Amid growing concerns around consent, safety, and trust in our political climate, “The Bed Trick” by Keiko Green forces the audience to reckon with misinformation by magnifying the relationships between college roommates. This sharply-written show guides the reader through questions of forgiveness, choice, and change while snappily shifting between Shakespearean direct address and contemporary character acting. 

Throughout the play, the characters navigate the emotional turmoil of divorced parents, distant partners and deceptive friends while coming of age on stage. The premise is simple: the bed trick is a morally-dubious prank where the bed tricked is told they will be having sex with one person, but that person is swapped with the bed tricker. While the premise is simple, the relationships are anything but. The actors expertly portray the tension, explorations and revelation necessary in navigating budding friendships and love lost.

Harriet (Angie Tennant) functions as the unreliable narrator, drawing parallels between the modern relationships and Shakespeare’s Classic “All’s Well That Ends Well.” Her character interjects with direct address to both draw dramatic parallels and muse about the genius of Shakespeare’s performance traditions. The direct address was particularly effective when Harriet would comment on the nature of performance itself. She questions the role of both the audience and actor as she expands our understanding of participation in a play. Angie Tennant fearlessly jumps between character and narrator, allowing the audience a glimpse into the mental landscape of the characters on stage.

The play drew upon the allegorical strength of Shakespeare while actively critiquing its source material. As a writer who does not particularly enjoy Shakespeare, I felt very seen by the character of Lulu (Madeline Tran), the “mean girl” of the show. While her no-nonsense attitude comes off as abrasive at first, her questions cut like a knife through the social realities of classical plays. She starts her critique of “All’s Well That Ends Well” with an extremely important question, “is the bed trick rape?”. Once asked, it’s like time froze in the theater. This question especially impacted Marianne (Sami Yacob-Andrus), whose parents met under similar circumstances, setting the play in motion. 

As Marianne sought her father Benny’s (Isaac Lamb) truth, she re-opened wounds from the traumatic start of his relationship to his ex-wife (Claire Rigsby) and the deceitful sex involved. Benny tried to downplay the impact of this experience, neglecting the real harm to his daughters’ understandings of healthy relationships. In doing so, Marianne experiences the trappings of generational trauma. Healing is put on hold to restore a sense of comfort for the characters. Benny inadvertently sets off a chain of events leading to additional trauma, heartache, and suffering that may have been avoided with some challenging conversations. The play finishes with apologies and questions, pushing the audience to wonder how we can undue the harm of sexual assault in our communities.

“The Bed Trick” does a brilliant job of leaving the audience with more questions than answers. Rather than providing a clear answer to what (or who) deserves forgiveness, the actors actively ask the audience for forgiveness, saying “a bow is an apology”. The actors apologize for not providing us with a clear moral conclusion. The ending inspires conversation, leaving us to reconcile our own traumas while still trying to seek safety in our romantic and platonic lives, reminding us that we are never done maturing.

Roommates Lulu (Madeleine Tran), Harriet (Angie Tennant), and Marianne (Sami Yacob-Andrus) stumble through relationships of every kind. A revolving door of conflict makes for constantly shifting alliances and rivalries among the ensemble. Including Lulu’s wavering boyfriend (Mac Shonher), Harriet’s sense of self, and Marianne’s own namesake. The tensions boil over as the girls find themselves deeply entangled in a web of deception and desire.

With a structure akin to reading a book, each scene further complicates and then reveals something about the play. This push and pull of the story propels it forward and keeps anxieties high. 

The play’s self aware perspective is keenly entertaining but not without its pitfalls. College freshman and theatre major Harriet, directly and indirectly speaks to the very nature of the story and its source material. The storytelling starts heavy handed, putting the show in sharply clear context. While I found certain moments bordering on over-explanation, this approach is effective for audiences needing a door into Shakespeare. Deeply baked into the script are conversations about the contradictory ideas and the inherent “moral problems” in All’s Well That Ends Well. It is these large, uncomfortable questions that give The Bedtrick its teeth, drawn out expertly by the direction of ART’s Luan Schooler.

