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Reviewed by:
  • Brewed by Scott T. Barsotti
  • Angela Sweigart-Gallagher
Brewed. By Scott T. Barsotti. Directed by Anna C. Bahow. Tympanic Theatre Company and Ruckus Theater Company at Theater Wit, Chicago. 16 March 2013.

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Erin Myers (Paulette) challenges Charlotte Mae Ellison (Collette) to one of the many fights in Brewed.

(Photo: Gerard Van Halsema.) [End Page 418]

Tympanic Theatre Company’s motto—”the best kind of weird”—is an apt description for its recent world premiere of Scott Barsotti’s play Brewed, a collaboration with the Ruckus Theater Company. While difficult to categorize in genre, Brewed raises troubling questions about the strength of family (particularly sisterly) bonds, and the extent to which one is responsible to and for one’s family. Part dark comedy, part family drama, and part horror show, the production was distinctive for its bloody and brutal violence and its balance of hyper-realism and elements of fantasy. The history and potential for violence is central to Brewed’s conflict, and director Anna Bahow effectively realizes the violence and builds on the elements of fantasy through the staging and fight choreography, makeup design, and scenic and lighting elements.

In Brewed, six combative sisters struggle to share the responsibility and burden of constantly (and consistently) stirring a pot. It is a monotonous ritual that Nanette (Meredith Rae Lyons) has abandoned for a promising NASCAR career, and that dour tinkerer Roxette (the expressive Susan Myburgh of Tympanic) has largely ignored to nurture a new relationship with her girlfriend Lee (played to generous laughter by Ruckus’s Elise Mayfield). The clueless Collette (a delightfully cheerful Charlotte Mae Ellison of Tympanic) cannot manage the task without significant supervision, leaving the remaining sisters, Juliette (Dana Black), Babette (Stevie Chaddock Lambert), and Paulette (Erin Myers), struggling to shoulder the burden. Juliette serves as the emotional backbone of the family and seems most determined to keep the sisters committed to the task of stirring the pot, which, as Barsotti reveals over the course of the first act, may be the only thing keeping the wheelchair bound and volatile Babette (“Babs”) alive. The act of stirring (or not stirring) thus haunts the sisters and the play: should the other sisters continue to stir the pot and risk Babette’s violence, or stop stirring and risk her death?

The question of family obligation is all the more pressing after Babs breaks Lee’s neck in an end-of-act-1 cliffhanger. This grisly moment, well-staged by Bahow and choreographed by the so-called violence designers Richard Gilbert and Victor Bayona, challenges the sisters to confront Babs’s history of violence, which the audience discovers by the end of the show includes a seventh sister. The unprovoked and unanticipated murder, accompanied by the realistic and disturbing sound of bones breaking by designer Maxwell Shults, drew audible gasps from the audience and left many tittering nervously during intermission. The moment forces the audience to consider for the duration of the intermission the question of just how far the bonds of sisterly love can be stretched before they break.

Such moments echoed earlier plays, such as Sam Shepard’s True West and Curse of the Starving Class and Maria Irene Fornes’s Mud. As in Shepard and Fornes, Brewed’s violence serves as Barsotti’s primary mode of expressing familial connection and history. Bahow and her violence-design team effectively drew the audience in to the literal and figurative conflicts of the play through a series of well-choreographed fight scenes. For example, the sisters repeatedly challenged one another to a series of ritualized brawls, each one initiated with the threat, “You and me, sister!” Makeup designer Chrissy Weisenburger (Tympanic), as well as the actors themselves (onstage and in real time) created a number of ghastly bruises and cuts that graphically represented the seething resentments bubbling among the sisters.

Working in Theater Wit’s large rectangular Theatre 3, Brewed’s scenic designer Dustin Pettigrew (Tympanic) created a versatile setting for Bahow’s interpretation of the play. The unit set, like the play, reveled in its inability to be firmly categorized as either violent family drama or quirky horror/fantasy show. It...

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