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Building the Bridge: Ciji Guerin and the 10-Year Experiment That Defined Northwest Theatre Workshop
Building the Bridge: Ciji Guerin and the 10-Year Experiment That Defined Northwest Theatre Workshop
By Brad Bolchunos
Murren Kennedy and Murri Lazaroff-Babin in Noisemaker.
Ciji Guerin
The night before dress rehearsal, Ciji Guerin sits at a folding table with the cast and creative team of a new works project, waiting for a late playwright. When the playwright bursts in announcing a thirty-two-page rewrite, chaos erupts. The actors panic, the stage manager scrambles for paper, and the tech director declares no changes to set, costumes, or cues. Guerin calls a coffee break, pulls the playwright aside, and reads through the new pages line by line.
Two hours later, the rewrite has been distilled to five pages that sharpen the play’s thematic spine.
“Her instincts are right,” Guerin tells the cast. “Without the longer rewrite, we wouldn’t have found the needed changes.”
That mix of insight and foresight has guided Guerin through a decade of experimentation.
What defined Guerin’s decade at Northwest Theatre Workshop was her dedication to building an effective and repeatable new play development process. Since taking the helm in 2015, she has shaped a company that thrives on analysis, collaboration, and invention. Under her direction, NWTW became a proving ground for new plays and playwrights in a city known for its scrappy originality.
Now, as she prepares to step down, Guerin leaves behind more than a record of productions. She leaves a blueprint: a way of creating, developing and producing new work that survives upheaval and uncertainty.
The Cantilever Years: Building the Bridge
The Cantilever Years: Building the Bridge
Illustrations of the four productions of The Cantilever Project.
Wayne Harrel at work.
When Guerin took the helm of Northwest Theatre Workshop in 2015, her first move was The Cantilever Project, a daring experiment to “bridge the production gap” and prove that new plays could reach the stage.
Tired of seeing scripts stall after staged readings, Guerin joined forces with three Portland playwrights: George Taylor, Wayne Harrel, and Vivien Lyon. Their goal was to test a producing model built on shared resources, tight deadlines, and full productions within a single year.
“It was boot camp meets grad school,” Guerin recalled. “We were building the plane while flying it and somehow landing it in front of an audience.”
To make the model viable, the team pooled budgets, rehearsal hours, and production crews.
George Taylor and Ciji Guerin at work.
“By stacking all our work together, we can utilize economies of scale to trim our costs and drive each artist to deliver with hard and fast deadlines,” Lyon explained.
Vivien Lyon at work.
Harrel added from his live event touring background: “We traveled the country, turning hotel ballrooms into theatres overnight. So four shows in a local venue is quite doable. Of course, those other gigs were paid for by corporate marketing and sales budgets. We’re a little more challenged, financially.”
“It was boot camp meets grad school. We were building the plane while flying it and somehow landing it in front of an audience.”
“It was boot camp meets grad school. We were building the plane while flying it and somehow landing it in front of an audience.”
Consultant George Thorn praised the concept as “a new structural idea that is innovative and interesting. It addresses the issues and goals that the younger generation is struggling to take on, and it has the potential to span generations of artists. Keep going!”
The gamble paid off.
Guerin’s Noisemaker and Harrel’s Miserere (aka Jaffa Gate) were later named Oregonian “Best Bets,” proving that a small group of playwrights could create their own production pipeline and that Portland’s appetite for original work was far larger than anyone expected (The Oregonian).
That early experiment set the stage for Guerin to build a full dramaturgical engine.
Dre' Slaman in Jaffa Gate.
The Create Years: Turning Process into Power
The Create Years: Turning Process into Power
Kate Belden, Yasmin Ruvalcaba and Redmond Reams in Create: Writing the Script.
By 2018, Guerin had transformed the lessons of The Cantilever Project into a comprehensive dramaturgical engine known as The Create Process. What began as a practical fix for the “production gap” evolved into a disciplined method for understanding how a script builds its thematic meaning and communicates it to an audience.
“It takes the big, beautiful, creative mess of a rough draft, pulls it apart, and shows how to put it back together in such a way that an audience can appreciate and experience the creative vision,” said playwright J Aron Braide.
“It takes the big, beautiful, creative mess of a rough draft, pulls it apart, and shows how to put it back together in such a way that an audience can appreciate and experience the creative vision.”
“It takes the big, beautiful, creative mess of a rough draft, pulls it apart, and shows how to put it back together in such a way that an audience can appreciate and experience the creative vision.”
That dramaturgical focus expanded into a full ecosystem. Create: Writing the Script became the foundation for new programs, including the Short Play Workshop, the unpredictable Mad Libs Workshop, and The Thirst, a full-length play written collectively by six playwrights who explored shared authorship through weekly dramaturgical sessions.
Cupid Hale and Zella Selvoy-Devan performing in The Thirst.
