The Fertile Ground Festival of New Works is a citywide, multi-week performing arts festival taking place in venues throughout Portland, Oregon and the surrounding areas.

This year's lineup includes site specific theatre, dance, solo shows, aerial performance, puppetry, and dozens upon dozens of brand-new scripts by some of Portland's most celebrated and prolific playwrights.

Schedule of Events:

7:30pm - Camp Fire Stories by Murri Lazaroff-Babin

This piece is about home and memory; and the attempt to conjure both.

It’s about how the idea of home changes over time, and the interesting ways in which we fill in the gaps of blurred memories from childhood. It also explores how we experience loss, danger, adventure, weird grown-ups, and weird surroundings as children.

This piece is an attempt to allow the audience to remember the unique things about their own individual homes. Most of all, it’s an homage to the thousands who lost their homes in the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California.

Rating/Recommended Age:
16+

Performance Length:
65 minutes (no intermission)

Location: CoHo Theatre, 2257 NW Raleigh St, Portland, OR 97210

Buy Tickets

7:30pm - Predator Pray by Pearson Kunz

A New Queer Thriller by Pearson Kunz

Predator Pray is a challenging new two-act thriller making its world premiere at the Backdoor Theatre as part of the Fertile Grounds festival with the support of the festival’s GROW Grant. This gripping drama is the first full-length play by playwright and local queer theater artist Pearson Kunz - a proud member of FUSE Theatre Ensemble.

Set in the immaculate kitchen of a devout Mormon household, Predator Pray unfolds the morning after Joseph returns home from his two-year mission, only to find that his queer best friend, Devon, has mysteriously vanished in his absence. As Joseph struggles to reconnect with his life, his mother, Evelyn, exerts a suffocating control over their reunion, spinning a tangled web of faith, deception, and moral reckoning. What begins as an intimate family drama spirals into a chilling confrontation with faith that forces Joseph to face the darkest depths of his home, his past, and himself. With razor-sharp dialogue and a slow-burning tension that builds to a shocking conclusion, Predator Pray explores repression, queerness, and the devastating consequences of extreme faith.

Join us at the Back Door Theatre for an unforgettable night of suspense, twists, and fearless storytelling!

Rating/Recommended Age:
14+

Performance Length:
90 minutes with intermission

Location:The Back Door Theater, 4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR

Buy Tickets