at how to make the play really specific to today. It feels like it’s inherent in the emotional trip that these characters are on, trying to understand what the world means now.

Miller: There is an interesting device that starts the play: a coin flip by the stage manager. Can you explain what that is and what’s happening?

Yarbrough: Sure. Before the play starts, the stage manager comes out, introduces himself and asks for a volunteer from the audience. A volunteer comes up and the stage manager presents them a coin and says, “In a minute, you’ll be asked to flip this coin, and based on the results, one set of events will happen throughout the play. If it comes up ‘tails,’ a different or alternate set of events will be in their place or be omitted altogether. And that will be notated in the performance by a tone. Every time that tone sounds, that’s the moment something could have happened differently.” So in some ways, the audience is involved in a “choose your own adventure” version of the story, and that’s the setup.

Miller: Right. And then things happen.

Yarbrough: And then things happen.

Miller: I will be a good boy and not say what those things are.

Yarbrough: It’s any variety of things in terms of, somebody could just have, in that tone, walked out of the play. Other moments are a little less dramatic in that the choice of pizza toppings on a pizza order could be different. It’s really throwing in the audience’s lap – what does change mean and how do we perceive it?

Miller: At one point, speaking of change, a character says, “The rate of change in society has increased so radically in the past 30 years or so, that the sensation of something big being just around the corner has become kind of the status quo.”

It was fascinating to hear a character, who’s living on September 12, 2001, say that. Because in retrospect, it seems like the period since then, that’s been the real period of change, precipitated in a lot of ways by 9/11. But there were books … literally a book called “The End of History.” There was some sense after the Berlin Wall fell down, that we were done with massive change and we were going to have this era of prosperity and peace and wonderful boringness.

Yarbrough: Yes.

Miller: But that hasn’t happened.

Yarbrough: No.

Miller: How do you think about this question of the pace of change and its effect on us?

Yarbrough: It’s dizzying. As I’ve said before, the way the characters respond in the play in 2001 almost feels naive, or quaint. And I was remembering this morning that I think that the news crawl at the bottom of the screens on CNN and Fox News came about on September 11, because there was so much information to go through–

Miller: The permanent crawl.

Yarbrough: Yes, the permanent crawl. That has changed how we see the news, how we watch it. And then with phones, that changes just infiltrated so that we don’t have distance from the news. It’s always in front of us, all the time. And I think emotionally that’s a challenge to try and navigate.

I think some of the anxiety of that lives in the characters in the play, just in their experience. The TV is on through the whole play. They’ll be in the middle of a conversation and all of a sudden their focus is drawn to the TV because it’s just there and history is living right in front of their faces. I think that the speed with which news travels and events, we become aware to them, has only increased our anxiety from even 20 years ago.

Miller: You and some of the actors in the original staging of this play were living in New York on 9/11. Everybody had experienced those events as adults who were relatively close to the ages of the characters in the play. It obviously had just happened four years earlier and you were all adults at the time, but the actors for this new production are significantly younger. I’m bad at judging ages, but my guess is that some of them at least may not have their own memories of 9/11, or if they do, they were relatively young, is my guess, looking at their beautiful faces. What did that mean for your direction?

Yarbrough: It meant that we had to dig into what that day meant for those of us that it’s still a living memory, but really, just talking about our individual experiences, in the room. One of the first rehearsals is a table read, but it’s also where we’ll start talking about, “Why do this play now?” It was important for me to hear the experiences that the younger actors had. Most of them were in grade school at the time, some in junior high, but most of them were fairly sheltered. But what they remember is their teachers having to come in and say, “Class, we’re gonna be leaving early,” or, “There’s this thing that’s happened, we wanna make sure to send you home,” but they didn’t really get very much information.

Miller: So they didn’t have memories, for example, of watching two planes hit two towers over and over and over?

Yarbrough: Yeah, a lot of them … I mean, our lighting designer on the show, she wasn’t even born yet. She was saying that she didn’t realize until just a couple of weeks ago that the Pentagon was actually a part of the whole day. And one of the things that’s so interesting about the play is it really provides a perspective on how most of the world witnessed that day through the television, versus the experience of being in New York.

So we almost have a universal communal experience that I think the play depends on. But it was really interesting revisiting that day with all of us and understanding, for me, how can we make the events of that day relevant to a generation that might see the show that didn’t experience it? And so we have some design elements that I hope assist in that.

Miller: How much did you remember about your own directing choices 20 years ago?

Yarbrough: Not as much as I would have liked to, but enough that … I direct a lot by rhythm and music of the text. A lot of the rhythms and emphases that the characters have to make a point, those landed really clearly. But there’s a whole section, as I mentioned, of a drinking game at the top of act two, that we had to sort of recreate on our own.

But it was great coming back to the play because I love it and I do know it so well that I didn’t have to chew on, does the text mean this or does the text mean that? We were just able to go in and really work on the characters and how they interact with each other. I depended on it as much as I could remember.

