Notable as larger-than-life Williams, theater veteran Jack Heller reveals the acute vulnerability beneath the playwright’s selfishness, roar and bluster. Tamara Braun, best known for her daytime television roles, matches Heller every step of the way as Williams’ female counterpart. The pair’s tour-de-force performances are intensified further by the intimacy of the small, black-box theater.

READ MORE

Note to casting agents: Read this review several times over and consider casting an actress know knows her stuff instead of a fluff piece.

Phyllis: Do you prefer acting for television, film or for the stage? Do you prepare for one differently than the other?
Tamara: I like the subtleties that film and TV allow that theatre does not. The camera does not lie. It picks up thought and inner life. But with film you have to wait so long to see the final product. TV airs much quicker than film and daytime…such quick turnaround but often I was too busy to watch.

In theatre, the audience becomes another entity to your performance. You try and not let them change your performance but inevitably one is affected by it. We are affected by people’s energy in life so of course we will be affected in the theatre. If the audience is with you on a certain night it can propel your performance to great heights and if they are not really with you (and the cast takes it in) then unfortunately the performance can feel off…in terms of preferring one more than others… I like them all for the challenges that each bring.

Examiner.com

• [ 001 ] PRESS: 04/26/2012 – TAMARA BRAUN TALKS TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, DAYS OF OUR LIVES AND AMC

Thanks and onwards.

Dianne

Review: Tamara Braun in intimate ‘Tennessee in the Summer’

By Margaret Gray
April 18, 2012, 2:10 p.m.

If you’ve been struggling to dissuade your child from becoming a playwright, here’s an easy fix: Take the theatrically inclined scribbler to the Sidewalk Studio Theatre to see “Tennessee in the Summer,” Joe Besecker’s nightmarish portrait of the late-career Tennessee Williams, sweating, reminiscing, drinking and gulping Seconal pills in a New York City hotel room.

Besecker’s conceit is that Williams (the great Jack Heller) had an inner child — actually a young blond woman in a slip, played here by the slinky, sloe-eyed soap opera star Tamara Braun. As the lights come up, Williams hunches over his typewriter, surrounded by balled-up pages, while the blond sprawls on the bed, complaining of boredom and taunting Williams about his “recent string of box-office flops.” Eventually she lures a hustler (Robert Standley) into the room, effectively ending the workday.

“Woman,” as she is listed in the program, owes a great deal to Williams’ female characters, particularly Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” But she’s also a persuasive embodiment of that inner voice that can make the most successful existence an inescapable hell. At times her mockery becomes so vicious that I was tempted to grab a Seconal for myself. (The 33-seat space is very intimate. I essentially participated in the steamy sex scenes, staged fearlessly by director Sal Romeo.) But she can also be sympathetic, even loving, and in the most wrenching scene, when Williams’ brother Dakin (Standley again) tricks him into committing himself, she suffers alongside him.

Woman forces Williams to relive painful incidents from his past: encounters with his adored schizophrenic sister, Rose (Louise Davis), and pivotal moments in his 14-year romance with the muscular Frankie Merlo (Standley yet again). Davis is chilling as the mad, impish Rose, and also performs an unforgettable monologue as Williams’s equally crazy and far meaner mother, Edwina. The character of Frankie is the least well written, almost mawkish, and the point of his scenes seems to be to present Williams’ selfish, cruel side.

So vividly does this play depict a great writer’s misbehavior, isolation, terror and misery that even the most stage-struck youth in the audience is bound to fill out that law school application you brought along just in case.

SOURCE

Off to a good start. I’ve been combing the internet for any other reviews for the play. I’m so happy Tamara is getting good notices. As I’ve said before I’d kill to see this. There are three actors I’d love to see on stage, one of them is Tamara. The other two are David Strathairn who garnered himself an Oscar Nomination for his role as Edward R. Murrow in George Clooney’s Good Night And Good Luck and who is returning for season two of the SyFy channel’s breatkout series Alphas and the other is Keir Dullea who I’ve created a site for and who starred as astronaut Dave Bowman in Stanley Kubrick’s amazing work of art 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Keir founded a theatre group with his late wife, Susie, for helping talent both young and old to hone their crafts with script-in-hand readings of various plays. I’d love to see either of these three in something before I keel over. That would be the dream at least.

The reason I’m posting this is because I want it known as I’ve posted in the disclaimer section in the sidebar that I do not own anything. What I’ve found on the internet is subject to the same laws I’ve posted here and that is the FAIR USE law or what is also known as CREATIVE COMMONS. The meaning of CREATIVE COMMONS is listed below.

The idea of universal access to research, education, and culture is made possible by the Internet, but our legal and social systems don’t always allow that idea to be realized. Copyright was created long before the emergence of the Internet, and can make it hard to legally perform actions we take for granted on the network: copy, paste, edit source, and post to the Web. The default setting of copyright law requires all of these actions to have explicit permission, granted in advance, whether you’re an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian, policymaker, or just a regular user. To achieve the vision of universal access, someone needed to provide a free, public, and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the Internet and the reality of copyright laws. That someone is Creative Commons.

Source

I am not saying that I own anything unless it has my name attached to it such as the tribute section or any synopsis created for Tamara’s films or her television work. There have been some instances where I have been granted permission such as in the gallery section under LITTLE CHENIER where I was granted permission to post certain pictures by Stafford Scott who was attached to the film. All other content I again claim under FAIR USE and CREATIVE COMMONS for educational purposes and to advance the knowledge of Tamara Braun and her work in its totality. Where I have been contacted to remove images, I have done so.