“It has been amazing to work on a script together with this diverse team of writers,” said Louise Wynn, “…[with] this technique for channeling our creativity into a form that helps us understand how the elements of the play fit together to make it elegant and interesting.”
By the end of the decade, The Create Process had evolved from a single workshop model into a versatile set of story and concept development tools that artists across disciplines could use to build new work.
Playwrights, dramaturgs, and directors applied it to traditional plays, devised theatre, and collaboratively written projects, adapting its techniques to fit the needs of each production. It became NWTW’s central framework for developing new work.
Wayne Harrel prepares to write a play based on NWTW’s Madlibs Playwriting card game.
Under Guerin’s leadership, the company created fifty-seven original plays for audiences, from first readings to full productions. For a company of its size, that level of output was extraordinary and remains a lasting measure of what her process made possible.
The company had found its rhythm, creating new plays with precision and purpose. The future looked wide open. Then the silence came, and everything had to be reimagined.
The cast of Just This One, from left: Hank Shreve, Saeeda Wright, Sugaray Rayford, Lisa Mann, Carlton Jackson and LaRhonda Steele.
The creative team from the production of “Stump Your Stumptown Playwrights.”
Reinvention and Renewal
Reinvention and Renewal
“You’ve got to turn on your camera. Look for the little camera icon.”
The playwright hits the wrong button and vanishes from the Zoom meeting. The technical director groans. “We can’t even stay online long enough to have a meeting. We’re done.”
“We can’t shut down,” a board member says. “People have already paid for workshops. We’ve got grant agreements to honor.”
A director interjects, “Maybe we can move the workshops online.”
“Playwriting’s too personal for that,” a playwright says.
“I’ve taken online workshops that worked.”
“Well, you’re weird.”
The meeting collapses into a ruckus.
Voices overlap, arguments flare, and tempers snap.
Guerin mutes the chaos.
“Here’s what I’m going to do,” she says.
“Every theatre company in the world is facing this same problem.
“A way will show itself. And when it does, I’m going to do it. Who’s in?”
Chaos pervades in The Downer Mortuary by Jonathan Hernandez, complete with live TV coverage. Clockwise from upper left, Jenna Cady, Shira Goldeen, Maia McCarthy, and Enrique E. Andrade.
NWTW’s “Bad Citizen” presented eight short plays in 2020 in two installments.
Silence. Then, one by one, heads nod. Only one person—the director of their next production—backs away. The rest stay.
When Patrick Nims, founder of Zoom Theatre, began teaching companies how to produce digital shows, Northwest Theatre Workshop followed his lead. They moved every workshop and production online.
“It was remarkable,” Guerin says. “Everyone at Northwest Theatre Workshop stepped up, worked hard, learned new skills, and made it happen. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.”
“It was remarkable. Everyone at Northwest Theatre Workshop stepped up, worked hard, learned new skills, and made it happen. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.”
“It was remarkable. Everyone at Northwest Theatre Workshop stepped up, worked hard, learned new skills, and made it happen. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.”
What began as a scramble to stay afloat quickly became a new chapter in Northwest Theatre Workshop’s evolution.
Guerin and her team turned Zoom into a stage, building a virtual rehearsal room that stretched across cities and time zones. Actors rehearsed in their kitchens, playwrights rewrote scenes from their bedrooms, and designers found ways to create atmosphere remotely. The same ingenuity that had driven NWTW’s early experiments now fueled its survival.
Nancy Campbell and Ethan Sloan in Watersports, a play by Kwik Jones as part of Fragments.
During this period, NWTW partnered with two other companies to produce three digital showcases of short plays, two full-length plays, and a new musical. These collaborations kept artists working and audiences connected while live stages were dark.
By 2022, the COVID experience had reshaped NWTW’s structure. The company began testing an artist-run model centered on flexible committees that could expand or contract based on project needs.
Before and during the pandemic, NWTW’s New Works Workshop at Theatre Vertigo’s Shoebox Theatre offered free sessions where playwrights collaborated with local actors and guest directors to develop new scenes and test works in progress.
When Theatre Vertigo closed after the pandemic, NWTW carried that spirit forward with the Scene2Scene Online Workshop and recurring showcases of new work at Stomping Grounds Arthouse, presented every few months.
Actors London Bauman, Kaia Hillier and Jacquelle Davis work a scene at a New Works Workshop.
The ongoing commitment to providing free, process-based opportunities for playwrights kept NWTW connected to its community and laid the groundwork for its next stage of site-specific and immersive productions.
The goal was to make the organization as responsive as its art, to build a structure that could adapt to changing resources and leadership while maintaining creative momentum. For Guerin, survival was never separate from creation. Each constraint became a design challenge, and every crisis a new way to build meaning. What began as survival soon became transformation.
