From May 14 - 24, Hand2Mouth will come together to act like family. On stage, a brightly lit kitchen, a cave-like bedroom and a cozy living room bristle with microphones, video cameras and speakers, ready to roll in and out of frame and focus. In this household environment Hand2Mouth’s five performers act out the mundane, tense, dramatic and ridiculous stories and memories from their own family experiences. Welcome to Everyone Who Looks Like You, the new ensemble-created performance from Hand2Mouth’s vibrant company of creators and performers.

Using their own lives and families as source materials, the company members re-create, imitate and initiate the complexities of family life – of living and breathing with those who know you best and least. As this house of five moves through furious dances, ear-piercing fights, unlikely reconciliations and meditative storytelling, a picture of universal family life emerges from the raw and personal. This springtime performance is a prelude to the full fall premiere.

 “The idea of performing a story about your family is as old as storytelling itself. But this new performance pushes our company into new, difficult terrain. We set an impossible task on ourselves; to convey the love, confusion and feeling of belonging in each performer’s own family relations. From this mash-up of multiple family sagas we hope to create a family setting surprisingly familiar to the audiences own experiences. We’ll do this via a dense blend of performance styles so as not to allow our story to slip into easy clichés or let audiences ever think ‘I’ve seen this story before,’” says Jonathan Walters, Hand2Mouth’s Artistic Director.

• What:         Everyone Who Looks Like You
• When:        May 14 –May 24, Thursday – Sundays, 8 p.m.
• Where:       Milepost 5, 900 NE 81st Avenue, Portland, OR
• Cost:          $15 general admission, $10 on Thursdays. $25 for May 15 Opening Party
• Tickets:      mail@hand2mouththeatre.org, 503-235-5284
• More info:   www.hand2mouththeatre.org

Everyone Who Looks Like You is conceived, created and produced by Hand2Mouth Theatre. Performers include company members Erin Leddy, Faith Helma, Jerry Tischleder, Julie Hammond and Liz Hayden, under the direction Artistic Director Jonathan Walters. Production stage management by Liam Kaas-Lentz, sound and original music by Bill Ibsen, lighting design by Christopher Kuhl, video by Luke Norby, and costumes by Lacey Cassidy.

This project is made possible with the generous support of the Regional Arts and Culture Council and was developed in part at a 2009 residency at Caldera Arts and as artist-in-residence at Milepost 5. Described by The Seattle Times as having “the kind of promise, fearlessness and energy that the American theater needs, and should encourage,” Hand2Mouth makes boundary pushing performances with a limitless appetite for exploration, energetic physicality and vocal experimentation. Hand2Mouth has created over a dozen original works since 2000 including the Drammy Award winning Repeat After Me which premiered at PICA’s 2007 Time Based Art Festival, performance-installation Project X which premiered at the 2008 Bumbershoot festival, and the international project Dos Pueblos.

This performance will be staged at Milepost 5 in a converted chapel. Milepost 5 is a new live/work community for artists in the Montavilla neighborhood and an up and coming nexus for creative output on Portland’s east side. Milepost 5 hosts visual and performing arts events and series at its campus, and maintains an Artist-in-Residence program.