Portland Pride Play Festival spotlights LGBTQ+ theatre talent

A tale of gay men vying for a newly deceased king’s throne. A comedy about a young Jewish woman coming out to her family on the first night of Hanukkah. Siblings reuniting at a funeral forced to hash out childhood conflicts and family history. 

The Portland Pride Play Festival offers stories of unexpected circumstances and universal human experiences alike, depicting the diversity of the LGBTQ+ experience. While the festival offers the means to put a production together, the organizers have a larger vision: to involve Portland’s queer community in creating more entertainment that really resonates.​

Presented by Third Eye Theatre, the festival hosts staged readings of eight plays with the goal of giving queer audiences a chance to see themselves accurately represented on stage, whether as villains, heroes or kings. The festival runs from July 10-12 at The Back Door Theatre.

Unlike a full-blown production with costuming, blocking and actors performing without scripts, staged readings are more like a first-look at the direction of a script with the actors playing their roles just a few weeks after casting.

Artistic director Alacias Enger said the organization’s format offers an incubator for stage actors and playwrights to hone their skills and receive direct audience feedback. Afterward, audience members are encouraged to tell playwrights and directors what they felt worked — or didn’t — about the production. Based in part on that feedback, one of the scripts is selected by organizers for development into a full production in 2027. Enger credits the upcoming festival’s growth to funding support from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and Arts Access Fund.

While the festival is only in its second year, the organizers have a long history in Portland’s theater scene. Enger recently returned to Portland and reconnected with a long-time colleague:  Ravyn Jazper-Hawke. They came together to reignite Third Eye Theatre after a decades-long hiatus, with Enger as artistic director and Jazper-Hawke as programming manager. 

Jazper-Hawke and Enger met in the early 2000s, crossing paths at various theater companies in Portland, and eventually launching Third Eye Theatre. From 2007 until 2013, the theater was active in getting new plays on stage. Then a different career path moved Enger across the country. With Enger back in town, the pair revived Third Eye with a refined mission to develop better representation of LGBTQ+ stories on stage.

And already, they’re seeing success.

Last year, Jeremy Cole’s script for “Encounters” won top honors in the inaugural festival’s feedback and production structure. After the festival, the theatre supported the development of the script from its initial 20 minutes into a 40-minute act with the addition of lights, costuming and a slate of rehearsals. The full production debuted earlier this year at the Fertile Ground Festival of New Works in Portland. The show was presented to audiences at three nearly sold out shows.

“I feel that Third Eye Theatre is playing a critical role in developing entertainment in a way that actually presents queer stories at the center,” Enger said.

‘The way we fit into the world’

Jazper-Hawke and Enger say these shows are for both seasoned theatre-goers and curious newcomers alike. The festival offers a $5 Arts for All rate for Oregon Trail Card holders, and organizers add that all shows have a sliding-scale admission with a suggested donation of $20. Anyone can attend regardless of their ability to pay.

With LGBTQ+ communities under attack from the current federal administration, and increasing violence against queer and trans people, Third Eye Theatre’s productions don’t shy away from reality. They offer both the intense and sometimes painful experiences of LGBTQ+ communities, as well as the mundane, comedic and even fantastical experiences of life as a queer person today.

For this year’s festival, Jazper-Hawke is directing Mikki Gillette’s “Flowers of Virtue.” The story follows a community of trans and nonbinary characters navigating social expectations and tensions at their local queer bar in Idaho. It includes zero cisgender characters. Gillette’s play creates a world where trans and nonbinary characters are not singled out for their identity. Jazper-Hawke said that avoids a narrative where one person’s gender identity is simply used to “make a point.” Instead, the script asks how genderqueer people can support each other.

Jazper-Hawke said the play speaks to the complexities of the LGBTQ+ umbrella, and the reality that transphobia exists within it. The play is one of the festival’s more gut-wrenching performances, but Jazper-Hawke said there’s still a universality to the piece despite the hardships.

“It’s still something that is relatable for everybody, because I think everybody has been in a position where they felt like they were truly alone,” Jazper-Hawke said.

Enger, meanwhile, is directing a family comedy she described as “touchingly humorous.” In “Queerly Departed,” written by Ian Trutt, three siblings come together for a family member’s funeral, broaching difficult topics of past conflict and hurt feelings with levity.

Enger encourages the engagement of everyone — including audience members who are outside the LGBTQ+ community. 

“What we’re hoping for is to have audience members come in and see the way we fit into the world that they are in, in ways they maybe haven’t considered before,” Enger said.

‘Featuring us as the main characters’

Since Shakespearean times and likely long before, LGBTQ+ performers have been part of the theater community and essential to productions. However, Enger said, they haven’t necessarily been celebrated for their contributions.

Similarly, Enger said there’s an imbalance between directors’ use of queer actors and the characters they have historically played.

“LGBTQIA+ community has oftentimes provided the talent behind the stories told on stage, but those stories themselves rarely feature our stories, and they rarely feature us as the main characters,” Enger said.

In the past, many theater productions have either erased LGBTQ+ characters from their productions or portrayed them in a stereotypical or harmful light. More recently, there has been a rise in more positive mainstream productions and depictions of LGBTQ+ characters and stories as seen in Broadway productions like Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!” and the stage adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home.”

While the festival is just one weekend, Enger sees it as part of a broader effort to improve queer representation and support LGBTQ+ actors and writers.

“If we don’t develop the writers’ stories who are in this space, and highlight and feature them, then we’re not going to see ourselves front and center of those stories, and we’re not going to see our stories,” Enger said.

Jazper-Hawke concurred. 

“This happens a lot with queer characters, trans characters, houseless characters, they’re all punchlines in someone else’s story, and we like to break that habit,” Jazper-Hawke said.

This article appears in July 1, 2026.