Merri Biechler’s Tammy Faye’s Final Audition explores the famed televangelist’s life and will have its first full production at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival.
One of Jan Hooks’ most memorable performances on Saturday Night Live was of a woman who seemed all too made-up to be real. But the thick mascara, high-pitch voice and large jewelry were all based on the real life televangelist, Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, known commonly as Tammy Faye.
With her husband Jim Bakker, Tammy Faye was a famous Christian TV figure. She and Bakker were founding members of The 700 Club and hosted the PTL Club, which stands for “Praise the Lord” — both talk show-like TV programs — from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s.
She is also the subject of local playwright Merri Biechler’s play Tammy Faye’s Final Audition, which will have its first full production at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday.
Fringe theater is more experimental and is most often performed in smaller-scale spaces.
“She was everywhere,” Biechler said. “She was mostly known for that unbelievable amount of makeup and eyelashes and always crying on the air, but she was so much more than that.”
The play finds Tammy Faye near the end of her life as she enters a fevered dream, where she interviews the men in her life to get help for a final audition for one last TV show.
The story of the creation of this play is a different one. Actress Shelley Delaney, who plays the title character, had been fascinated with Tammy Faye ever since she saw her famed final interview on Larry King Live in 2007, which occurred only seven hours before her death.
“She was clearly dying,” Delaney, associate professor of performance at Ohio University, said. “First of all, it was hard to watch. She was in terrible shape. Second, I couldn’t understand what compulsion got her in front of the cameras. How can you, in this state, this close to death, still feel like you even need to be witnessed or be in front of people?”
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Delaney’s intense interest resulted in her prodding Biechler to write a play about Tammy Faye for her. And so Biechler did.
A workshop reading of the play was held in the summer of 2014. Since then, Biechler said she mostly made changes within the text of the play.
David Haugen, associate professor of performance, is the only other actor in the play. Haugen portrays all of the men in Tammy Faye’s life: her husband Bakker, her son Jamie “Jay” Bakker, her second husband Roe Messner and former talk show co-host Jim J. Bullock.
Delaney said her interest in Tammy Faye largely stems from Tammy Faye’s connection to reality TV.
In the late 1980s, Bakker became entangled in a sex scandal and was arrested for accounting fraud. The whole time, Delaney said, Tammy Faye stayed in front of the camera, publicly forgiving Bakker and intensely sobbing.
“She was very much out there with everybody, talking to all of the people who were her fans and on the other side of the screen as if they were talking to these people who were their partners,” Delaney said. “I’m baffled by that compulsion to be witnessed, … revealing yourself naked in front of the camera without anything between you and it.”
At the same time she made headlines for her unforgettable exterior, she also made news for being accepting.
Biechler said in 1984, Tammy Faye brought a gay man with AIDS onto her show “at a time when President Reagan wasn’t even saying the word ‘AIDS’ in the early ’80s, and here was a conservative Christian reaching out to a gay man with AIDS to include him in her worship.”
By portraying these different sides of Tammy Faye, Biechler said she hopes the play will allow people to experience Tammy Faye like never before.
Yet the show cannot be done without Delaney wearing Tammy Faye’s signature makeup and hair.
“If I put the hair and clothes on, it’s like it eats me alive,” she said with a laugh. “There are pieces of jewelry like the size of my head. But that’s how she saw herself. Think about how much personality it takes to shine through that clothing and makeup.”
The play will later head to the Capital Fringe in Washington D.C. in July and the Centenary Stage Co. in New Jersey in November. Biechler and Delaney said they hope to bring the play to Athens this academic year.
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