Iron Pig on Tour!

Rebecca Nachison in In Our Name

After taking the New York Fringe Festival by storm with the play In Our Name, a Eugene theater company goes to Seattle. Actually, playwright Elena Hartwell lives in Seattle, but she and Eugene-area actor Rebecca Nachison, who comprise Iron Pig Productions, report that In Our Name, seen in Eugene at the Lord Leebrick Theatre last August (see www.eugeneweekly.com/2007/08/02/theater2.html)and in the Fringe Fest the same month, has a new venue. If you missed the powerful piece of theater here and in the Big City to the east, you can catch it Jan. 25 and 26 at Live Girls! Theater in the Big City to the North.

Nachison, who moved here after a successful career in big cities — locally, she’s been in the Very Little Theatre’s Enchanted April and the Lord Leebrick Theatre’s Mother Courage, and she will star in the Leebrick’s upcoming The Busy World Is Hushed — also notes that the play is about to be published by New York Theatre Experience in the anthology Plays and Playwrights 2008. That will be available at www.nyte.org/pp08.htmsometime in February, but you can read an interview with Hartwell at the website (www.nyte.org/pp08int_hartwell.htm)to whet your appetite. A sample: “War destroys not just the present, but the future. And people are impacted far beyond the reach of the battle grounds.”

Oregon Book Awards on Tour!

OK, well, the awards themselves won’t be happening here as long as the money and funding for Literary Arts stays focused around Portland, but hey, four of the nominees — a couple of them winners — visit (the great unwashed poor hippies of) Eugene at 6:30 pm on Thursday, Jan. 24, at the Eugene Public Library. Alison Clement, whose Twenty Questions (reviewed in EW Oct. 11, 2007) won the Ken Kesey Award for the Novel, headlines the group. Sharing award honors is Shannon Riggs, winner of the Eloise Jarvis McGraw Award for Children’s Literature for Not in Room 204. Two finalist dudes come along with the winning women: Paul Merchant, poetry finalist for Some Business of Affinity, and Ben Saunders, a UO prof and nonfiction finalist for Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation. Couldn’t quite face the PDX trek in December for the spendy awards announcement? Celebrate these fine writers at our finest downtown building, where you can buy the books from the UO Bookstore people and get ’em signed by the Famous Award People.

Architecture on the Web!

This week’s architecture story, about rebuilding the cities of the Balkans after the wars of the 1990s, will be available in a web exclusive