5 cool things to know about 1990s play ‘Middletown Mall’ at Portland’s Third Rail Rep (2024)

In the 1990s, malls had it all.

You could grab the latest grunge or Britney CD at Sam Goody, shop for crop tops at The Limited, perk up with a cup of artisan coffee from that brand new chain Starbucks, then pop over to the video store and make it a Blockbuster night.

Portland playwright Lava Alapai (who directed “School Girls; Or The African Mean Girls Play,” a co-production of Artists Repertory Theatre and Portland Center Stage; and co-directed “An Octoroon” for Artists Repertory) drops us back then and there in her music-infused play, “Middletown Mall,” running at Third Rail Repertory Theatre through June 9.

Sweet, but not steeped in nostalgia, her comic cautionary snapshot looks at four mall employees with a singular dream: Breaking out of their dead-end jobs by winning “Sing Out!” — an “American Idol”-size karaoke competition.

Here are five things to know before for you catch Third Rail’s retro winner.

—Call it a nonmusical jukebox musical.

Though set in the ‘90s, “Middletown Mall’s” format follows the “play-with-music” trend, where songs punctuate a drama sporadically and in a diegetic manner — meaning characters don’t break out into conventional song and dance numbers revealing their feelings.

The “score” in “Middletown Mall” is made up of “strategically placed anthems from the ‘80s and ‘90s canon,” Alapai said. They’re sung as the starry-eyed store clerks rehearse for the karaoke contest. (The playwright wants audiences to be surprised, so let’s keep a lid on the titles.)

“It’s because I love musicals, that’s where I came from. My first show ever as an actor was ‘Pippin,’ as it is for most 14-year-olds,” she said with a laugh. “I’m not a composer. I’m not a lyricist,” — so this format was the “closest thing” she could create to inhabit that musical space.

Actors Alex Ramirez de Cruz, Emmanuel Davis, Treasure Lunan, Kailey Rhodes and Darius Pierce (who plays a gruff food court manager) delivered the goods vocally on opening night, from the first-pumping first banger to the singalong finale.

—Smells Like Redeem Spirit.

Alapai calls her play a “love letter” to Generation X.

“People forgot about us a little bit,” she said.

Her ode to the undersung demographic sprang from a shopping trip in Safeway a few years back. She caught herself singing along to what turned out to be a Muzak version of a Metallica guitar-churner. She’d just turned 50.

“Something happened. I became old, and I don’t know how that happened!” she said. And she suddenly flashed back to growing up in her home state, Hawaii.

“I lived right across the street from a mall. Every chance I got, that’s where I spent my time. We weren’t supervised. We were very independent,” she recalled. “There was an innocence in our lives, and there were things to look forward to and the future was bright.”

Alapai took those dueling vibes and ran with them, specifically setting her play in 1998, just as the world turned a corner, before the dot-com crash, Y2K panic, 9/11 and the Iraq War.

In “Middletown Mall,” Carly, Willow, Ash and Baxter find each other “in that last bit of innocence,” Alapai said. The play is, “Funny ‘til it isn’t. And then when it isn’t, I ask the question: ‘What do we do about it?’”

—There’s more in store for the “Middletown Mall”-rats.

“Middletown Mall” is the first of a trilogy of plays. Alapai is far enough into the second, “Sunny’s Gifts and Things,” that it’s being read onstage at Artists Repertory Theatre on June 16.

While “Sunny’s” takes place in Hawaii in 1982, the third play, which Alapai is just starting to write, jumps forward to the beginning of the pandemic.

Informing all three works are some wise words Alapai received early in her career: “You should always have a mentor that is younger than you and a mentor that’s older than you,” she said.

“That is my whole life. I learn from Gen Z. I learn from the Millennials. I’m really learning from the Boomers right now — what not to do,” she said. Her trilogy follows that philosophy of acquiring multigenerational mentors, “and then looking at your life and making sure you are the best version of yourself that you possibly can be in the moment.”

—The dialogue crackles with authenticity.

The (retail) reason? The playwright logged many hours behind the counters, in the stockrooms and on the sales floors of mall shops.

“My very first job was at Sbarro’s,” Alapai said. In addition to slinging pies for the national pizza chain, Alapai worked a short stint at the Gap, then a longer stretch for Starbucks. Her last retail job was as a genius at an Apple Store, which she hints, might work into the plot of the third play.

—”Middletown Mall” is wonderfully, organically inclusive.

Because all kinds of people went to the mall and worked there, Alapai’s characters present an innately broad and true cross-section of America.

It was particularly important for her to include characters who are Latinx, (Alapai’s wife, Ramirez de Cruz, who plays Carly, is half-Mexican); “Black cis-gendered men who are emotionally intelligent — because we don’t see that,” she said (Davis as Baxter); and trans (Lunan, as Ash).

“There’s never been a time when we did not have trans or nonbinary people,” said Alapai. “Maybe we didn’t have the exact language for it. But language should and always will change, and we should learn that language.”

Alapai said writing a trans role in a story set in the 1990s is her way of saying: “I see you. I know you were always there. You were always in my life, and I just wanted to make sure that you were always represented.”

— Lee Williams, for The Oregonian/OregonLive

“Middletown Mall”

When: Continues 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday through June 9.

Where: CoHo Theatre, 2257 NW. Raleigh St.

Tickets: $25-$47; thirdrailrep.org, 503-235-1101.