March 12-18, 1997
Volume 16, Number 5

--Carol Lloyd

Building the Perfect Beast

True Fiction Magazine

"Tennis!" shouts an audience member, and the show grinds into first gear with a scene involving upper-class ladies bickering after a tennis lesson. The actors seem seized by stage fright. The dialogue thuds. The conflict stinks of contrivance. Do the performers really think they can build an evening on a mockery of country-club snobbery?

Then something shifts. Suddenly it's revealed that one woman's father died on the 18th hole 20 years ago. Then we cut to a scene of her father, Pedro, and his mistress, Lucinda, arguing in a private bungalow. On a plane, a woman reads a novel, The Chronicles of Pedro and Lucinda--just as the plane is crashing. Like an old jalopy warming up, the play suddenly gains momentum, running away with the company of actors as if they are merely passengers rather than drivers.

Such is the strange magic of watching True Fiction Magazine build a full-length improvised play. Over the last nine years they've constructed some 4,000 original works out of little but faith in the power of improvisation. From a word or phrase elicited from the loudmouth in the fourth row, they build a scene, a storyline, another scene, more characters, until they have a massive tangled web of a plot that by the end, to the audience's amazement, unravels, coheres, and finally resolves.

At a recent show, the initial "tennis" scene ultimately spawned a story of family murders unearthed on the country-club golf course, black magic carried out by a "sheep demon," a terrorist campaign of airplane bombings, a lounge act in heaven, and a whiny Jesus who longs for Earth and plays compulsively with his stigmata holes.

Although the seven performers exhibit competent acting skills, their real strength lies in the narrative genius of their collective imagination. Even though they sometimes pander to easy laughter, inevitably the shows possess moments of sizzling, reckless perfection.

Stephen Kearin achieved a subtle tour de force portraying (in the same scene) identical twins--gardener Escovardo and maintenance man Escovito--one of whom had just buried a murder victim and the other of whom knew nothing about it. Reed Kirk Rahlmann--suffering from laryngitis--devised ways to make his croak further the story, playing a deaf lawyer, a raspy mob Godfather, an ancient magician and best of all a tracheotomied victim of a shark attack.

With the exception of the psycho-permutations of Kearin, the actors too often depend upon language instead of physical expressivity. Yet this is a mild criticism for an otherwise rare theatrical treat: the opportunity to play in the fertile, bottomless marsh of collaborative alchemy. Brewing black humor, mystery, fantasy and ironic musical interludes, True Fiction evokes the surreality of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective or Pennies from Heaven, but takes it one step further: each performance is as live, unscripted and ephemeral as a dream.