Tonight begins the final weekend of Horse Head Theatre's run of Stephen Belber's Fault Lines at The Brewery Tap. The play is centered around two friends, Bill (Drake Simpson) and Jim (Rick Silverman), who have drifted apart over the years but who have come together at a bar to celebrate a birthday. The setup seems typical enough — old pals unsure of what brings them together, uncomfortable at still calling each other "dude" — but the script makes a few hard turns before all is said and done and the actors keep it moving from the early jokes to the final meltdowns. This is only Horse Head's second production, following last year's Red Light Winter, and it finds the troupe further along in their mission to make theatre a more interactive, "real" experience.
The play is set at a bar and it is, as said above, staged at a bar — staged but not on a stage, per se. The Brewery Tap has a stage, but it is occupied, as at any bar, by a band, not by actors. Local funk band Plump is part of the act, transitioning from their raucous pre-party jams to neatly arranged incidental accompaniment. There is no curtain; Bill wanders from somewhere back by the bar up to the empty tables against the side wall, takes a seat, and waits for his friends to arrive. The audience is left to eavesdrop, though a little more conspicuously than would be allowed on a typical night out. At the same time, anyone is also free to get up and order another drink. The Brewery Tap's regulars have been allowed to fill out the bar free of charge. All the details add up to a pleasant sense of comfort and, until things start getting heavy, the entertaining banter of the play makes it feel like it's just another good night out.
The four members of the cast inhabit their roles with ease and director Kevin Holden has given them free reign to go off script. The conversations come across as natural and the actors' laughter at the jokes is real (the audience's too). In the same way that the production has hidden itself as a play, the script has it's tricks to not give into the trappings of a script. The improvisation and the chemistry between the actors helps, but eventually things have to start moving and what at first might seem a little contrived or unbelievable actually ends up being contrived within the script as well — friends at a bar pulling each others' leg, though here it's not a funny sort of fib. Without giving the twists away, by the time things have picked up the pacing has you engrossed and the actors are working at a level where the unbelievable seems believable, even if just for a moment, before the truth shifts again. The play doesn't resolve the character's problems so much as it strips away facade after facade until the real dilemma is finally put before them. This, we are told in the play, is the purpose of "bar talk" — cutting through the complacency of living day-to-day and checking if your life is actually on the track it should be, checking if you can continue to avoid the truth for the sake of convenience: "Am I really still this man's friend?" or "Do I get along with my wife well enough to spend my life with her?" Questions that would mean a drastic change if answered, but that you can get by without answering for such a long time that they seem amazingly inconsequential.
Soon after taking their celebratory shots of tequila, Bill and Jim are joined by an apparent stranger, Joe (Philip Lehl), who takes it upon himself to shake things up between the friends. Lehl plays Joe with a geeky swagger, a self-knowing loser who loves a fight for the sake of a fight — even if you lose, it's good to know where you actually stand. Joe's appearance is the play's main mechanic, and Lehl takes control right off the bat, forging the kind of forceful interaction and uneasy chemistry with Bill and Jim that is familiar to anyone who's come across an overbearing down-and-out at a bar. Joe's speeches give us the keys to the play, words and structures to use to understand what's about to happen: he explains the titular "fault line" that will some day rupture a relationship — you might as well know what side you're standing on ahead of time so that you don't waste years waiting out an inevitable divide. He talks about living "inward" (hiding your true feelings) versus living "outward" (a sort of volatile honesty) and as uncomfortable as all his prying makes Bill, he makes it seem almost reasonable — it's "bar talk," a prostate exam for the psyche.
Simpson's performance as Bill deftly straddles a line between the sympathy-inducing everyman, the condescending control-freak, and a man afraid of his own compunction. The play ends with Bill on his own, disturbed by the revelations of the night and garnering a mix of pity and revulsion from the audience. Simpson owns the final meltdown with a loudness and emotional resonance that cannot be ignored. The explicit "outward" scheming of the plot collides head-on with the "inward" plans and hierarchies of Bill's way of life resulting in the kind of surreal onslaught of guilt most reminiscent of Kafka's short story "The Judgment." As Jim, Silverman achieves a kind of amicable desperation that counters Bill's complacency. Jim needs Bill as a friend in a way that Bill doesn't, and Silverman gives life to a whole retinue of strategies to earn his loyalty back: overeager humor, pitiful wallowing, and tentative flattery, among others, before finally resorting to an orchestrated and hard-fisted ultimatum. Ivy Castle-Rush enters the play towards the end as Jess, Bill's wife, and her presence alone begins to tangle up the men. The script is juggling so many possible revelations at that point that the audience hangs on to Jess's every line, hoping to tease out the truth in the relationships between them all.
As outlandish and intricate as the plot becomes in it's exploration of truth and relationships, the "real" setting of the bar cuts out a lot of the didacticism and distance that can be associated with drama. The audience is not left with a morality lesson so much as food for thought, something to talk with friends about while sharing a beer.
Fault Lines will be performed this Thursday through Saturday at 8pm. Happy hour at the Brewery Tap is from 5-7pm and Plump plays for the hour between. Tickets range from $10-$20 and can be bought in advance.
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Photo: Anthony Rathbun
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