The script requires a fluidity of space. One that allows the characters to move freely. This is especially true for Harriet as she steps in and out of narration, always bringing the story back to its integral themes of love, manipulation, and the blurred lines of Shakespearean age consent.  

The set is centered around a dorm room, bursting at the seams with typical college memorabilia. I found myself drawn to the space’s endless intricacies. The set overflows into the audience creating an edgeless landing zone for the actors. While initially the space feels cramped, quickly it opens, becoming a sort of playground for the characters to move through. 

While the story hinges off the four teens, the performance of Marianne’s parents keeps the play grounded. Soft hearted professor, Benny (Issac Lamb) battles the transition of his daughter into adulthood while reconciling his own relationships. When Marianne’s whirlwind but well-meaning mother, Anna (Claire Rigsby) shows up unannounced, the two of them hash out their divorce and dig up old wounds. Both actors deliver beautifully nuanced performances. The obvious intimacy between them adds both authenticity to the history of the story and a  perfect mirror to the Bard’s original text.

Green’s play expertly shows how to handle the darker side of Shakespeare. This production honors those intentions and pushes audiences to question canonical stories and what is really at the core of our relationships.

The three principal characters, the roommates Lulu, Marrianne and Harriet portrayed by Madeline Tran, Sami Yacob-Andrus and Angie Tennant respectively, are engaged in a particular social dynamic that should be familiar to anyone who attended a university during their emerging independence upon exiting adolescence. In the beginning, Marrianne and Lulu are the best of friends while Harriet is the odd one out, seemingly unaware of her ostracization. As the play progresses the structure of their relationship shifts after the girls make choices that force a change in their individual dynamics, sometimes causing each other emotional distress either unintentionally or unknowingly. The character of Lulu in particular does so in the most upfront way, and in a different play her covert jabs at Harriet and pressuring of Marriane would make her the quote-en-quote “villain.” However, The Bed Trick is not that kind of play and refuses to pass judgement on any of its characters. Keiko Green in an interview with Seattle Shakespeare Company said, “ I can’t really say that there’s an antagonist in this play. I have built a play of six characters that I love and care for and empathize with” (Green 2024). Earlier in the same interview Green talks about how the theme of forgiveness played a major part in her perception of the work as she engaged with the original cast in rehearsals at Seattle Shakespeare. This same sense of empathy can be felt in the performances at ART’s The Bed Trick. It feels as though each character is searching for ways to love the other characters and themselves, reckoning with their own understandings of romance and friendship. We can see this most evidently in Harriet’s scenes where she attempts to unravel the morals of All’s Well, and Marianne’s rationalizing of her parents’ romance. The final moments of the show, where Harriet envisions an apology between the principal characters of Shakespeare’s play through the characters of Lulu and Willis, exemplifies these themes of forgiveness. The cast’s performances elevate the humanity of their characters, allowing the audience to accept the complications of their dynamic. The Bed Trick doesn’t provide any easy answers, we don’t find out if the three girls repair their friendships, if Lulu and Willis forgive each other as Harriet envisions, if Marianne’s parents ever reconcile or move on and stop fixating on their pasts. Likely not. But the play’s portrayal of this specific time in the characters lives, the aforementioned exit from their adolescence, leaves this possibility open. 

The relationship between the three girls and their conversations about Harriet’s play and Marrianne’s parents reminds us of a confusing time in our lives, as we entered into an adult world where we begin to exist outside of the context of classrooms and high school cliques. They strive for understanding and connection, but still carry the baggage of their adolescent lives and put each other down to gain validation. This contemporary setting puts the audience in the right frame of mind to understand the seemingly distant ideals of Shakespeare’s world; in short it asks us to remember a simpler time when forgiveness held boundless potential and we were all fumbling through our early adulthood to find love and friendship.

Works Cited
Chance Theater and Green, K. (2023) Interview with Keiko Green about her brand new play, ‘The bed trick’, Chance Theater. Available at: https://chancetheater.com/interview-keikogreen/ (Accessed: 15 November 2025).
Seattle Shakespeare Company and Green, K. (2024) An Interview with Keiko Green | The Bed Trick, YouTube. Available at: An Interview with Keiko Green | The Bed Trick (Accessed: 16 November 2025). 

