By Brad Bolchunos
David Loftus as Santa and Kilee Rheinsburg-Tawasha as Rindy confront some dark changes afoot in Rindy Boo, part of Scenes of the Season. Production photos by Roy Arauz.
Northwest Theatre Workshop’s Scenes of the Season began with a terrific producing idea and a problem nobody foresaw.
The idea came from director Jeremy Cole: a holiday show made of short plays and musicals, each one based on a known holiday story, each one given a twist, each one performed inside Rose City Book Pub.
The instructions were clean enough to sound easy. Writers would choose a familiar holiday tale. They would write a five- to seven-minute piece. It would have to happen in the pub. It would use no more than three characters. It would require no conventional light or sound cues. It had to be short, flexible, funny enough for a holiday crowd, and recognizable enough that audiences could enjoy the game of figuring out what had been turned inside out.
Then Cole unexpectedly had to drop out of the project.
That left Ciji Guerin, Northwest Theatre Workshop’s producing artistic director, with a project already in motion and a concept that she had not launched. Her task was not only to keep the trains running, but also to protect the spirit of Cole’s premise and make six separately created short pieces feel like one theatrical event.
The show worked. It sold out. Audiences laughed, drank, listened, and shifted in their chairs to watch actors appear throughout the room around them. They enjoyed the shock of discovering that the person at the next table might be Yukon Cornelius, Hans Gruber, Mrs. Claus, Clarence the Angel, Krampus, or a drunken caroler who would not take no for an answer. BroadwayWorld called the show “fresh and funny,” and noted how the scenes seemed to emerge from the crowd, creating the feeling of overhearing real conversations instead of watching a conventional play.
Although the critical response pleased the participants, it does not tell the whole story.
Garland Lyonds, Hal Logan, and Elizabeth Rothan sing in When the Artist Is Away ..., one of the plays in Fragments.
Behind the sold-out run was a company exploring different kinds of new work processes to figure out how to best serve its mission.
Earlier in the year, NWTW had created Fragments, a devised, site-specific production at Hopewell Hub in Salem. Fragments also sold out. But the two projects were built in radically different ways. Fragments was slow, exploratory, site-rooted, and ensemble-driven. Scenes of the Season was fast, prompt-driven, writer-led, and built for a pub audience during the holidays.
Both productions reached new audiences. Both promoted local businesses. Both showed NWTW’s ability to move theatre out of conventional theatre buildings. But from an artistic standpoint, they taught different lessons.
“Although more time-consuming, we were able to create more meaningful artistic work with the process we used creating Fragments,” Guerin said. “But the audience enjoyed Scenes of the Season as much as they did Fragments, and both shows sold out.”
Scenes of the Season proved NWTW could make a hit with a short, sharp, skit-friendly structure. Fragments suggested the company could make deeper new work when the artists had more time to discover and shape what they were actually making.
Fragments began with a place. Guerin and Hopewell Hub co-owner Elizabeth Rothan developed the production as a walking theatrical journey through the Hopewell Hub, where audiences would move from site to site and encounter six short devised plays and musicals. Guerin wanted the event to support local business, build community, and create live human-to-human experiences. Rothan wanted theatre in the space but needed the right structure. Together, they found it.
At Fragments, the artists met at Hopewell Hub before the pieces existed. They formed teams. They picked sites. They studied objects, architecture, histories, textures, and contradictions. In the design of the project, each site was the first collaborator. The plays were built from the sites in which they occurred: a porch, a pond, a garden, a yome, a mushroom wall, and an art studio. The teams derived inspiration from objects and features at those sites, ranging from a shuffleboard to a fuel tank, and juxtapositions throughout the area.
Niels Truman, who wrote Honesty Box as part of Fragments, recalled the beginning as a whole-team meeting at Hopewell Hub. Playwrights and directors essentially speed-dated, looking for working chemistry. Truman ended up with director Mindi Logan and actors Ricardo Guevara and Sav Baird.
“We come to our work from a place of curiosity,” Truman said. “We share values of rigor and optimism.”
Adhering to the process of developing devised work meant the teams of artists creating Fragments were asked to build working relationships before they built scripts.
