I don’t think there’s any quit in Clinton K. Clark.

He may not live in Bend anymore, but the name of actor, playwright and director Clark should ring plenty of bells for followers of Bend theater over the past decade and change. I hadn’t heard from Clark since last summer. But just when he seems to go dormant, I’ll get a message from him, as I did Monday, when he messaged me about all he has coming up in Bend, his adopted home of Chicago and even New York City over the coming months.

My introduction to Clark, a Bend native and 2010 graduate of Southern Oregon University, was in 2011, when he first performed as the sardonic elf in Crumpet in “The Santaland Diaries.” He reprised the role during the holidays for several years, throughout which he consistently turned up in other shows worth watching.

In 2015, he formed his own production company to present an outdoor of “Macbeth,” given a corporate setting and billed as “Mac on the Move.” And move it did, to venues around Central Oregon, including a cemetery and Maragas Winery in Culver. Shakespeare plays became an annual summer tradition for Clark and production partner Raechel Gilland. After COVID-19 abated, they continued with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 2022 and “King Lear,” or “Queen Lear” as Guerrilla Shakespeare Co. presented it, last summer.

In 2016, ’17 and ’18, Clark wrote a few plays of his own, among them a comedic series of short plays in “A PC Christmas” and “A PC Thanksgiving” and one called ”The Beatles Die on Tuesday.”

In 2019, just a few months ahead of COVID-19, Clark pulled up stakes for Chicago. Clark told me this week that “an actor had a nervous breakdown in front of my first sold-out show only a month in.” During that time he also went through a bad breakup and lost his apartment.

He found a place to live and got to work on another play in Chicago, which had the misfortune of opening on March 17, 2020. In June of that year, he moved home to Bend for about eight months.

“I was gonna move to Seattle,” he said, “but the Chicago skyline kept popping into my mind’s eye.” In early 2021, he packed his car and drove with his cat for four days back to Chicago, where he again had no place to stay.

What did Clark do? He moved into an abandoned house for a few weeks — the one he’d been living in when COVID struck nearly a year earlier.

“When COVID hit, everyone split and left the place, myself included,” he said. His thespian roommates in the six-bedroom mansion had left most of their belongings behind, as had Clark.

He holed up in one room, where he relied on a single space heater for warmth. For bathroom breaks, he headed to McDonald’s and showered at friend’s places. For three weeks, it was just him, his cat “and a bunch of weird s–t like manikins and clown clothes.” He began selling belongings in order to make money, and soon got on his feet.

The second Chicago move has been fruitful. This week, Clark, 36, will present the third installment of a show he created called “Date My Friend,” in which comedy meets dating.

In it, performers, including comedians, actors and whoever else might want stage time and has a single friend to pitch give several-minute-long presentations on why their friend “shouldn’t be single — and maybe some of the reasons they still are,” Clark said. “Think 70% hype, 30% roast.”

He’s bringing “Date my Friend” to Silver Moon Brewing in Bend May 15 and July 24. Next month, he’s hosting it in New York: April 19 in Astoria and April 21 in Brooklyn. An actor friend will then host a show April 28 in Queens. He’s also made a foray into comedy production in Chicago, including an upcoming show for Gaza relief on May 21.

Prior to that, May 17-19 at Bend’s Open Space Event Studios, Clark will present a new, original historic play he’s written called “High Desert Horror (and the Lava Lake Murders).”

The play is in rehearsals and comes about in honor of the 100-year anniversary of the Lava Lake Murders, in which three fur trappers were murdered in Deschutes National Forest in January 1924.

Dropping In: Be careful when pronouncing Oregon place names

“The play brings accusations that Oregon’s first serial killer was a man named Ray Van Buren Jackson and is also responsible (at least in part) for the famous Lava Lake Killings,” Clark said. “I’ve set it up like it’s almost a trial from the afterlife, bringing charges of eight murders committed in the dusty cow towns of the High Desert between about 1910 and 1930.”

“He was never caught, but with the 20/20 vision of looking back in history, you can see that this one guy was most likely … involved in these eight murders because he was in these towns when it happened,” Clark said. “It’s a really gruesome, grisly story.”

“High Desert Horror” marks another teaming with the Deschutes Historical Museum, with which Clark has had a long relationship, which includes presenting all of the annual summer Shakespeare productions on the museum’s lawn.

“This is a kind of cool continuation of our relationship,” he said. “They’re setting up an exhibit, bringing out trapper gear and kind of setting up an exhibit of how Oregon was 100 years ago and around this time that this play is taking place.”

Speaking of summer and Shakespeare, auditions for this year’s play, “Merry Wives of Windsor,” will take place April 15 and 16 in Drake Park.

“This is our eighth production,” Clark said. “This year, we’re back to the comedies. ‘Lear’ was a particular challenge. It was a tough sell, and it didn’t sell very well. But everyone knows that it’s kind of the most depressing (Shakespeare) play. We’re stoked to get back to the comedies.”

At the moment, he’s stage managing a production at Chicago’s historic Biograph Theater, the former movie theater Depression-era gangster John Dillinger was coming out of when he was shot.

Overall, Clark said, his calendar looks a lot like the conspiracy theory meme of Charlie Day from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” wherein Charlie looks crazed in front of a board full of colors, text and scribbled lines.

“I’ve got like three or four months in a row that are all marked up with different-colored Sharpies. … That’s what my calendar looks like, like I’m trying to solve a big crime with it,” he said, laughing.

But then Clark prefers keeping busy.

“I really do,” he said. “It’s not exactly the reason I came out to Chicago, especially not the comedy thing … but I’m still tapped in artistically.”