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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us September 29, 2005 Ashland playwright stages musical in Portland The Associated Press Ashland High School grad Wade McCollum, right, poses for a promotional photo for his musical “One,” now playing in Portland. Submitted photo PORTLAND — Ashland native Wade McCollum, author of the homegrown musical “ONE,” has the symbol for infinity tattooed on each wrist: He can’t say anymore where he begins and everyone else ends. His name is on the posters advertising “Portland’s premier musical.” He wrote the story and carried the idea within him for years before finally getting it on paper. But there’s a reason Wade McCollum, a self-described student of fractals, dark matter and astrophysics, calls his project “ONE.” “I’m interested in the contractive aspects of the universe,” he says, “not just the expansive ones.” In the beginning, “ONE” was just that: one man, alone, writing in his father’s garage. But when he started telling people about his idea — a modern rock musical based loosely on Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha,” a story of personal enlightenment set in the time of the Buddha — more and more people began to join him. Actors moved hundreds of miles, shuttered apartments, said goodbye to lovers, and took leaves of absence from their day jobs in order to take part. “I’ll do anything,” said one young actress from New York. “Let me hang lights.” One man watching an early version wept openly, then pledged himself to help find the funding to try to take the show to Broadway one day. “It felt like somebody took my rib cage and just opened it up and filled it with light and love,” he says. Portlanders dug into wallets to raise $78,000 to help fund the production. An 11-year-old boy pledged $10 from his allowance. Others volunteered time and talent, designing playbills and Web sites and posters, donating rehearsal space. McCollum, who is tall and lean and tends to end his conversations with an embrace, has inspired some of this fervor. In Depth With The Director Arts & Entertainment editor Richard Moeschl will be backstage with Wade McCollum on closing night. Get the story in Etcetera, Oct. 8 His brilliant turns in “Bat Boy” and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” launched him as a Portland celebrity. Then he went to Los Angeles, and performed “Hedwig” there. A critic from the Los Angeles Times called him “wall-shredding.” Share Gilbert, an assistant vice president for Ticor Title Insurance National Commercial Division, calls herself “a Wade groupie.” She was so moved by his performance in “Hedwig” that she went back three times, she said, and made a point to sit right in the front each time. “I finally went up to Wade one night and said ‘I’m so impressed,’ and he said, ‘Haven’t I seen a lot of you lately?’” For the past month, the 18-actor cast has worked out of a donated rehearsal space in downtown Portland, eight hours a day, six days a week. Although the idea for “ONE” began with McCollum, it was clear, watching a recent rehearsal, that he had deliberately turned it into a collaborative project. Everyone seemed to have a hand in sorting out the story, which follows a young musician named Sid Arthur, played by McCollum, who is struggling to balance his personal ideals and artistic dreams with the complexities of fame. McCollum had asked two of his instructors from the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Santa Maria, Calif., to serve as the show’s directors, and rather than offer specific instructions, they often asked the actors a series of questions to help them decide how to refine the scenes. Whenever someone would suggest a tweak to the dialogue, McCollum, who was by his estimate on his 32nd complete rewrite of the script, would throw back his head, and bellow, “YESSS!” Every so often, the actors would wordlessly employ gestures that had been developed by the group based on their own personal responses to words such as “suffering,” “awakening,” “anger.” “In this piece, I feel it’s more me — Susannah — than anything else I’ve done; I feel like it’s me talking to the audience, not just my character,” says Portland actress and singer Susannah Mars. And whether McCollum intended that or not, it has added an interesting layer to a story that is, as McCollum explains it, ultimately about the search for personal truth and inner peace in our chaotic, modern times — the search for something larger than ourselves. For the cast, this idea that they are a part of something larger than themselves is reinforced by the fact that although they each have a specific character to play, they also play dozens of other parts, including trees and rivers and piles of ashes. “It’s even written that way in our contracts,” says actress Lorriane Cink. “It says our character’s name/ensemble … We’re all individuals within a greater whole.” “It’s a story I need to experience for myself,” says Shaye Troha. “To sift through my own personal story, not as an actor, but as a person.” Noah Jordan, an actor from Los Angeles who toured the world with “Hair” and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Starlight Express,” and who had appeared on “Days of Our Lives” and “Beverly Hills 90210,” began to feel disillusioned with that world and left to pursue a master’s degree in spiritual psychology. While doing that, he realized, he says, he still wanted to do theater, but theater that was spiritually meaningful, that allowed him to “speak from my heart.” When he learned about “ONE,” he knew it was “a perfect fit — it was exactly what I was looking for.” He landed a part and threw himself into raising money for the production. Soon, he was being asked to join the board of Insight Out Theatre Collective, which McCollum co-founded with friends Julianna Jaffe and Lindsay Lucas and which is presenting the Portland run of “ONE.” McCollum grew up on the road with his father, a drummer in a succession of rock and roll bands. One day, he saw a book on his father’s dresser. He began reading: “In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddhartha, the handsome Brahmin’s son, grew up with his friend Govinda.” Over the years, he reread Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha” more times than he can count, as he hit adolescence in Ashland, as he headed off on his own to acting school at 17, as he bounced from couch to couch around the country, landing his first acting jobs. At 19 he was living in his father’s garage, singing with his dad’s band, fresh out of acting school, having arrived in a rusting old Honda Civic with a crystal mounted on the hood. The car died as soon as he pulled into the driveway). He spotted a flier for a new playwright’s festival. He wanted to enter, but what should he write? He recalled the story of “Siddhartha.” Sitting in the garage, he dashed off a three-page description of the importance of the search for personal truth on notebook paper. He mailed it. A few days later, he got a letter back: The festival would be pleased to produce his play. It hit him: They think he’s already written the thing. Panicked, he combed through the notebooks he has kept over the years filled with songs, and poetry and scribblings about the nature of suffering and how to find inner peace — and realized it all fit together. “I’ve been writing this my entire life,” he thought. And where does “ONE” end? Two weeks before it opened, McCollum and the rest of the cast are in the backyard of a home in Southeast Portland, singing songs from the musical into the growing darkness, above the hum of crickets. This is one of the last fundraising evenings for “ONE,” and McCollum is explaining to the crowd that they have just about reached their goal of $200,000 to fund the Portland run. Between a break in the songs, as small white envelopes are passed around, one of the guests asks McCollum what his future hopes are for “ONE.” There are, in fact, great hopes: The possibility of taking the play to New York. Leading that effort is actor David Nevell, who saw “ONE” in a workshop last year and was so moved “I tried to talk to Wade afterward through the tears.” He signed on as a producer to seek funding to take “ONE” on to New York, and with luck, to Broadway. If all goes as planned, several potential investors will be flying to Portland to see the piece, he says. McCollum explained some of this that night. But what exactly will happen with “ONE,” he can’t say. All he really hopes “is that it is in the highest service to humanity” — whatever that looks like. Whether that’s a big stage in New York, or just 18 people singing to each other — and anyone else who is moved to listen — through the dark. 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