Review: Tender Rough Rough Tender by Sarah Saltwick, groundswell at the Off Center
by David Glen Robinson

The Fourth of July, 2011, in Austin was incredibly hot, fireworks were banned, the Bastrop Lost Pines burned down that summer, and restaurants charged for ice water, but only if patrons requested it.  This is the atmosphere of the incredibly hot Tender Rough Rough Tender by Sarah Saltwick, now playing at The Off-Center in east Austin.  The sit-com joke of taking cold drinks by throwing them in one’s own face rather than swallowing them is played to the hilt in the alcoholic character of Bell, played by Hannah Burkhauser.  Thereafter, being wet becomes the metaphor for the schnockered state.  In symbolic contrast, drinks of plain water are only mimed throughout the play.  

 

 

Bell is at a party, soaked, trolling for men, any men, and she lands firefighter Mike, played by Joseph Garlock, wet and flopping and thrashing like a three-pound bass on the bedroom floor.  Things progress, and later, as angry as the runner-up in a wet lingerie contest, Bell shouts growlingly, “It’s not noble to try to fuck a pretty girl!”  

 

Mike!  Run like the wind!

 

Mike stays, and ultimately there is accommodation.  Fire and water are the two core elements in opposition here.  Bell is the kind of self-medicating alcoholic whose problems are just too severe.  The fact that she's constantly self-soaked telegraphs the audience her cry for help, an SOS for someone to put out the fire destroying her life. How convenient that Mike is a firefighter.  We gain a sense of urgency, however, in that we see how Bell is in the deepest denial and well into that destructive race between some resolution of her inner problems and  progressive physical breakdown from alcohol consumption.  

 

 

Mike is a saver or a rescuer.  When asked how he fights fire, he says he doesn’t really fight it. He removes fuel from it, he redirects it by digging fire lines or building barriers, he removes people and pets from it, and he prevents it. The fire dies by itself, and the forest begins to regrow. Above all, Mike’s obsession with saving is a lifelong expiation for that one time as a rookie when he didn’t.  His troubled sleep now is part of the sacrifice that he is still making.  

 

Mike and his discontents gradually make sense to Bell, but it takes time, and then only after the play pivots on her signature line, not the title, but “What’s the point of being disappointed?” Gradually, we see her start to turn around the flaming, sinking oil tanker of her life.  

 

The title Tender Rough Rough Tender is a map of the emotional course of the play.  Playwright Sarah Saltwick articulates her vision beautifully and seeming to have thought of all the necessary details.  All the nuts and bolts are screwed down tight.  The script is sharp and the dialogue is believable, especially as the characters reveal their backstories without seeming to take time out for exposition.  The trendily inadequate one-page program lacked bios, but if memory serves, Sarah Saltwick is a recent MFA graduate of a playwriting program in Austin.  This, then, is what one might consider one of her early plays.  

 

The actors are intense and spot-on in their characterizations. Kudos for part of this goes to director Jess Hutchinson.  Joseph Garlock plays Mike with a sweet center appropriate to the character, when he could have played it all muscle. Garlock is in the front rank of spectacular young male actors in Austin that includes Judd Farris, Noel Gaulin, Jeff Mills, Ryan Hamilton, David J. Boss, Joey Hood, J. Ben Wolfe, and very few others.  

 

Hannah Burkhauser seems to be new to Austin, seems to have a dance background, and definitely has a huge emotional range. Beyond that, to repeat, there were no bios in the program. CTX Live Theatre records that she appeared last year in Punchkin Repertory's This Is Our Youth and was a a sinuous and alluring Ariel in Present Company's production of The Tempest.

 

The design fields meshed to serve the requirements of the play, with no area dominating any other.  This is refreshing in a community where there is often an imbalance in the design fields in a play.The high quality of this production by relatively new unknowns gives hope that the recent departures of Jason Amato and Ia Enstera have not left any irremedial gaps in Austin design.  

 

Tender Rough Rough Tender as a relationship biography compares favorably with last year’s award-winning Cock, produced by Theatre en Bloc, also at The Off-Center, and, oddly, with MAST by Paper Chairs, just closed at Salvage Vanguard Theatre. Other plays recently examining these themes seemed to be struck with cynicism and confusion.Maybe it’s the times.  

 

 

Not so Tender Rough Rough Tender.  It clears the smoke like a cool drink of water and replants the trees out Bastrop way.  The play is recommended for all adults.  We welcome many more such plays by Sarah Saltwick and groundswell.  The current production runs until August 30, 2015.  

 

 

 

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Tender Rough Rough Tender
by Sarah Saltwick
groundswell

August 21 - 24 - Friday thru Monday at 8 pm
August 27 - 29 - Thursday thru Saturday at 8 pm
August 30 - Sunday at 2 pm

this is a Rude Fusion project - big thanks to the Rude Mechs (Austin, TX))!  

Tickets available on-line