Aaron leads Profile Theatre

By Paul Haist

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Howard Aaron has been named managing director of Profile Theatre in Portland.
Profile Theatre is unique in Portland and on the West Coast for devoting each season to the work of just one playwright. This year that playwright is the late Wendy Wasserstein.
Aaron is known in Portland art and literary circles as the former program director for Portland Arts and Lectures and, prior to that, as the associate director of the Northwest Film Center.
He said he was looking forward especially to working with PT Artistic Director Jane Unger, whom he has know for several years.
"We met at a Passover seder about 15 years ago," said Aaron. "When I started Verb: Literature in Performance, I asked her to direct the first show."

Verb was a summer theater program Aaron created when he was with Literary Arts. It took its name from Martha Graham's observation that "theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place."
Verb presented one-act adaptations of literary short stories by authors including Raymond Carver, Russell Banks, Grace Paley and Charles Baxter.
Unger directed the Carver piece.
Aaron said, "Tess Gallagher, Carver's widow, attended a performance and talk-back and was amazed by how much Jane brought out in the stories that she (Gallagher) hadn't originally noticed."
Aaron said he likes to think of Portland's Eastside theaters (Profile Theatre is located at Theater! Theatre!, 3430 SE Belmont St.) as the equivalent of Off Broadway to Portland's Westside theaters.
Theaters on the Eastside "take on different kinds of risks than the more mainstream theaters" on the Westside, in Aaron's view.
He characterized Profile's format of presenting the work of just one playwright in several vehicles each season as riskier than the more diverse offerings of other theaters.
Risky, perhaps, but worth the effort, Aaron believes.
"You can go in-depth with a certain author," he said, agreeing that it was like a yearlong college seminar in the work of one writer.
For example, the upcoming season of Wasserstein will include fully staged productions of four of her works and staged readings of three others.
For the production of Wasserstein's "An American Daughter," Tony-award-winning director Dan Sullivan will come to Portland for the Oct. 15 final performance to participate in a discussion of the work and its author.
Noting that this is the kind of depth Profile delivers, Aaron said Sullivan, who started his theater career with the Seattle Repertory Theatre, was the first person to direct "American Daughter," and then worked with Wasserstein in New York.