Justine Hanlon, who wrote Pond, described that devised process as “not linear but cyclical,” shaped by “each suggestion, mishap, and moment of improvisation.”
Brad Bolchunos, who wrote Garden Stranger in concert with the director and actors on his team, said the process forced him out of the lane he knew and tested his comfort zone. “Deliberately circumventing the usual role definitions and moving collectively into one lane felt like I was disobeying rules of the road, swerving into traffic.”
The devised work model blurred ownership, slowed certainty, and forced the playwrights to watch and listen before writing. It made the actors generate material before the script was fixed, and it made the directors collaborate at an earlier stage of development. Fragments also required everyone to base their work intrinsically on the setting.
Ricardo Guevara and Sav Baird in Honesty Box.
For some writers, the devised work structure, beginning with the site inspirations and improvisations, was exhilarating. For others, it was irritating. Kwik Jones, who wrote Watersports, was blunt about it. “My mind didn’t work in that manner,” Jones said. “I don’t start thinking about a story until it’s time for me to write it. My laptop is shut until it’s time to work on a script. So, if we’re four months away, why are we here?”
Jones did not pretend to love the waiting. Like those on the other teams, he was advised to allow the work to arise collectively rather than allow one artist to impose a narrative early. “NWTW wanted us to wait,” Jones said. “Under the structure of the Fragments project, it wanted me to stall my creative mojo. I didn’t like that.”
But the waiting did lead to something. Jones’s group explored their site, learned about its history, listened to stories about bottle caps and bikers and family memories, and turned those fragments into a story of fractured family connection. “We became a part of the research,” Jones said.
That kind of discovery over time was part of what distinguished Fragments from Scenes of the Season. In Fragments, the artists became part of what would evolve into the story. In Scenes of the Season, the writers began with a story assignment.
That assignment had value as something playable, marketable, and clear. The premise gave the audience an immediate point of entry.
Wayne Harrel, returning after a long pause as a playwright, appreciated the accessibility of the Scenes of the Season challenge. “We’re writing five- to seven-minute scenes, based on classic holiday characters, set in a pub,” he said. The prospect struck him as “fun and manageable.”
And it was. But only to a point. When artists began actively working with the concept, many acknowledged it presented steep hills to climb.
Dan Sweet as Yukon Cornelius in Bumblers.
Bolchunos, who wrote Bumblers, described the assignment as “a tall order,” adding that providing a meaningful, cohesive story in no more than five pages would demand “exceedingly tight construction.”
He selected Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer as a starting point, specifically the Rankin/Bass television special based on the classic holiday song. He loved it as a child. But he knew nostalgia alone would not make a new play.
He began asking what happened to the show’s misfits later in their lives. What if the prospector Yukon Cornelius and the aspirational dentist elf Hermey had aged into bitterness, secrecy, and estrangement? What if the North Pole had fallen on hard times? What if the cheery misfit story moved toward a darker piece about shame, authenticity, belonging, and whether two former friends could tell each other the truth?
“I worked hard to organize my thoughts supporting the story I was striving to tell, with more than a dozen pages of jam-packed, hand-written notes as I was exploring the motifs,” Bolchunos said. “The project demanded a lot of thought before a five-page script could be ... wrought.”
Because the timeline was tight, casting and writing happened almost at the same time, he added. “Most of us in theatrical projects are accustomed to everything springing from the script at the outset. In this case, casting and writing were happening at virtually the same time.”
The actors and director helped him sharpen the work. Jeffrey Puukka, directing Bumblers, asked questions during rehearsals to guide the process. Actors Dan Sweet and Liorah Riutzel, as Yukon and Hermey, brought the relationship alive. Bolchunos said the first read-through raised his confidence and helped him find a few places where he could make adjustments and sharpen the focus.
One of the refinements was what he described as “small on the page but big in drama.” Toward the end of the piece, Hermey originally asked Yukon, “Can you guide us both back to the North Pole and help us find Rudolph and set him free?” Through rehearsal, that line became “Will you guide us ... ” The change echoed Santa’s famous call to Rudolph, and it clarified their moment of mission.
Liorah Riutzel as Hermey.
For Bolchunos, those kinds of discoveries reflected the process working effectively: a prompt, a draft, a director asking useful questions, actors revealing the relationship, and a playwright revising toward clarity.
