There is a theater benediction for those working downtown, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, and in community theater, and I paraphrase: may your audience always outnumber your cast. Producing Lanford Wilson's Balm in Gilead, with its 29 roles, the T. Schreiber Studio would seem to be tempting fate; instead director Peter Jensen has orchestrated a raucous symphony of a play that draws a capacity crowd to its feet.
It's hard to believe, with Manhattan the way it is now, that when Lanford Wilson wrote Balm in Gilead in 1964, his play reflected an Upper West Side reality. The scene, an all-night diner frequented by prostitutes and drug dealers, is a cacophony of human desperation against a backdrop of urban decay. A deliberate exaggeration in the number of characters, all with overlapping dialogue, Balm in Gilead was a dramatic expression of a modernist abstract painting. Now it is a show already in progress.
Like picking out the sound of a particular instrument in an orchestra, it is difficult to cite specific performances—the huge cast is too daunting in numbers to give due credit. Some roles, like Babe (Lisa Sobin), who spends most of the evening slumped on the diner counter in a drug stupor, are on the periphery of the play, reflecting the unhappy state of the disenfranchised. Other roles are singers who lead in with a cappella doo-wop and move and weave, to rock music, through the actors, bookending and then propelling the story with song. Still others are characters who do a St. Vitus dance to Wilson's splendid soliloquies. All make up a complex tapestry.
When Dopey (Lawrence Crimlis, pictured above) speaks, a spotlight shines and the players all freeze at attention, a surreal moment that heightens the chaos that is inevitable when the action continues. We don't always see it, but each character is in his or her own spotlight all the time, and Jensen does an exceptional job emphasizing just how intensified an environment each character experiences even when all the audience can discern is the noise of a busy diner.
Ann, the prostitute with the heart of gold, stops short of being a caricature of that prostitute through Jill Bianchini's performance. There is something in the stillness in which she holds her body that stands in striking contrast to all the nervous energy around her, both natural and drug-induced.
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