Wilson's Balm In Gilead: Character Analysis

For the centuries, theatre has served as a tool for intellectual enrichment. It enriches our mind and feeds our brain with pleasure and makes us think about the characters we see on the stage. This Sunday, I watched the Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead directed by F. Reed Brown at Burnight Centre Theatre at Cerritos College. The plot draws a parallel between the amoral, often criminal activity that the café's denizens engage in to provide temporary relief from their boredom and suffering, and the two main characters' becoming a couple in order to escape from loneliness and desperation. In Balm in Gilead, the director has tried to use the ‘Expressionism’, which seeks to reveal the inner emotions of the characters and expose the hidden truths

The plot revolves around the two main characters' Joe (Joseph Baca) and Darlene (Kesley Jimenez) becoming a couple in order to escape from their lives. Joe is a drug dealer and Darlene is a girl who just arrived in city from Chicago, and she has started hooking. Joe is a smooth talker with a discerning eye who seems to be his own man, above the frayed gang; Darlene the newbie, impressed by this good-looking guy, is just trying to take in the whole crazy scene. As she becomes more involved with Joe, their mutual attraction develops. The two of them are drawn together and manage to find a balm for their desperation and loneliness in a relationship with each

Although each character feels tremendously real, with his/her own quirks, thoughts, needs, desires and fears, but because there are so many characters, there isn’t much depth to them aside from Darlene, and none of them are fully fleshed out or explored. The plot, which gets lost under the rich chaos of the characters, is pretty predictable and uninteresting. The audience gets whatever the characters say and do in their own little subplots, which is enough to make them real, but not enough to let the audience truly know them. It features many unconventional theatrical devices, such as overlapping dialogue and simultaneous scenes also. However the cast performed well in a professional manner and were well rehearsed. Especially the performances by Darlene and the Anne was quite impressive. As Anne listens to Darlene’s monologue, she reveals all of her own lost hope. Because the plot didn’t have a conventional structure, it didn’t have the typical tension, rising action, climax and resolution that the audience would expect. Audience members weren’t sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for twists and turns. The actors made the best use of the space and entered and exited with a naturalness and flexibility. The stage was proscenium type, having the audience seated in the front of the stage, which helped the audience to watch all the artists at the same time. The stage settings, café set,