Facing the same overall prompt for Scenes of the Season, Nancy Campbell caught herself pausing ... and asking herself why.
“I am not a fan of Christmas carols, Christmas stories, Christmas … well, anything,” she concluded. “I somehow missed the magic and mystery of the season gene, and asked too many questions.”
That skepticism became useful, she said. She “auditioned” several holiday tales before landing on A Visit from St. Nicholas and the Santa myth. She began asking the kinds of questions that often lead to comedy. What if Mrs. Claus is the one who really runs everything? What if Santa has one job? What if he is tired of that job? What if their marriage has become a workplace dispute in red velvet?
“What became clear is that she is the entity who keeps things going,” Campbell said. “And that’s when I found the play.”
Debbie Hunter and Stefan Feuerherdt in ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.
Campbell’s ’Twas the Night Before Christmas found its shape through the dramatic conflict and tension of spouse against spouse, duty against fatigue, selflessness against selfishness. She met her actors, Debbie Hunter and Stefan Feuerherdt, at the early November read-through. The pub was noisy, trivia was happening nearby, and there was no room for Campbell to sit. Despite the commotion, she found herself enthralled.
“I was not disappointed,” she said. “Debbie Hunter and Stefan Feuerherdt were perfectly cast as Mrs. Claus and Santa Claus.”
The rest moved quickly for Campbell. She made a few word changes after the read-through, answered backstory questions at a subsequent rehearsal, and adjusted opening lines for clarity after the stumble-through rehearsal.
Campbell came out of the process with a slight reversal of her own. “While Christmas has yet to become a favorite holiday for me, I discovered a bit of a twist for myself as an artist: the joy in the writing journey regarding this particular holiday tale.”
Brad Bolchunos and Rosalind Fell in A Christmas Caroler.
Zella Selvoy-Devan’s A Christmas Caroler exposed another challenge inside the format: five pages of script can be readily written only if nothing substantial has to happen.
“When Northwest Theatre Workshop proposed Scenes of the Season, I underestimated the parts of it I would struggle with,” Selvoy-Devan said. “The idea seemed simple: five-page scripts that are a twist on a classic holiday tale. A super fun premise. The possibilities were endless and obvious.”
At first, she assumed five pages would be easy. “Compared to other scripts I’ve written, five pages could be written over breakfast coffee,” she said.
Then challenges surfaced about all the project would entail and the work behind building it. “A fun premise meant brainstorming. Five pages meant a need for strong character motivation. A talented composer meant collaboration.”
Her first impulse was to lean into someting clever. Leprechauns, New Year’s kisses, tooth fairies, “a constipated St. Valentine.” Anything surprising. But the better idea came from a practical production considerations. She had been warned that NWTW might not be able to find musical theatre actors because of the holiday-season competition from caroling groups, lounge singers, and other musicals. That explanation bothered her until she realized why: this was the one time of year when everyone ought to get to sing.
As a character, “the Caroler would have the same philosophy,” Selvoy-Devan said. “Abandoned by his caroling group, the Caroler would have to find a way to keep singing ... even once he met the Patron, who was convinced singing just wasn’t for her.”
For Selvoy-Devan, that conflict moved the piece from a piece based on gimmick to a story with meaning.
Another discovery was about the compact nature of the project. “The thing I underestimated about five pages is that a five-page piece is not a scene,” she said. “It’s a whole, fleshed-out story. Five pages is not a lot of room for character development, plot, dynamic, and, my old frenemy, motivation.”
Her first draft favored jokes over motivation. It made her laugh at first, but then bored her, she said.
“The spectacle doesn’t matter unless you make it matter,” she said. “Without substance and meaning, no amount of spectacle can make your story compelling, can make your story human.”
The collaboration with composer Duncan Kass also pushed her creatively. Together, they set deadlines, clarified roles, and agreed upon how much authority each of them would have. “There’s a certain fear in collaboration that you are relinquishing some part of the work,” Selvoy-Devan said. “But the only thing you are really relinquishing is control.”
Realizations about where to assert and relinquish control were among the larger lessons for other company members in both Fragments and Scenes of the Season.
Katie Bennett as Krampus in Rindy Boo.
