Reading undermines acting at ‘Churches’

The Interplayers season got off to a shaky start with Tina Howe’s comedy-drama about aging parents, “Painting Churches.”

Shaky, because one of the lead actors, Joan Welch, had to carry the script around with her onstage, from start to finish. She had not fully memorized the role, apparently, and many times had to read her lines directly out of the script. This was on Saturday night, which was opening night. In three preview performances before this, she had also apparently used the script.

Now, Joan Welch is one of the treasures of Spokane theater. It was great to see her onstage again. Script in hand or not, she often embodied the character of Fanny Church, making her funny, poignant and sad. She had many nice moments.

Yet staying “on book” causes serious problems dramatically.

First, it is distracting. The character must always be fiddling with the script, referring to it, and shifting it from one hand to the other. The audience can never suspend disbelief and accept the character as real; we are constantly being reminded that this is just an actor, reading lines.

Second, it gets in the way of any real connection between the characters. When Fanny is pleading with her aging husband, Gardner, or with her artist daughter Mags, about some heartwrenching emotional issue, she can’t even look them in the eye. Too often, she is looking at the script.

Third, carrying the script doesn’t work all that well, anyway. It often took her a few beats to find her place in the script, which meant that cues were picked up slowly. Sometimes, the wrong line came out anyway. This is inevitable unless she had kept her nose buried in the book every second, which would have been worse.

We can only hope that as the run continues this week, that Welch feels comfortable enough with the lines to go without the book.

I hate to dwell on this, but it colored every response to the play. I still can’t figure out if this was the show’s main problem, or if I would have felt detached from this play and this production anyway. All I know for sure is that I was never sucked into the world of Gardner and Fanny Church, an aging poet and his doting wife.

I can say that Bob Welch, the other half of Spokane’s top theater couple, was powerful and moving as Gardner. Welch was the very image of the Boston literary Brahmin: tall, dignified, white-haired and playful. This made his descent into what can best be described as a second childhood more poignant.

However, the circumstances made evaluating his performance, and the performance of Libby Skala, as Mags, the bohemian daughter, difficult as well. Skala’s voice and behavior seemed overly mannered and she acted more like a giddy teenager than an adult artist who demands to be taken seriously. Yet would this performance have worked, taken out of the odd context of the evening? I certainly might have been more willing to suspend disbelief.

In the same way, I couldn’t fairly evaluate the direction of new Interplayers artistic director Nike Imoru. Her vision of the play surely didn’t include Fanny Gardner reading her lines off of a page.

I can only guess that the biggest directoral decision was: Should we open the play at all, or wait until it’s fully ready?

Well, it would have been disappointing not to see the play. But I still don’t feel as if I have seen it properly.