Miller: How much did your appreciation or understanding of this play evolve, 20 years later?

Yarbrough: Quite a bit. There are several speeches or lines in the play that just hit differently 20 years later. One of the characters has a long diatribe about how the media tries to make us think we’re surprised by things that are obvious. There’s another character, a literary figure, who makes an argument about free will and how the people on those planes had choices that they could make, and we have choices about how we move through the world. Those resonated very differently to me. I heard the arguments clearer 20 years on than I did back then.

Miller: Do you think that’s more because the world has changed, or because you are also 20 years older? Or maybe it’s impossible to disentangle them?

Yarbrough: I think both. There’s a phrase at the very end, one of the characters is watching TV and just says, “World history, right this minute. Right this minute we’re living through world history.” That feels much more alive and present today, because that feels like every day compared to in 2001, where that was a defining moment. I feel like we are in redefining moments every day now.

Miller: The play forces us to confront this. Ideally, the response to that is not going to be to drink enormous, scary quantities of beer and tequila.

Yabrough: Yes, unresponsible quantities.

Miller: But then, what do we do?

Yarbrough: In that moment, the characters were trying to find a way to cope and I think, more importantly, connect. Even though the whole world experienced this day, most of us experienced it in our own homes, isolated. So one of the ways to move forward is through connection with people in our world, and that may be outside of our normal bubbles. And kindness is never, or is rarely, a bad thing.

Miller: I feel like this is connected to where I want to go now, which is the impetus to start a new theater company. You and a bunch of other theater artists, this sort of fascinating network of people – some original Portlanders who went to the East Coast, East Coasters who came here – you all eventually ended up here, though. Why did you want to start a company?

Yarbrough: Really to have some agency in the work that we did. Most of the initial company members were actors, and so as an actor, you rarely have any opportunity to contribute ideas as to what a theater programs. You’re usually jobbed in for one show and have no tangible connection to that company afterwards. We were looking for ways to have a say in what we did and how we did it, which bucked the traditional model of regional theater.

So it was really, one, to generate work; two, to generate work that we found really interesting; and three, to generate work at a level that we aspired to and could control.

Miller: Why do you think Third Rail has survived?

Yarbrough: They’re really scrappy. They make a lot with little, and we’ve done that from the beginning. There’s a commitment to paying professional wages, which we did with the actors from the very first show. We paid equity contracts. Also, I think this continuing desire to see plays that we want to see, and to produce work that engages us and makes us feel connected to the community.

Miller: Did that ever mean giving up some level of control that traditionally would be the realm of the director? I mean, if actors have more license to say, “What about this?” to you or to their fellow actors, does that mean you have to think about directing differently?

Yarbrough: Well, it does. We had an event yesterday with a lot of the founders and one of the things it brought up is, with this model there are a lot of rewards that come from it, but it’s not an efficient model. It’s not a model where decisions can be made quickly. But in my directing work, as in my producing work, I really value collaboration, and I was also – even though I was, in some ways, the figurehead at the time – I was really, within the company, looked as the leader among equals.

What that does is create a sense of ownership within the company that we are willing to invest time and energy and learn new skills, to try and make this particular placing or that particular placing, so there was always an opportunity for us to grow artistically as well. But it is a tricky thing to try and navigate, and I think one of the successes of the company is continuing to bring on people with different skill sets in terms of directing, acting, design that keeps the work vibrant and necessary.

Miller: What do you think it takes to have effective collaboration?

Yarbrough: A willingness to sit on your ego for a while. The bravery to speak up. An understanding that all ideas are on the table until we narrow them down to find what’s gonna be best for this situation. But it does take people who really value and want to collaborate.

Miller: What has it meant to you to come back to this theater at this time to do this play again?

Yarbrough: Everything? Is that too broad a term?

Miller: No, keep going.

Yarbrough: It’s been a gift to be able to revisit this piece that meant so much to the company, so much to me as a director. I learned so much about myself as a director and what I valued and where my skills were in that first production. Being able to come into a room with new actors and share that experience and create a fearlessness in them, that they could trust me, because I’ve been through this before.

I could ask things of them that might be uncomfortable if they were stepping into an organization that they weren’t familiar with. It has just been a true gift and I don’t take it for granted. It doesn’t happen all the time or to everyone.

Miller: You’re getting ready for the 40th anniversary of the theater for the 2045 production?

Yarbrough: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Miller: It has been lovely talking with you. Thanks so much, Scott Yarbrough.

Yarbrough: Thank you very much.

Miller: Scott Yarbrough is a founding artistic director of Third Rail Repertory Theatre. He is directing the reprisal of the first play the theater put on in 2005. It’s called “Recent Tragic Events.” It’s up now through Sunday, November 23 at CoHo Theatre.

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