The Siren Theater: The future home of Bad Reputation Productions.
  • Courtesy Shelley McLendon
  • The Siren Theater: The future home of Bad Reputation Productions.

With the closure of Theater! Theatre! in 2013 and rising rents citywide, Portland's theater and comedy community has been short on small, low-cost performance spaces, despite a strong need. Shelley McLendon, who runs Bad Reputation Productions and performs sketch comedy and improv with the Aces and the Liberators, knows this problem all too well. The shortage of available spaces meant she would often find herself booking whatever space she could find when it became available, even if she didn't know exactly what her next project was.

Now, after two years spent looking for a new space, McLendon has found a better solution: She's opening her own theater in Old Town/Chinatown's historical Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association Building at 315 NW Davis. The Siren Theater will open in mid-October. The space is "for Bad Reputation," says McLendon, "but also to make available to Portland theater and comedy community, because there's a shortage of mid-sized affordable theaters in town." The Siren Theater will house a theater on the first floor as well as rehearsal space and offices.

Once new light and sound systems and new floors have been installed, Bad Reputation's first show in its new home will be a revival of 2012's The Lost Boys—Live! (full disclosure: Mercury Editor in Chief Wm. Steven Humphrey is in this show, reprising his roles as Grandpa and Paul, the Vampire). When installation is complete, the theater will accommodate an audience of 100-130, and McLendon says she hopes to keep ticket prices low.

"[In] every quadrant of Portland I have put in a lease offer," she says of her two-year search for a theater space. "This is the first place where everything so far has aligned."