Somewhere between Shakespeare and a karaoke night, The Bed Trick slips between eras and tones, asking what does it mean to be “okay” with sex, in all its dubiously consensual forms, and what does it mean to be rewritten by it? The in-show pre-show gave us Elizabethan neckpieces and harp plucks whenever Shakespearean language appeared, but the world of the play was aggressively modern… messy desks, miscellaneous ramen cups, and purple beanbags. The text kept bouncing between direct quotations and painfully real present-day speech, and the tension between those registers carried through each scene. 

The play is very funny–my favourite character is the dad with a cardigan and an excellent booty wiggle–but it’s also full of tiny heartbreaks. Lines like: “The way he was mad at me kind of scared me… it was all kind of unbearable” or “I think you’re using a lot of buzzwords to overpower me right now” landed like bruises. The play orbits a trio of dormmates trying (and failing) to grow up at the same speed. Harriet’s naive brightness and Lulu’s mean-girl jadedness rubbed against each other in the best way, while the virginal Marianne’s slow reveal–that she’s named after the girl her father wished he’d married–brought a quiet ache.

Playwright Keiko Green builds these emotional trapdoors so that laughter suddenly tips into reflection. Willis’s monologue about his long-term girlfriend Lulu, “Can I breathe without her?” was beautiful in its sincerity: the sound of an eighteen-year-old trying to justify staying with someone he’s already outgrown, because the alternative… being alone, being himself… feels impossible.

Then the intermission cracked open with “I Wanna Know What Love Is” blasting through the theater, turning into audience karaoke, and somehow it fit. The show circles and circles that question: How do we know what love is, and who taught us how to recognize it? It’s hard not to notice the narrative that much of our moral compass comes pre-loaded. Half of our beliefs about love and wrongdoing aren’t beliefs at all, just old scripts we’ve been quoting from. These hand-me-downs–a little Shakespeare here, a little Greek tragedy there, a little Bible verse, a little parental folklore–were stitched together long before we knew we were wearing them.

If the writing traces the myths we carry, the designs give those myths a room to rattle around in. The set’s lived-in clutter and specific sound choices made every emotion feel amplified. On one side of the room, Lulu and Marianne’s birthday dance party pulsed with light, motion, and the deep thud-thud of the bass, while Harriet stayed trapped in a stark rehearsal for a play that wasn’t even a mainstage. Marianne cruelly teases her for “missing out,” and it was a reminder of how heightened everything feels at eighteen, when every decision feels like it could define your whole life. Every choice is a life-defining one.

Green’s The Bed Trick suggests that the morals we cling to don’t appear out of nowhere. They’re shaped by the adults we watched, the stories we absorbed, the systems we quietly agreed to participate in. It’s funny and painful all at once, watching even the parental characters come to terms with the parts of themselves that never stopped being eighteen. 

The second act swells darker. The mother enters in skintight leopard print and lipstick on her straw, half-drunkenly confessing that maybe… the bed trick was bad?… her voice guttural and raw. Her admission isn’t just personal; it’s generational. It’s the moment where the show stops asking “What happened?” and starts asking “Why did we think this was acceptable for so long?” There’s a cyclical quality to everyone’s choices: Marianne and Willis emotionally cheating, Lulu kissing Harriet, power dynamics looping and mutating…but each scene feels like people trying to rewrite their own scripts, to figure out what consent means after a lifetime of watching bad examples. 

By the end, apologies come easily, maybe too easily. Throwing the cast into intentionally hokey period costumes inside that broken-windowed, suspiciously missing-chaired dorm room is a great bit (Shakespeare’s ghost showing up to collect royalties) even as the monologue takes a swing at his romantic manipulation. Still, the ending leans on his blueprint: a soft-edged, modern fantasy of emotional resolution where everyone understands each other just enough to get home. And maybe, just maybe, that’s the contemporary version of “all’s well that ends well.” Yet it left me with a faint ache… a reminder that someone, somewhere, is always deciding what “well” should mean. So much of what we call “resolution” still traces back to the sources we claim to have outgrown: Elizabethan comedy promising harmony, church logic promising forgiveness and absolution, myth promising a moral. These inheritances settle quietly into us, shaping instinct long before reflection, and they still whisper rules about what a “good” ending should look like.

