ART’s remodeled headquarters on Southwest Morrison Street is like a sapling starting to sprout leaves. It may be a work in progress strewn with ladders and scaffolding, but you can see the space’s grandeur, openness and elegance starting to emerge.
Since 2019, the theater company’s rebuild has been marred by everything from the pandemic to financial troubles to the struggle to retain an artistic director. Yet it is finally ready to welcome audiences back—for play readings in its vast new lobby.
“I am not a runner, but I imagine it feels how you feel when you finish a marathon,” says managing director Aiyana Cunningham, who joined the company last June. “It cost some difficult pain and hardship to get here.”
Before the renovation, ART was one of Portland’s foremost purveyors of epic-scale theater, unleashing ambitious productions of provocative plays like Caught by Christopher Chen and Magellanica by E.M. Lewis. The company also battled the limitations of its space, which was plagued by outdated restrooms, a leaky roof, and a fickle HVAC system.
Cunningham ruefully describes the effort to upgrade ART—an endeavor budgeted at $35 million—as an “adventure.” Perhaps the darkest chapter of the journey was last summer, when the cash-strapped company temporarily suspended its 2023-24 season and laid off artistic director Jeanette Harrison, who had been at ART for only a year.
While the company’s mainstage is unfinished, the lobby is close enough to completion to serve as a performance space. In April, ART will present readings from four classic, yet-to-be-announced plays there, followed by performances from the Fertile Ground Festival of New Works, plus readings of new plays in June.
ART’s theatrical efforts will likely remain modest until the building can fully reopen—in 2026, Cunningham hopes—and the company still needs to recruit a new artistic director and raise $7 million to complete renovations. But after a half-decade of setbacks, the upcoming performances offer hope that one of Portland’s finest theater institutions will bloom as vibrantly as it did in the 2010s.
“Our goal with presenting these staged readings this spring is just to reconnect with our people—the artists we work with and the audience members, just to see people face to face and say, ‘Hi, how’re you doing? We’re OK, you’re OK. Here’s our building, let’s celebrate,’” Cunningham says.