In Rindy Boo, Harrel and composer Paul Harlan found a process that fit the speed of the assignment better than almost anyone else. Harrel had a basic premise: a variation of Cindy Lou Who meets Santa and Krampus, with naughty and nice, reward and punishment, forgiveness and mischief all tangled together. Harrel and Harlan divided the labor clearly. Harrel wrote book and lyrics. Harlan wrote the music.
“With musicals, there’s always the age-old question, ‘Which comes first, music or lyrics?’” Harrel said. “My answer is: story comes first.”
Harlan moved fast. He supplied melodies for Rindy and Santa with placeholder lyrics, which gave Harrel phrasing challenges he liked. “I guess he was going first,” Harrel said. “And I’m glad he did.”
Because the piece had three songs in roughly seven minutes, Harrel never wrote a full dialogue-driven book. “We kept the outline in front of us and I told the emerging story through the lyrics, matching the great melodies Paul created,” he said.
Then rehearsal changed the story. Kilee Rheinsburg-Tawasha, playing Rindy, kept making the character more devious and manipulative. Instead of resisting that impulse, the team pushed Rindy’s enlightenment later. The result, Harrel said, was “a delightful reversal late in the show.”
Harlan’s account shows how detailed the musical collaboration became. “Wayne gave me a basic storyline and three character descriptions,” he said. He connected the songs through musical motives, giving Rindy and Santa (played by David Loftus) related melodic material and making Krampus (played by Katie Bennett) “a darker version of Santa.” Later, actors changed the work again. “Their collaboration on the characters led to several changes in the music and the lyrics,” Harlan said. Bennett’s ideas clarified Rindy’s arc and Krampus’s exit, he added.
“Through the collaborative process,” Harlan said, “I believe we created great story line, character arcs and music that emerge, evolve, and conclude well in a short, seven-minute time frame.”
Harlan’s reflections serve as one of the high-water marks for the Scenes process: short form, clear story, and good collaboration, with music and performance adjusting to one another. The result was a piece conveying a strong sense that its creators knew exactly what it was.
Justine Hanlon’s experience with The Interview tells a rougher story.
Hanlon began in September with brainstorming. She wanted something adjacent to Bad Santa, then Krampus, then horror, then winter action. She eventually landed on Die Hard, mistaken identity, and a job interview with the villainous Hans Gruber.
Edward Lyons, Jr., as the Applicant, left, and Christopher Keown as Hans Gruber in The Interview.
But the form itself shaped the writing. “The venue and the nature of the show posed particular challenges in that we only had a short amount of space and time to get things going,” Hanlon said. “Room to build some dramatic action isn’t there. You essentially need to ‘jump in’ and hook your audience.”
The piece would have to arrive hot, she said, with no time to warm up.
Hanlon generally loves hearing drafts aloud. “My favorite part of the writing process is to hear a rough draft read aloud by professionals,” she said. “Hearing the work instantly gives me a sense of where I need to trim or shore things up a little bit more.”
But the first read-through for Scenes of the Season was not ideal. It happened in the pub, where the company was also trying to test the space. The room was loud with the noise of other patrons, and that sometimes made dialogue and comments hard to hear. A feedback session followed anyway. Hanlon criticized the experience as uneven and, at points, rude. Still, she found parts of it useful.
“A few people asked questions which gave me insight into where I was going awry,” she said. “Listen closely to questions, because the nature of the questions can show you the holes in your story.”
From that first round, she learned she needed to bring the villain’s announcement earlier, make her applicant character more idiotic as a counterweight, and make the dialogue snap harder because the actors had limited movement in the pub.
The fast process also reinforced a hard-to-learn craft lesson, she said. There is no time to sentimentalize weak lines. “If a line of dialogue is leading people the wrong way, goodbye, friend!” Hanlon said. “That line of dialogue goes out.”
Guerin’s own Lassoing the Moon became the most explicit case study in the gap between Cole’s prompt and NWTW’s deeper artistic appetite.
“When NWTW decided to create Scenes of the Season, an immersive holiday show that would include the work of six playwrights and directors, two or three composers and up to 12 actors and singers, I was both excited and trepidatious,” Guerin said. “The specifications for the scripts didn’t play to my strengths and wasn’t a form I’d written before.”