Sitting in a Portland audience, as a Portland theatre artist, I know that we are constantly negotiating which stories get told and who gets to interpret them. This play felt less like a judgment and more like an invitation–not to declare what is right, but to notice where our sense of rightness even comes from. The Bed Trick leaves you buzzing. It’s about cycles of desire, consent, and storytelling, and how every generation keeps trying to crawl out of the same tangled bed, hoping this time, maybe, we’ll get it right–or at least realize the rules were never neutral to begin with.

Once confronted with the question of the ethics within All’s Well That Ends Well, they weigh heavy on Harriett’s mind, affecting her ability to work soundly on the show through rehearsal. Her director responds, in an attempt to disregard her worries, that the show is from “a different time.” That isn’t enough, she still sits with all the issues of the play, unable to fully enjoy a show she once had so much excitement for. “But we’re doing it now,” Harriett responds, unsatisfied.

It begs the question; why do we return time and time again to the classics, building up and reinforcing this “canon” of works? These stories largely are born out of the past, they come from times that are not all that similar to our own. We, today, live very different lifestyles than the Elizabethans that Shakespeare wrote for and, perhaps more importantly, we live by a completely different set of customs and moral standards. Often we look to history as a sort of marker of the ways we’ve progressed societally, but we can’t escape the fact we are born out of this history – that it shapes our world and influences us. We inherently carry on hints of their norms and we treasure their stories by extension. Often, in an attempt to square this, we aim to deconstruct these stories and connect them to new and modern contexts. This is done quite well in Green’s The Bed Trick, placing All’s Well as far from the halls of nobility as one can be: the messy dorms during one’s freshman year of college.

All’s Well makes its presence clear in two different ways throughout the play. The first is in a very literal sense: it is the play that Harriett is spending her time rehearsing. She grapples with the same question as playwright and audience, wondering what we can learn nowadays from a script so riddled with problematic conclusions. Meanwhile Marianne deals with the plot of All’s Well playing out in her own life, her mom having perpetrated “the bed trick,” something that has haunted her dad throughout his life despite his attempts to repress it. On top of this, her parents seem to carry a religious guilt around sex (her father claiming the trick was part of God’s plan) making the topic somewhat harder to discuss openly. We see the weight of this press down upon Marianne – she cannot avoid the scars of her past. Marianne acts out throughout the story, she does not know how to engage with sex or romance in a healthy manner because her parents never did. Her basis is flawed, and without a thorough examination of that, she returns to what is familiar. Romance that is, to some extent, genuine but is built out of infidelity, lies, and pretending to be someone else. In this way, the character reflects the play – both are returning to their history, repressing it, grappling with it, repeating it.

Additionally, it makes us turn our attention to what happens when we make sex out to be a simultaneously important and taboo subject. We end up fostering an environment where there is no one to turn to in times of need, and yet a constant pressure to engage. Marianne at one point says that she is “tired of everyone placing so much importance on [her] virginity.” It’s no coincidence she is the youngest character in the play, the only one whose parents are around. This connection between sexual desire, youth, and innocence is a hallmark of fairy tales – you see it in Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty. The one who is pure and young causing everyone to in equal parts want to protect them and control them, it is very much engrained into the larger western canon. And it is an element of our history that mystifies something we ought to discuss more openly, it is an element that scars us.

At The Bed Trick’s end, we get the start of the answer to the question that Harriett has spent the whole play wondering: what can we gain from exploring this story in the modern setting? Can putting the two together, past and present, provide us with the clarity to undo these pressures and scars? If we examine it and come away with answers, does that mean all ends well? We watch as characters apologize to one another, strip and cry and hold one another. But we don’t know how it all turns out. The actors turn to us, once again just actors, and let us know this. They can’t provide us with answers. Neither can the play. Neither can the past. It’s why we’re always deconstructing the canon – it’s a crucial first step, but the answer is never there. We must continue to live, to return to our past, to make sense of our present. Again and again. 

