Review: Impro's TENNESSEE WILLIAMS UNSCRIPTED Scores at the Falcon
By: Don Grigware Jun. 21, 2016
Tennessee Williams UnScripted/created by the Impro Theatre Company /at the Falcon Theatre/directed by Brian Lohmann/through July 31
If you have never seen a production of the Impro Theatre Company, be aware that the play you see is one-time only. With the suggestion at the top from an audience member of the name of an heirloom, the actors take it, title the play, and then create the characters and the play totally from scratch. Everything that happens is spontaneous and will never be repeated in another performance. It makes me question what the job of the director, in this case member Brian Lohmann, actually is?
With Tennessee Williams, you think first and foremost the South, a stilted slowness of pace and accent, sprawling plantations, filthy rich land owners and maybe some dirt poor farmers, marriages on the verge of collapse, women seething for sexual pleasure and usually one man, a stranger, ready to respond to the call of duty while the rest are impotent or not manly enough to deliver. Sometimes one strong woman, often an outsider, stands apart as crazy, delusional like Blanche duBois, one that also makes living terribly uncomfortable for the rest.
Yes, Williams offers colorful locales and people, but what the Impro managed to glean from "Brass Bowl" stretched way beyond the confines of imagination. Going to extremes with the language and spending an entire monologue on a pot is fair game to Impro. Is it tin, copper or brass? To Roberta (Kari Coleman) in a loveless marriage with Skudge (Dan O'Connor), the makeup of the pot, the wallpaper, the carpeting, everything drives her to the brink. She is out of place and doesn't want to be here. She, like, Williams' Blanche, is completely out of touch with reality. Melinda (Kelly Holden Bashar), also in a loveless marriage with Robert or Bobo (Brian Lohmann, also director)) longs openly for a midnight swim with Chance (Ryan Smith), the quiet stranger with one lung. There is also a character like the dying Big Daddy who owns Vista del Lago, whose name is Mr. Tobias, or Toby for short, (Floyd VanBuskirk) and his younger, very apprehensive girlfriend, Cornelian, who serves as the maid. (Edi Patterson)
All the actors maintain their characters quite brilliantly, some with more deeply dramatic consequences than others. The scene in Act II between Bashar as Melinda and Lohmann as Bobo is my favorite. It's a bedroom scene, and it could very well be between Brick and Maggie the Cat straight out of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It's an ungodly hot summer night, and Melinda is at the open window trying to catch a breath of fresh air while Bobo is stretched out on the bed lazy and predictably flat as a swamp. Melinda describes the tedium of their time together. You can feel her longing for something new...but it is her chastisement of Bobo's behavior that gets him up and out and in search of some unpredictability. In fact, he kills single-handedly a boa constrictor on the prowl. Who would have thought that he was up to it? Williams did let Brick summon up his masculinity at the end of Cat to collect his inheritance, but not without Maggie's sharp interventions. A man finds his way in the world when he must sooner or later rise to the occasion and satisfy his woman. The snake, by the way, becomes the evening meal for all - a nice change of pace? - cooked, you guessed it, in the "Brass Bowl"!
Audience really enjoyed the jokes about the terrain. Somehow the characters found themselves on a mountain in Florida, referring to it as a vertical swamp ... and getting more and more comedy from it than perhaps was necessary. Whatever, the evening was pure fun and the style of Tennessee Williams did manage to poke through every now and again. I particularly liked the deep ruminations at the end about how a change in vista must come between two people before they can fully understand one another.
Bravo!
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