courtesy of Portland PlayhouseIsaac Lamb gets ready to chow down in "Famished," Eugenia Woods' engaging theatrical examination of the ethics and psychology of food.A ticket to the play “Famished,” which opened Saturday night as part of the Fertile Ground festival, comes with a question that audience members are asked to answer on a slip of paper as they enter the theater: “What are you really hungry for?”
       
Eugenia Woods’ smart and winsomely entertaining play proceeds to offer some potential answers -- anything from beef Wellington to good sex to supportive family -- and, more importantly, plenty of nudges toward a deeper consideration of the question.
       
It is, after all, a good question, one that we might seek answers to not just in the pit of our stomachs or in “Famished,” but in Fertile Ground as a whole. The 11-day festival, which began Thursday and focuses on new, locally created works of theater and other performance forms, boasts several dozen shows from producers big and small, well-established and inexperienced. Surely there must be some appetite driving it all.
       
The Portland creative community, it’s safe to say, is hungry for more outlets for expression. As ceaselessly busy as the city’s professional theater scene has become in recent years, it still leaves plenty of writers jumping at the chance to get their work in front of audiences and get the feedback vital to refining theatrical work. And for artists and audiences alike, the festival is a sign that whether we like things salty or sweet, whether we’re after understanding or just amusement, we’re perpetually hungry for stories.
       
“Famished” (which Portland Playhouse is staging at Imago Theatre, because of a zoning issue at its regular Prescott Street space) has a particular Portland flavor. Woods and director Megan Kate Ward created the play through a series of interviews, surveys and guerrilla-theater experiments over the past 18 months, focused on emotional connections with, and uses of, food. But while it uses the highly politicized arguments raging these days over food ethics and economics as grist for its mill, it’s gentle in its satire and admirably evenhanded in its pursuit of a more fruitful dialogue.
       
What starts out as a series of elliptical scenes and interstitial voice-overs, coalesces into a touching tale of three generations in a single family and the part food plays in their upbringing, their bonding, their fights and so on. It’s funny, perceptive and goodhearted, without shying away from the serious implications of its subject. Granted, many of the fixations it examines reflect a privileged slice of the world, yet the heart of its message is deeply, universally human.
      
It’s worth seeing, too, for a uniformly excellent cast -- from which Jill Westerby as a nervous mom whose cravings clash with her values, and Jessica Wallenfels as a mischievous sprite called Our Lady of Insatiable Desire stand out most vividly.
       
With so many shows going on at once, performance spaces and performers become valuable commodities. So it speaks well for Clare Willett’s drama “Dear Galileo” that its staged reading was presented by Artists Repertory Theatre in one of its large halls and featured a top-flight cast highlighted by the reliably engaging David Bodin. And Willett’s ambitious writing was worthy of such resources.

A complex, century-jumping narrative about the great Renaissance scientist, a modern astronomer and a Creationist, each with their willful offspring, “Dear Galileo” attempts a reconciliation of fathers and daughters, faith and science, psychology and cosmology. At this stage of development, its romantic subplot is less compelling than its astrophysics primers, but this is nonetheless a very promising work.

As many shows as there are in the festival, you might not be able to find a greater  contrast to “Dear Galileo” than “Oil Change - the Musical Comedy,” presented in a sort of concert/reading version at Broadway Rose’s New Stage in Tigard. One wears a love of learning on its sleeve, the other gleefully smears on the silliness like grease on its coveralls. Where one is scrupulously shaped, the other still needs plenty of body work.
“Oil Change” also is a contrast to the Portland-centric concerns of “Famished.”

Written by Portlander Brent Rogers with his Texas-based brother, Klay, it feels like its aimed for audiences more willing to embrace the redneck cliches that permeate its characters. (Whether Southern audiences would be more or less forgiving of garage denizens such as the Hispanic who wants to teach people to cha cha or the black ex-con who makes Katt Williams look like Sidney Poitier, I cannot guess.)

All the same, it can be charming in its simple, straightforward humor, and includes a few very fine songs in both comic and romantic veins. With some more connective tissue for its central romance, it stands a chance for a theatrical life as a popular lighthearted, lightweight diversion.

-- Marty Hughley