By Luan Schooler
Interim Artistic Director

We’re so excited to produce three bold new plays by women with strong Pacific Northwest ties this season! Building on the energy of last year’s all-premiere season of locally created plays, the year ahead features another world premiere (E.M. Lewis’s Apple Hunters!, a bighearted comedy about loneliness and connection) and two second-productions (Keiko Green’s social media-fueled bedroom farce, The Bed Trick, and Kallan Dana’s surreal family thriller, Racecar Racecar Racecar). ART’s mission is “to produce intimate, provocative theatre and provide a home for a diverse community of artists and audiences to take creative risks” – and new plays are our most exhilarating, direct path to fulfillment.

We love a timely classic – and know that today’s new play can be tomorrow’s classic. That’s why we’re driven to support living playwrights attempting to make sense of today’s crazy, tumultuous world. Their rigorous exploration of current issues often comes wrapped in playful, irreverent storytelling that catches us off guard, and those moments of surprise can shift our hearts and minds, opening us to a richer understanding of the world.  We love a play that feels both unexpected and inevitable, that gives us a fresh look at something we thought we knew!

ART has a strong national reputation for developing and premiering new plays like Magellanica, The Storyteller, Sapience, American Fast, plus many others, including The Thanksgiving Play and Wolf Play (which both went on to Broadway and Off-Broadway).  But here’s something people don’t always realize: while world premieres get the headlines, second productions might be even more important to a play’s life. A play can only be fully understood once it’s staged, and writers don’t always have the chance to completely refine the script during its first run — that chance comes with the second production. We’re thrilled to have all of our playwrights in rehearsals with us this season, giving them time to strengthen their work and take it to the next level – so that you will see the best version possible!

At ART, we’re drawn to plays that stand at an angle to the world and show us something anew, that risk failure rather than repeat formula, and that spark surprising, essential conversations. New plays are living, breathing explorations that take both artists and audiences on an adventure of discovery  – and that’s the journey ART invites you to join!

      I love theatre, from my first production at age 5 as a star bellied Sneetch to today as a 17 year-old with a myriad of theatrical acting, directing and writing experiences under my belt. I just can’t get enough of it. With high school graduation on the horizon, I endeavored on an exploration of how this love can become a career. As a member of Oregon Children’s Theatre’s (OCT) Young Professionals (YP) program I asked our Artistic Director, Dani Baldwin, if I could get an apprenticeship of the career I most imagined for myself, a theatre director. Dani reached out to a variety of companies in the area seeing if they wanted to take on a teen wanting to learn and observe. After a few polite declines, an opportunity finally came through to work with Artist Repertory Theatre’s (ART) Artistic Director Luan Schooler on their upcoming production of Sara Jean Accuardi’s The Storyteller. I was to follow the production from its inception to eventual production, gaining a deeper understanding of the craft. As soon as I read the script for the show, I fell in love. The Storyteller is a new work by Accuardi that was set to debut at ART in May. The script was witty, graceful and resoundingly tender in a way that set it apart from work I had read in the past. I was filled with anticipation for the journey ahead.

      In the first production meeting, I observed the various designers pitching their proposals for the shows scenic, light, sound and costume design. The core of these proposals was elevation of the text’s themes and the intended atmosphere for the production. Production meetings offered an illuminating experience to understand the work that goes into a show beyond the actors or director. The collaboration and cohesion of different ideas and perspectives was treated with reverence, offering a sense of community to the professional environment. It was revelatory to engage in these meetings, with long lasting discussions on things I would’ve never considered, like the method in which two hot dogs would be eaten by the cast. Rehearsals for The Storyteller officially began a few months later. As soon as the actors finished the first table read, I knew that the production was special. I was enamored with all the life the actors brought to the characters, bringing out the humor, sorrow and wonder at the show’s core. The extensive collaboration around the text was a new experience for me. In most of my High School productions, we had our first read-through and then jumped straight into blocking. But here, substantial time was devoted to the details, motivations and underlying themes of the work. This discussion was not prescribed solely by either Luan or Sara Jean but instead open to everyone at the table to express their interpretations, ideas and thoughts. The show did not come together out of any singular artistic vision, but instead through collaborative thought and discourse. 