Guerin chose It’s a Wonderful Life and became interested in Mary Bailey, not as the dutiful wife in the sentimental memory of the film, but as the person who keeps saving George Bailey.
“Mary’s actually a badass that bails out George while he keeps getting himself into one ridiculous situation after another trying to save the town,” she said.
The real nature of Mary was strong perspective, but it was not quite a twist. Guerin said she realized too late that she did not subvert the original tale so much as reexamine it.
Angelique O'Rourke as Mary turns from Brent McMorris as Clarence in Lassoing the Moon.
“I wasn’t very comfortable with the script,” she said. “Without the time to do a proper ‘retelling’ of the story, I was confused on what info I need to provide the audience for the five-page play to make sense, and what I could leave out.”
The script felt overburdened, she added. She sent it to other playwrights under the subject line, “Help, I think this might suck.”
At the first read-through, Guerin made a broader discovery. “None of the plays were ‘tales with a twist,’” she said. Some writers had already received approval from Cole to do something else because they could not figure out how to meet the spec as written. Guerin said she wished she had done the same.
Her instinct was to scrap the script and rewrite it into something simpler. The director and actors resisted. They liked the script. They believed rehearsal would solve it. “It did not,” Guerin said.
Scott Stroot, left, who directed other pieces in Scenes of the Season, confers with Ciji Guerin during a stumble-through rehearsal of the production.
At each rehearsal she tried to pitch a rewrite. At each rehearsal she met resistance. Artists on other teams saw problems too, but some said they thought the trouble was staging or acting choices.
Guerin came to a harder conclusion. “Despite how well the script might read, the problem was the script,” she said. “It didn’t work in performance.”
Audiences eventually clarified the issue. One person called it a character piece. Another said there was too much going on, and suggested the piece needed to be “distilled.” That word stuck.
“I don’t know why the word ‘distilled’ was what I needed to hear,” Guerin said. “Hearing that it needed to be ‘distilled’ just changed the way I was thinking about it.”
By then, the run was over.
Her retrospective conclusion cuts to the heart of Scenes of the Season. A true twisted retelling usually requires more space than the original tale, not less. A five-minute piece can flip a premise, exaggerate a side character, or make a comic argument, but it cannot easily do the deeper work of retelling and subversion.
“Saturday Night Live often has skits that spin popular films and TV series on their heads,” Guerin said. “A five minute SNL ‘twisted skit’ that turned It’s A Wonderful Life on its head by making Clarence or Mary the villain of the story is more in line with what I should’ve written.”
Cole’s prompt for the show produced, or at least encouraged, a style conducive to a skit. In Rose City Book Pub, that style worked. The audience liked it. The show sold out. But it was not the same kind of new work NWTW had been building through Fragments.
Guerin’s agreement to take on the production late in the process added another layer of intensity. She was not only writing one of the pieces within the show, but also charged with turning the whole set of pieces into a cohesive evening. That meant building the theatrical frame around six different works, all made under intense time constraints.
The production solved that issue through music, placement, timing, and the pub itself. Duncan Kass’s lounge-music frame helped the event feel like something already happening in the room. Actors were preset among patrons or entered through the front door. Scenes happened at tables, bar seats, and corners of the room. Musical interludes bought time for movement, food delivery, and the next surprise. The staff had to know when to pause orders, when to hand Mary her prop wine, and when food could move without breaking the show.
The logistics posed big challenges. In an immersive pub show, a prop glass can vanish because the wait staff unknowingly clears the table. A back door can be locked, trapping the flow of actors offstage. A microphone can be in the wrong channel, prevening proper amplification. A patron can sit where an actor needs to be. A scene can move from one table to another after opening.
Duncan Kass, at a rehearsal, adds panache with a lounge music frame-up and interludes.
Guerin’s play had to change action involving spilled drinks after the first performances; Clarence eventually had to drink both drinks that he was holding in his hands. The change was borne of necessity, but it serves as an example of live adaptation inside a working business.
It was also the continuation of a producing model NWTW had tested with Fragments. Guerin has argued that theatrical events in unexpected places can help both theatre companies and small businesses. After Fragments, Rothan said working with NWTW “put us on the map” and called it Hopewell Hub’s “best weekend ever.”
