

hw.wallenfels.jpgView full sizeJessica Wallenfels, who has done theatrical choreography and Portland Center Stage and the Oregon Shakespear Festival, is now directing "Find Me Beside You."

Two years in the making, Jessica Wallenfels'  rock opera/

story ballet "Find Me Beside You" is an ambitious staging of one of the most renowned rock albums of all time: Van Morrison's  "Astral Weeks," an imagistic song cycle that swings stylistically from jazz to folk to blues to classical guitar, with lyrics that read like stream-of-consciousness riffs on places and faces, faded picture stamps on a worn passport.

The story Wallenfels has fashioned around Morrison's elusive songs sheds that free-associative flow in favor of a narrative coming-of-age tale, bouncing from Morrison's native Belfast  to Dublin  during the time of The Troubles,  and spanning 12 years in the lives of its three central characters: Aeden  (Dave Cole),  impulsive and prone to excess; Bridget  (Elizabeth Klinger),  his pining best friend from childhood; and the doomed innocent, Meagan  (Emilee Yaakola),  Bridget's younger schoolgirl sister.

As musical theater, "Find Me Beside You" benefits tremendously from its onstage band, four musicians (Sam Densmore,  Eddy Dragonetti,  Eric Nordin  and Sarah O'Mara)  on 10 instruments; for Morrison aficionados, their tight command of the score is a draw, absent The Belfast Cowboy  himself. And while Thursday's  opening night at Theater! Theatre!  suffered from spotty amplification of the actors' head mics, Klinger in particular -- and Rebecca Teran  as Aeden's first love, Colleen -- wrap themselves around the lyrics with believable pathos and gutsy relish.

Find Me Beside You


8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays through Aug. 14


Theater! Theatre!, 3430 S.E. Belmont St.


$20-$25, 503-897-0425 or

But from an album that has famously eluded interpretation, yoking wayward lyrics into a cohesive narrative arc proves slippery. In one hour without intermission, "Find Me Beside You" covers a lot of territory, both temporally and geographically. The story opens in 1972 post-riot Belfast with huddled mourners in tableaux against graffitied walls. In the space of the album's title track, Aeden and Bridget, shadowed by their 10-year-old selves (Shea Mackinnon  and Roxanne Stathos),  revisit Aeden's troubled childhood home, circa 1960, and the happier milieu of the sisters, traverse streets and hillsides, and return to the bomb-ridden wreckage of 1972. Along with Teran, Jeremy Sloan,  Tracy Turner  and Caitlin Upshaw  admirably take on multiple roles as bystanders, intervening characters and Greek chorus, but their shifting personas can make for a befuddlingly crowded stage.

Flashbacks, characters and locales change and cycle back continuously from there, and the confusion (is this Belfast or Dublin? what year?) stems from the action's literal and gestural reliance on the lyrics. "Cyprus Avenue"  demands that the action be set in Dublin, where Aeden's stumbling drunk is unconvincingly seduced by young Meagan's "barefoot virgin child"  of the song before; a squatters' mansion, reigned over by the crossdressing medium "Madame George"  (played by Norman Wilson  as a benign matriarch of debauchery) seems less part of the narrative flow than a name check of Morrison's proper nouns.

So, too, with Meagan, whose "little ballerina"  ages from age 6 to a prancing, tutu-clad 14-year-old to the tragically rejected young woman of play's end; choregraphically, she's still a child, not ready for the professional dance stage the script puts her on. By the final scene, Aeden has cycled through three lovers and has undergone an apparent coming-of-age redemption, but because of the play's rapidly chaotic progression, his character reads as a victim of tides pushing him (Madame George, bombs) or pulling him (the seductions of Colleen and Meagan) on a whim.

Slowed down and allowed breathing room between the songs, "Find Me Beside You" might evolve into the story ballet envisioned by Wallenfels: a young man's loss of innocence, set against the larger backdrop of violence-torn Ireland. For now, Morrison's songs in "Astral Weeks" receive the deepest treatment.