They're ready for another Encore
The senior theater troupe will unveil "Life!" on Saturday in Eugene

By Paul Denison

©2005 Eugene Reister-Guard

Used by permission

February 13, 2005

Encore Theatre will kick off its eighth season Saturday night in the usual way, with a fund-raising performance at Amazon Community Center, 2700 Hilyard St.

But this season will not be entirely business as usual for the senior theater troupe, which fell about $5,000 short last season. And it is beginning this season without a grant from the Meyer Memorial Trust, which has provided substantial support in the past, including one three-year grant of $53,000.

“Foundations that have supported us consistently aren’t as generous in today’s economy, and election-year politics have taken a toll on individual donors as well,” board President Judy Moseley wrote in the group’s fall 2004 newsletter.

Moseley reported that Encore Theatre dipped into its savings to pay last season’s bills, has reduced its budget this season and is actively looking for new sources of funding.

Meanwhile, artistic/executive director Eliza Roaring Springs and songwriter/production manager Lydia Lord are getting this year’s group ready for another busy season of performances in schools and juvenile detention centers.

Along with Saturday’s season opener, the schedule includes four other public performances, which the nonprofit organization uses to raise money and, incidentally, attract new performers.

These will be March 9 at Willamalane Senior Adult Activity Center in Springfield, April 23 at the Very Little Theatre, May 14 at Caesar Chavez Elementary School and June 4 at Roosevelt Middle School.

Each year, working with both returning and rookie performers, Roaring Springs scripts and choreographs a song, dance and storytelling revue based on the actual lives of troupe members, who are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. Lord writes the songs.

This year’s program will include “Bein’ A Parent Blues,” a rap on the difference between teenagers then and now; a reflective song about the ways people protect themselves against pain; and a finale suggesting that similarities between the old and the young just might outweigh the differences.

“We try to find issues that are germane to both generations,” Lord says. “It needs to matter, and it needs to grab the kids.”

The seniors do the show free of charge in schools around the state, often followed by one-on-one personal theater workshops with students. Since February 1998, Encore Theatre has performed for more than 30,000 young people in 220 Oregon schools. Usually, these are just one-day stands: a performance, lunch break, workshops and then home again.

A more in-depth program, which the group says “may be our most powerful,” consists of six-day residencies at juvenile detention centers. The seniors perform, do TRUTHeatre one-on-ones and develop a show that they perform with the kids as the Patchwork Players.

Last season, Encore Theatre did its first residency with a group of sex offenders at MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility, and its first all-female residency, at Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility.

This season will include three six-day residencies, one at Deschutes detention center in Bend, one at Hillcrest and one at Serbu here in Eugene, where they launched the original program.

"basically good kids who were born into pretty horrible situations"

“It’s hard to say no when they really want you, and you know you can make a difference,” Lord says.

Roaring Springs says young people in juvenile correction facilities are “basically good kids who were born into pretty horrible situations,” never learned positive ways to deal with life and “really blew it.” Such kids “feel really doomed,” she says, but meeting elders who have experienced and survived similar problems can help them open up and turn around their thinking.

Both she and Lord have provided a transitional home for kids to give them a better chance at success when they were released from detention centers into a world that has changed and is full of challenges. For some kids, she says, “There’s no support system, nothing.”

Roaring Springs says that group has had to overcome stereotypes about “senior theatre.” Those may apply some places but not to Encore Theatre, whose inter-generational approach is highly unusual, if not unique, in the United States.

“It’s not just a bunch of older people doing little skits, and it’s not a kids’ show,” she says, noting that Encore Theatre has settled on teens as its main audience. “It’s at-risk community kid-building.”

Saturday’s season-launching show at Amazon Community Center will begin at 7:30 p.m. The groups suggests donations of $5-$10 (tax-deductible) at the door, although “larger contributions are appreciated now more than ever.”

For kids, as usual, admission is free.