Scenes of the Season extended that model to Rose City Book Pub.
The company was learning on several fronts at once: how to partner with businesses, how to produce immersive work in active spaces, how to guide multiple writers, how to handle music and food service, and how to make a holiday event feel social rather than staged.
Many of the post-show recommendations took a practical tone: Book a longer run or a larger house. Make the work more ADA accessible. Designate a green room. Develop entrances and exits earlier. Create a props table. Hold a preliminary meeting so everyone can pick teams before the playwrights write. Establish a strong premise with the creative teams, so audiences can understand the premise at the outset of the show.
The concept of a show determines not only its process but also shapes its cohesiveness.
Fragments formed teams first. It let the artists investigate together. It let the theme emerge from the whole. Scenes of the Season gave writers a prompt and then asked the production to unify the results. One process discovered cohesion early. The other found cohesion late.
Ethan Sloan and Nancy Campbell in Watersports, part of Fragments.
Neither process was pure. Fragments came with conflict, confusion, broken ensembles, defensiveness around feedback, and uneven collaboration. Campbell’s Fragments team fractured badly enough that she ended up starting again with new collaborators and only six rehearsals before final dress. Selvoy-Devan’s Fragments process taught her that saying yes to everything is not collaboration. “Breaking the rules of the project is not collaboration,” she said. “Trusting that others know better is not good collaboration.”
Fragments was not tidy. But its mess was tied to the artistic inquiry in its process.
Scenes of the Season was cleaner in its public face and faster in its execution. Its messiness was tied to compression. There was not enough time for every writer to discover the right form. There was not enough room in the assignment for deep retelling. There was not enough rehearsal process to rebuild pieces that needed a different conceptual conflict.
The show’s success came because the overall event itself was strong, the performers were lively, the music supported the transitions, and the audience enjoyed the premise—no small achievement.
Still, for a company committed to creating, developing, and producing new work by Northwest artists, the distinction matters. A crowd-pleasing evening is not automatically a strong development model. A sold-out house is not proof that the process produced the deepest possible work.
Scenes of the Season proved how NWTW can entertain people. It can sell a strange idea. It can partner with a pub. It can make theatre feel local, social, and alive. It can bring writers, composers, actors, directors, musicians, photographers, stage managers, and house staff into one unruly room and make the whole thing play.
What Fragments proved is different. It proved that when NWTW gives artists time to listen, argue, improvise, study place, and build theme from the ground up, the resulting work may carry more artistic weight. It may also ask more of everyone. More time. More patience. More uncertainty. More trust.
“Devising, for me, is about trust,” Campbell said after Fragments.
That lesson carried into Scenes of the Season, but in compressed form. Each participant had to trust their collaborators, trust in the most useful feedback, and trust the concept, even while recognizing its limits.
For other NWTW processes, company members will strive to apply what worked best from both productions.
From Scenes of the Season, those features include the accessibility of the premise, the joy of short-form audience surprise, the partnership with local business, the musical frame, and the willingness to let theatre happen where people already gather.
From Fragments, the company will likely consider aspects of the deeper early process: form teams before writing, let artists choose or study the site together, build a shared premise with the creative teams, identify the themes before scripts harden, and hold a work-in-progress run with enough time left for real revision.
Ideally, that combination of approaches could give the company work that is popular without being thin, collaborative without being shapeless, immersive without being gimmicky, and new without being underdeveloped.
Scenes of the Season was successful in that its shows sold out, audiences enjoyed it, critics gave strong reviews, high energy packed the room, and the pieces landed well. But its greater value may be what it taught NWTW about the difference between making a successful event and building a lasting new-work process.
Cole’s original concept gave the company a fun holiday machine. Guerin’s late takeover made that machine run. The writers and artists filled it with wit, music, nerve, and local talent. The audience rewarded the whole thing. But if NWTW wants to keep developing the kind of meaningful new work it found through Fragments, then Scenes of the Season should be viewed as a stepping stone.
Artists have to care how the work is made as much they care about the production and its impact. As they forge ahead, company members recognize process must remain intrinsic to how they define success.
Learn more about Brad Bolchunos.