by Miryam Gordon - SGN A&E Writer

BEATING UP BACHMAN
BASH THEATRE/
RADIAL THEATER PROJECT
(at West of Lenin)
Through February 16

In a second iteration of a different process to generate a play, David Gassner and his Radial Theater Project partnered with BASH Theatre (formerly known as The Community Theatre) and its five continuing members, added a few other actor friends, and improvised for a number of months. Playwright Wayne Rawley watched, reflected, and generated a play based on themes and interactions that arose from the improvisation.

The play that was created, Beating Up Bachman, is now being presented at West of Lenin. It's definitely both interesting and uneven, as a project derived from a non-linear process might tend to be. But there are intriguing plot points, some laugh-out-loud moments, and a mystery included.

Rawley is a really good writer, and some individual scenes are intensely well-written. When he has a free hand to create characters, his dialogue crackles and is both idiosyncratic (interesting) and true-to-life. But this process might not have allowed him enough creative room. Writing with certain actors and their particular input and themes may have interfered with tightening the story, dispensing with an unnecessary character, or changing something that just didn't work very well. But the opportunity to try this approach seems likely to have interested him, just for the sake of seeing what would result.

Here is a dysfunctional family, the Truckers, with three daughters. They've grown up in a very small Eastern Washington town and their reputation is so strong that their motto, 'Don't Fuck with the Truck,' embodies their ascendance in the town's social hierarchy. Each daughter has a crisis issue in her life, and their relationships with each other and the various extended family members are complicated.

DOMESTIC DRAMAS
The youngest daughter has five children and a screw-up for a husband, and the males of the family are so fed up with him that they want to beat him up. But they can't find him, so most of the play is spent revealing various family secrets. The characters chafe at small-town life, but in other ways enjoy the close proximity of family and the support that it gives each of them.

In particular, Lisa Every does a great job as the eldest daughter, Lisa, who holds the Trucker family together - everyone seems to want to sleep at her house! - while trying to cope with her own peril: her husband is being sued for taking clients from a former employer. All three men - Chris Macdonald as a low-key family friend in love with one sister, Cristopher Berns as Lisa's ne'er-do-well brother-in-law, and Ryan Sanders as Lisa's husband - do nice jobs in their quirky roles.

It's definitely not cookie-cutter theater, so if you love something different, make tracks to see this production. Be aware that it does run a bit long, clocking in at close to three hours with an intermission. For more information, go to www.bashtheatre.org or www.radialtheater.org. For tickets, visit www.brownpapertickets.com/event/289273 or call (206) 352-1777.

Discuss your opinions with sgncritic@gmail.com or go to www.facebook.com/SeattleTheaterWriters.

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