North Plan @ PCS

Friday was the opening night for Jason Wells’s The North Plan at Portland Center Stage. A fan favorite of the PCS Jaw Playwrights Festival in 2010, PCS was very excited about the world premiere of The North Plan, and Wells himself was in the audience at Gerding Theater for the opening night of his work.

The North Plan centers on conspiracy and revolution. A new provisional government has taken over Washington after a mysterious “emergency situation,” and they are intent on rounding up people they consider to be enemies. They even have a list. Carlton Berg has a copy of that list and he is on the run from the Department of Homeland Security, until he ends up in a police station in Lodus, Missouri, where his fate and the fate of the names on that list depend on police chief Swenson, administrative assistant Shonda Cox, and Tanya Shepke, a local alcohol enthusiast with an opinion about everything and, possibly, attention-deficit disorder. Opportunities for hilarious misunderstandings and miscommunications abound.

As audience members took their seats, I had a chance to look through the program. I was struck by the section where director Rose Riordan commented on the play, and one character in particular. “The unleashing of the character Tanya Shepke will go down in PCS history,” Riordan said in her Director’s Notes. “We’ve never had anything like her on stage and probably never will again.”

As soon as the play began, we all realized exactly what Riordan meant. The very first scene features Shepke in a prison cell ranting about how she reported herself for drunk driving. With those first few lines the audience knew she was something else, and there was hardly a line actress Kate Eastwood Norris spoke for the rest of the night that didn’t have us all rolling with laughter. During intermission, flattering adjectives such as “fabulous” and “hysterical” were flung freely back and forth.

And it’s absolutely justified. With her frequent foul language and unwavering tough attitude, Shepke’s character stole the show. Though she appeared to be the one least able to influence the plot, she literally took the status quo and made it her own when she burst back into the police station with a hunting rifle to rescue Carlton and ended the play firing a pair of pistols into the air. She embodies the tough, rebellious underdog American spirit served up with plenty of laughter. No wonder Norris received the greatest applause at the end of the evening.