PHOTO: The cast of "Catch Me When I Fall" reherse in this undated courtesy photo. Written and Directed by Jodi Walder, the play spotlights Forest Grove homelessness resources non-profit GG's House and the community it serves. (Courtesy Jodi Walder)

As a playwright, Portland’s Jodi Walder appreciates a good story, especially one in the vein of social justice. So, when she encountered a theater producer and volunteer board member from Forest Grove non-profit GG’s House, which serves homeless people in Western Washington County, the seed was planted.

“Our clients are always saying, ‘Hey, you do plays. Why don’t you do a play about us?’” Walder recalls being told. “She said, ‘You should come out there and check it out and see if you think that would be like a project you’d be interested in.’”

Walder was interested. The result is “Catch Me When I Fall,” premiering Friday, May 29 in Hillsboro with performances throughout Washington County during June.

Walder wrote and is directing the production, with music and lyrics by Noel Katz, but there are many more people who did work to put the play together. Walder started by speaking with staff and volunteers at GG’s House, a resource center providing clothing, food, medical supplies and so much more to those in need. From there, she assembled a team which interviewed 50 people who had received support from the facility.

“I trained a group of college kids and retirees to conduct the interviews, Walder said. “We had four hours of training and practice sessions beforehand and then we showed up and we were there over the course of three weeks, and we audio recorded the interviews.”

Each interview was transcribed and written into a first-person monologue. The monologues and some of the songs from Katz, who got involved at around this point in the process, were workshopped by volunteers through PDX Backstage, a listserv for Portland’s theater community. Hearing that the project needed cohesive narrative, another draft came together. Shortly thereafter, real-life events influenced that narrative as GG’s House lost their lease.

“That became the sort of crisis of the play and the mobilizing thing that brought lots of different characters together,” Walder said. “The play has a few monologues at the beginning, but it is mostly about the interactions between the various characters as they gather at GG’s house, form some loose community and then form a much tighter community as they try and help GG’s House find a way to successfully continue.”

“Catch Me” is produced by Stages Performing Arts Youth Academy and is sponsored by Washington County, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, the Oregon Cultural Trust and the Cultural Coalition of Washington County. While neither GG’s House or the people it serves are notably Jewish, Walder looks at theater built around social justice advocacy as a classic expression of tikkun olam,  the Hebrew-language ideal of “repairing the world” that was part of the core Jewish values that have guided her life.

“I think theater is absolutely, positively one of the ways that we can repair the world,” she said, “because we think about the three steps of awareness, acceptance and action, which is how I think things change. We have to be aware that there’s a problem. We have to accept that this problem exists, even if we think it’s really crappy, and that it shouldn’t be like that, and then we get to choose how we want to take action about that.”

Awareness is the step that theater has incredible power to create. Walder is hopeful that there are some particular areas of awareness that can come out of “Catch Me.”

“There are absolutely people on the street struggling with drugs and alcohol. There are people on the street with mental health issues,” she said. “But there’s also a lot of people on the street who have a full-time job or two or three part-time jobs, but they don’t make enough at minimum wage to afford rent. Many people are one medical problem or broken-down car or whatever away from disaster and eviction. The realm of people on the street is so much broader than most of us imagine.”

Acceptance and action come next and are largely up to the viewer. Walder always carries socks in her car for those in need she encounters out in the world – in situations where all the essentials of daily living are hard to come by, socks are important enough that the phrase “Socks save lives” is affixed to a wall at GG’s House.

“I know that me writing a play that maybe if I’m lucky, 500 people will come see, isn’t going to change the world,” Walder said, “but one of my cast members said something to me the second week that made me cry and made me feel like very validated in this project.”

The actor explained that the show finale puts the question to its own characters of what they want people to know; a verse explains that people in need are often ignored or looked away from, and that a simple interaction goes a long way. Taking the verse to heart, they struck up a conversation with a homeless person they encountered, which ended in a hug and thank you.

“Sometimes people need that as much as they need a dollar bill or an orange,” Walder said. “This actor said to me, ‘I don’t know how many people are going to be changed by your play, but you know that you already changed one person.’”

Performances of “Catch Me When I Fall” are scheduled for Friday Through Sunday, May 29-31 and June 5-7 at the Masonic Lodge in Hillsboro, with 7:30 pm performances on Fridays and Saturdays at 2 pm performances on Saturdays and Sundays. Outdoor performances are also scheduled for Saturday, June 13 in the parking lot of GG’s House in Forest Grove and Sunday, June 14 at the Hillsboro Civic Plaza. These shows begin at 2 pm, are weather-dependent, and do not require tickets.

More information is available online at catchmewhenifall.com.