Performance

Installations

These are to keep you captive… To captivate you between performances.

A white chicken foot on top of a deck of playing cards, scattered jewelry, and various objects on a wooden surface, including an Indian currency note, a crystal, a rope, and decorative items.

Image created using photos from Kartikeya Srivastava and Matthieu Rochette from Unsplash

Chicken Legs

by The QUeeps

Visitors will step into a tent, one at a time, to be told their fortunes. The uncanny seers inside may read palms, tarot cards, tea leaves, or even entrails. Actually, especially entrails. Yum.

PG-13

Length: 2 min per person

Friday Oct 9th

  • 5:30-6:00

  • 7:00-7:30

  • 8:30-9:00

Saturday Oct 10th

  • 5:30-6pm

  • 7-7:30

Sunday Oct 11th

  • 5:30-6pm

  • 7-7:30pm

Chicken Legs Bios

  • Victorian Queeps

    Company

    The Queeps formed in 2023, with the creation of the sexy camp hit “They Were a Dracula,” and followed up with the performance installation “Limbo” in 2024. The company has a roster of veteran creator/performers, collected by Summer Olsson, and oriented toward clowning, melodrama, and the macabre. The highest hope of The Queeps is that an audience member will say “that was weird, and I liked it.”

  • Summer Olsson

    Performer / Creator

    Summer Olsson is a performer, director, writer, and registered nurse. Her career has spanned touring devised theatre through Europe to playing kids shows across the PNW with a trash puppet rock band. She worked as a second assistant director in stop motion animation, including on the Oscar winning Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio and Emmy-winning The Tiny Chef Show. Her writing has been published in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Slippery Elm Literary Journal, Art Born Words (Demagogue Press) and others. 

    @mslemonsours

  • Allie Menzimer

    Performer / Creator

    Local unwell puppeteer and clown Allie Menzimer is sorry for running late and hasn’t finished a book in months. Like the seagulls hovering over her ancestral Bay Area homeland, she spends her time screaming at the ocean and eating trash. Keep an eye out for Odd Year, a story about baseball, showing locally in PDX and touring the Canadian Fringe circuit in 2027. Fuck ICE, free Palestine.

    @ohpennygreen

A white disposable coffee cup with black illustrations and handwriting, held by a person's hand. There is a streak of coffee dripping down the side of the cup.

The Lost have been found.

You found us! Welcome back.

You probably don't remember us.

Theatre while you wait. We serve spectacle!

A Coffee Cart in Purgatory is a personalized immersive theatre experience disguised as a functioning coffee cart.

The Infinite Nothingness is a spacetime-traveling pirate ship built from the last surviving fragments of an ancient diner that has been hurtling through unreality for infinite eternities. Now stranded in Purgatory, its crew has only a brief window in each dimension to make sales before the ship is pulled back into the void.

There is no conventional audience seating, & no fixed performance experienced the same way twice. Customers check in with the Hostess, place an order, & receive their own individualized performance while they wait. The audience's questions, choices, personalities & participation become part of the show.

But there is another show happening at the same time.

From outside the cart, another audience can watch the machinery behind the illusion: the hidden mechanisms, physical comedy, acrobatics, scrambling worker, impossible service, & all the strange labour required to make your coffee appear as if by magic.

Inside, you are the customer. Outside, you see how the magic works.

The crew includes a failed demon, an impossible waitress, a malfunctioning robot chef, puppets, pirates, & an invisible busboy who somehow keeps the whole thing running.

Our coffee is real. Our junk is real. The spectacle is real. The reality is questionable.

It’s not a show, it’s just a perfectly functioning coffee cart. …in Purgatory.

A Coffee Cart in Purgatory

by Theatre School Dropout Productions

Rated PG-13

15-minute performance loop, repeated as needed during festival turnover periods. Within each loop, audience members receive individualized one-on-one theatre as they order and wait for service, with each interaction typically lasting 3–10 minutes depending on the order and flow of service.

Content Warning

Audience participation & direct interaction; theatrical shouting; occasional profanity; loud music; sudden sound effects; theatrical lighting changes/flashing effects; surreal references to death, Hell, Purgatory & the afterlife; themes of existential anxiety, labor, capitalism & imprisonment.

Practical note: Audience members may be approached directly by performers & may be invited to participate, answer questions, perform, or interact with the environment. 

Thursday Oct. 8: 6:00pm-7:00pm
Friday Oct. 9: 5:00-5:30, 7:00-7:20, 8:00-8:20
Saturday Oct. 10: 12:30pm-1:30pm, 3:00-3:15pm, 4:30-5:30
Sunday Oct. 11: 1:00pm-1:45pm, 3:00-3:15, 4:20-5:30
Sunday Oct. 18: After Party in the Parking lot

A Coffee Cart in Purgatory Bios

  • Placeholder

    Company

    Theatre School Dropout Produx specializes in making something out of nothing. We strive to create strange, irreverent live performances for people who like their theatre a little feral around the edges. Starting with mutating written work, we improvise to devise immersive, site-specific work that blurs the line between performance & ordinary life, often using comedy, physical theatre, audience participation, found materials & real-world environments as part of the theatrical machinery.

    Our work is interested in the places where performance, labor, absurdity & human connection collide. We like making theatre that doesn't politely wait for an audience to sit down. We would rather meet people where they are, invite them into the world, & see what happens.

  • Zigzag with accordion, seated on stage

    Creator / Director / Performer / Invisible Busboy / GREG / To-Go Boxes

    Zigzag Sunshine Rhae is upside-down.

  • Close up of Lucy & a hedgehog

    DieAnne / Hostess / Manager / Performer

    Lucy Paschall

    At the age of 10 Lucy went to her first acting class and developed acute appendicitis. She never looked back! She is a proud member of ‘People with toe thumbs unite’ and also has 2 webbed toes.

  • Close up of Tony in sunglasses @ Costco

    The Impossible Waitress / Performer

    Tony Mendez was born in the middle of a debate on the importance of improv in the modern world.  He has thus gone on to act in many back alleys and ne'er-do-well locations. He would like to thank the continuum for his knack of staying alive.