Critic’s PickIt was not easy work being Tammy Faye Bakker. In Tammy Faye’s Final Audition performer Shelley Delaney, a theater professor at Ohio University, is a wholly believable Tammy Faye, auditioning — we come to realize — for heaven. She wants whoever it is, the someone or something she has believed in since she was 10 and had the unnerving experience of talking to in tongues, to understand her and, please, to accept her and recognize that all her life she has only wanted to persuade others to love him (Him?) too. The wig, the mascara, the whole shtick was pointed toward His grace. They were what she could do to further His cause.
The audience, not unusual for Fringe audiences, has a role as well. We became an imaginary studio audience as Tammy Faye played to that heavenly being, explaining her life and its mysteries. She is aided by a few props including a mock frame with antenna signifying a television screen. B But her most irreplaceable and able assist comes from co-star David Haugen. He plays four distinctly different roles, including each of her husbands and her son. Minimal but clever costuming helps Haugen suggest who he is, but his own posture, voice and habitation of his characters are the defining signals.
Wild exaggeration was Tammy Faye’s hallmark on TV and has led to interpretations of her life that dismiss any real emotion in her stated beliefs. Tammy Faye’s Final Audition, presented by Brick Monkey Theater Ensemble (from Athens, Ohio), suggests otherwise. We hear from her that she knew at an early age that she and God “were best friends.” To her mind, nothing in her life challenged that. Until, at last, this Final Audition, when she finds doubt raising its ugly head. So she alters her plea, on the grounds that if You’re there You’ll hear me — and hopes for the best. One can’t help but hope that when death met the actual Tammy Faye, only hours after an appearance on Larry King Live, the best happened.
It’s interesting and appropriate that this religion-tinged offering is presented at First Lutheran Church (on Race Street east of Washington Park), in a beautiful if worse for wear upper room. Religion is how we explain the unexplainable. Tammy Faye Baker’s response was intensely human, but to the viewer raises questions: What indeed would a Supreme Being think of mascara? That he hadn’t done the right thing in inventing eyelashes? Tammy Faye was indeed human. But aren’t we all?
Jane Durrell is a freelance arts critic and has contributed to CityBeat since its founding in 1994.
Read the official 32-page FRINGE FESTIVAL GUIDE here and find the full performance lineup here.
This article appears in Jun 3-9, 2015.