Portland playwright Sean Brown's solo drag-theater show "Death of a Drag Queen" is returning to Northeast Portland for four performances after its initial run earlier this year.

The play opens Saturday, July 11, at Triangle Productions on NE Sandy Boulevard.

The 80-minute show premiered Friday, December 5, 2025, at Portland's Echo Theater before moving to Triangle Productions for a late January 2026 run. The production's website bills the July return as "Portland Pride Performances," with dates spanning two weekends.

Brown's show stars Atlanta actor Sean Marlow as Miss Cram P. Brulee, a fictional drag queen waking up on her 60th birthday to find her water shut off, an eviction notice on the door, and friends who keep canceling on her celebration.

The piece draws from Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," reframing the everyman story through the lens of a veteran drag performer confronting aging, irrelevance, and queer survival.

"With Death of a Drag Queen, I wanted to give that same dignity to the common queen," Brown told BroadwayWorld ahead of the show's December 2025 premiere. "Not the superstar, not the legend, but the working queen whose life contains beauty, regret, humor, collapse, resilience."

Marlow, who co-founded Chicago's Trapdoor Theatre in 1993 and earned a Joseph Jefferson Award nomination for Best Actor, was brought in from Atlanta specifically for the role. He performs the entire show solo, breaking the fourth wall and occasionally roasting audience members.

Willamette Week's Nicole Eckrich called the production "tender, raw and perhaps the most existentially somber drag performance of the year" in a December 2025 review.

The production received a Regional Arts & Culture Council grant for reaching underserved cultures within underserved communities, according to BroadwayWorld. It uses AI-generated projected backdrops as part of its set design.

Triangle Productions, founded in 1989, describes itself as one of the oldest LGBTQ-identified theaters in the United States, with roughly 300 shows produced over more than 35 years. The venue seats just over 150 people.

A content note: the Willamette Week review flagged that the show contains suicide references not prominently disclosed in advance marketing. The production is restricted to ages 16 and older.

How to attend

  • Dates: Saturday, July 11; Sunday, July 12; Saturday, July 18; Sunday, July 19
  • Location: The Board Room at Triangle Theater, 1785 NE Sandy Blvd., Portland, OR 97232
  • Doors: 7:30 p.m.
  • Tickets: $30, available exclusively via Venmo at @Sean-Brown-406 (include the performance date in the Venmo notes; there is no traditional box office for this production)
  • Parking: Free in adjacent lots