Theatre Where You Live
Theatre Where You Live
From the beginning, Northwest Theatre Workshop treated money as a structural challenge rather than an afterthought. The blend of artistic ambition and fiscal discipline of The Cantilever Project was one of the company’s defining principles and resurfaced with even greater urgency after COVID.
By the early 2020s, the financial landscape for small theatres had grown harsher. National studies showed the same pattern across the country: audiences returning slowly, production and labor costs rising, and grants and sponsorships failing to keep pace. In that context, NWTW’s shift toward site-specific and immersive work became both an aesthetic evolution and a financial strategy.
Working with local businesses and nonprofit partners, Guerin and her collaborators produced Fragments, Scenes of the Season, and Detours in venues across Portland and Salem. The shows used shared spaces, small budgets, and inventive staging to reach new audiences. Fragments and Scenes of the Season sold out, and Detours filled 92 percent of its available seats, demonstrating that audiences were eager for original, community-rooted work presented in unexpected places.
Together, these productions marked a period of renewal for Northwest Theatre Workshop. They proved that scarcity could drive creativity and that Guerin’s core principles of collaboration, adaptability, and community engagement remained the company’s strongest assets in a changing theatre landscape.
A scene from a vignette by Zella Selvoy-Devan as part of Detours.
Supporters Who Made It Possible
Supporters Who Made It Possible
From left, actors Ariel Puls, Leah Cohn, Raz Mostaghimi and Jamie Kushnick share jubilation while rehearsing a movement-based vignette for Detours.
Behind Northwest Theatre Workshop’s decade of innovation stands a community of funders who believed that new work matters.
Over the past ten years, The Kinsman Foundation, the Oregon Arts Commission, The Miller Foundation, the Oregon Community Foundation, and individual donors such as Ronni Lacroute, along with other corporate and community partners, provided what amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in essential support.
That investment helped NWTW take creative risks that few small companies could attempt.
It enabled the company to build original work from the ground up, nurture playwrights at every stage, and to keep the work going through some of theatre’s hardest years.
Their contributions built more than productions; they built a platform for new voices and the space for those voices to be heard.
Curtain Call: The Founders’ Showcase
Curtain Call: The Founders’ Showcase
George Taylor.
The Founders’ Showcase: Unmediated and Do That Dance.
Judy Straalsund.
As Guerin prepares to step down on December 31, 2025, she will close her tenure with The Founders’ Showcase, a program that brings her decade of work full circle. The event features Unmediated by Brad Bolchunos, directed by Guerin, and Do That Dance by Wayne Harrel and Craig Bidondo, directed by Judy Straalsund.
Both plays grew through Guerin’s Create workshops, the dramaturgical process she spent 10 years refining, and include artists who have been with her since the start.
George Taylor, who co-founded The Cantilever Project with Harrel and Guerin, helped secure the financial foundation that made this production possible. Taylor has been integral to the company from its inception. He’s raised funds, mentored Guerin in nonprofit leadership, and developed his own plays through NWTW’s workshops.
Straalsund, who directed one of the Cantilever pieces and later served as company manager, brought her experience as a former Producing Artistic Director to mentor Guerin through the challenges of running a small company, alongside Taylor.
Bolchunos joined soon after, drawn to the company’s early experiments in dramaturgical development.
Together, they have helped shape Northwest Theatre Workshop from its first production to its final showcase under Guerin’s leadership.
What’s Next
What’s Next
Ciji Guerin.
Guerin’s departure will inevitably shift what kinds of projects Northwest Theatre Workshop can take on, at least during the 2026 transition. But the company is built for exactly this kind of change. Its artist-run, committee-based structure, first tested in 2022, was designed to bend without breaking; to expand, contract, or reconfigure as resources demand. Under the new model, a compact team of fewer than 10 artist-producers will guide the work forward, keeping NWTW nimble and focused on what has always mattered most: developing and producing new plays.
Meanwhile, Guerin isn’t stepping away so much as evolving her role. She will continue shaping the field through an online, self-paced course on her dramaturgical methods, which powered the Create Process, launching January 1, 2027.
As she takes her final bow, the company stands exactly where she wanted it: built to outlast any single artist. Its lean, flexible structure embodies the philosophy she’s championed from the start: that innovation isn’t a moment, it’s a practice. The next generation of leadership at Northwest Theatre Workshop will inherit not just her dramaturgical process, but also her belief that theatre, at its best, is always a work in progress.
Garland Lyons, Hal Logan, and Elizabeth Rothan in Fragments.
Brad Bolchunos
Brad Bolchunos
I’m fascinated by how our stories can connect us. My work ranges from the full-length Mesmerism drama Spellbinders and the journalism mystery Unmediated to the short comedy Death Wears Fishnets. A company member of Northwest Theatre Workshop, one of the leaders of PDX Playwrights, and a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, I’ve had the honor of seeing my work presented 10 consecutive years in the Fertile Ground Festival of New Work. I’m a former newspaper reporter and humor columnist based in Portland, Oregon.
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