Blog Community Bridgerton, Girl, Gossip, meets, Oscar, PCS, Wilde Hey PDX June 5, 2025 0 Comments

‘Bridgerton’ meets ‘Gossip Girl’ meets Oscar Wilde at PCS

You’re reading a past edition of our weekly Things to Do column, about the concerts, art shows, comedy sets, movies, readings, and plays we’re attending each week. Read the current installment. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.

I’ve been trying to picture “a bouquet of rotten vegetables.” It seems more like a figurative image than something one would actually prepare, let alone gift, like a knuckle sandwich or a can of whoop-ass. Which vegetables? How rotten? Is it even clever, the boo of tomatoes disguised as the applause of roses? Famously, this compost arrangement is what Oscar Wilde’s lover’s father so desperately wanted to give, or throw at, the playwright the night that what would be his final dramatic work, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened in London.

That was 1895. Wilde had committed the crime of being gay. And while his boyfriend’s dad’s (reproducing his obnoxious Victorian name feels irrelevant) homophobic cornucopia never made it past the theater’s entrance, it did mark the beginning of Wilde’s end. The episode sparked trials, two years in prison, and a terrible downward spiral. Wilde was dead before the end of 1900. (A gleeful historical note: so too was the dad!) Earnest isn’t gay. He isn’t anybody, but rather an identity two dandies, Jack and Algernon, take on while jumping between the country and society life. Still, it’s no stretch to view these personae as stand-ins for masking queer identity.

By contrast, Kamilah Bush’s reimagined Earnest production at Portland Center Stage (June 1–29, $25–93) wears its queerness on its press release. Her Jack is the “femme fastidious one”; Algernon, the “masc party boy.” It mentions influences of Saltburn and Gossip Girl. It mentions Jane Austen and Bridgerton, and intimates that its 1919-set cast seem to be aware they’re in a period piece.

In various drafts, Wilde is said to have tried the subtitle A Serious Comedy for Trivial People before landing on A Trivial Comedy for Serious People—same difference, just less hand-holding for the people in question. The Victorians liked the play, though the scandal around Wilde’s sexuality stilted its initial runs. It was a witty, gay old time, the reviews said, while attempting to write it off as unserious. Except, apparently, H. G. Wells. In an uncredited review, he wondered, skeptically, how the serious people would take the joke that wasn’t a joke about the boy named Earnest who doesn’t exist.

More Things to Do This Week

VISUAL ART Kirk Read

May 30–June 25; reception 5–9PM SUN, JUNE 1 | Replicant Bar & Bottle Shop, FREE

Read moved to Portland in 2020. Upon landing, he heard over and over how much better this little city once was. Thus, You Should Have Gotten Here Sooner, his latest series of collages, takes up this unending golden-era refrain that plagues every subculture, city, country, and (probably) universe. Scraping weathered posters and flyers from telephone poles, working like “a gardener, embracing the fungal ecosystems,” his materials gathering served as a biopsy. The results? “We are not preserved in amber,” he yells in the press release, “we are decaying in front of each other.” And isn’t that beautiful!

MUSIC Louis: A Silent Film w/ Wynton Marsalis and Cecile Licad

7:30PM FRI, MAY 30 | ARLENE SCHNITZER CONCERT HALL, $65+

Silent is a bit of a misnomer here. While writer-director Dan Pritzker’s Louis Armstrong tribute lacks a soundtrack, it’s designed to accompany a live band—one with a trumpeter worthy of the great. Enter Wynton Marsalis, director of jazz studies at Juilliard, the first jazz composer to win a Pulitzer, and the biggest name in trumpeters since, indeed, Louis Armstrong. Classical pianist Cecile Licad, along with a 11-piece jazz ensemble, plays with Marsalis in this touring concert series masquerading as a movie.

BOOKS Melissa Febos

7PM WED, JUNE 4 | POWELL’S CITY OF BOOKS, FREE

Since Whip Smart, her 2010 memoir of working her way through undergrad as a dominatrix, Febos has been almost universally praised for her sharp, queer, and eruditely sex-positive writing. Which makes her latest, a book called The Dry Season that covers a year of celibacy, something of a turn. Far from a moralizing book of abstinence, it picks up in the aftermath of a tortuous relationship. At 35, needing a reset after bouncing from one relationship to the next since she was a teenager, Febos dove deep researching historical examples of celibate, literary women, Sappho to Hildegard von Bingen to the beguines. In conversation with Portland novelist Chelsea Bieker, she’ll chat about what she found in the archives—and her own bout of celibacy.