      Partway through observing my second rehearsal, I received an email from OCT. All programming was canceled for the following year to preserve financial resources. The shows, classes and even the very YP program that had put me in the room I was in now, would halt with no foreseen continuation. My heart sank. This program which granted me access to the industry was shutting down right as I was on the verge of investing time and money towards making theatre my life. Why was I deciding to go into an industry that felt like it was on fire? I pushed these feelings aside for the time, and kept on with my experience at ART. In the blink of an eye, the show had transformed from taped outlines and boxes in a rehearsal space, to a real, living, breathing space in ART’s lobby theatre. The set, lighting, sound and prop design had come together to make the wondrous sensory world of The Storyteller. Observing so many rehearsals, I had substantial time to soak in the narrative, thematic elements and worldbuilding of the show. Every time through, I was taken on an odyssey not just through the characters’ stories, but my own. As I saw Randi (the protagonist; a 17 year old girl) develop from childhood to adolescence, I saw my own childhood flash through my mind. All the moments spent with my parents, all the stories passed down to me that have shaped the person I am today. I felt all the experiences which brought me up to this moment, a turning point in my life. A kid, on the verge of becoming an adult. 

      Near the end of my experience shadowing the production, I got an opportunity for a one on one interview with the Playwright, Sara Jean Accuardi. At this point in the process I had made a personal discovery, my deepest passion in theatre was in writing. Hearing what it was like to actually make playwriting your profession in today’s financial climate, one which had me deeply fearful, meant everything to me. Our interview was a blast, with discussion of Accuardi’s history and sources of inspiration. Throughout our talk, Accuardi was incredibly encouraging, telling me that the only way to make it in this path was to, “just keep doing it.” My experience at ART has been deeply enriching, and while the road ahead is frightening, I now feel so much more secure in doing what I love. Knowing that this deeply valuable opportunity for young artists may be inaccessible to those coming up after me, is tragic. For all the aspiring theatre makers out there, we need programs like OCT that help meet dreams with reality. I urge anyone who has the opportunity to help keep OCT alive to take action. Without it I would not have the strength to keep pursuing what I love not despite the world, but with it.

Tell us about the development history of this play!

The very first reading of this play was in the lobby of Artists Rep’s old building during the 2018 Fertile Ground Festival of New Works, and now the World Premiere is in the lobby of the new building! How’s that for fate? The play has been through several development workshops since that reading in 2018, including at PlayMakers Repertory Company and the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference. I’m also happy to say that it has won a few fancy awards, including the Oregon Book Award for Drama in 2023. Earlier this year, I was fortunate to have a full workshop production of the play at Western Washington University, which allowed me to see it on its feet before heading into rehearsals for this World Premiere production. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with so many excellent artists on this play’s journey crazy full-circle journey, including this wonderful cast and crew who have brought it to life so beautifully.

Both you and this play are “home grown” in every way––how does it feel to premiere this play in your hometown, in the space where it was first presented as a reading? Does it feel different working in Portland than elsewhere in the world?

The road leading to this production is paved with serendipity! I grew up in the Portland Metro Area, and I was a theatre kid, so I saw a lot of plays at Artists Rep. When I was in undergrad at Portland State University, the apartment I lived in was about a five-minute walk from the theatre, so–thanks to that lovely student discount!– I’d catch almost every show. I loved that Artists Rep would bring so many new and exciting plays to its stage, and it was around that time that I began to think about writing my own plays. I would sit in their audience and dream the seemingly far-fetched dream of someday writing something that would be up on that stage too– and here we are! I’ve worked in several really wonderful theatre cities, but to me, nothing compares to Portland. This feels very special.

What has been your favorite memory from rehearsal so far?

I can’t choose, there are so many! Here are a few:

• The script calls for “the most perfect slow dance song in the history of proms,” and it was really fun to watch the cast and creative team figure out what that would be.
• Intertube choreography.
• Watching everyone’s visions come together to create pure magic for the first time in tech.
• Isaac and Sami breaking into musical numbers from Annie.
• All of the incredible insight from Luan and the cast that helped shape the script, and everyone’s patience with me as I kept bringing in new pages throughout the process.
• Hot dogs.

by Marilyn Stacey