Maybe the hardest thing an actor will ever have to do onstage is convey a sense of intimacy — not with the audience, but with fellow actors. You, the audience, just walked into the place, you don't know these people, you've never even seen them before, and somehow they must convey chemistry, history, and a gazillion unseen moments in the characters' unwritten pasts. In Fill Our Mouths, this happened many times. Katherine Michelle Tanner's character time-lapsed through a profound lesbian affair with Lela Elam's; Tanner's relationship with her husband, played by Brandon Morris, was solid and yet vaguely on the rocks; and when the play opened, Elam was on the verge of a tense transitional moment with her deaf girlfriend, played by Kim Ehly. Figuring out which one of these dynamics was most convincingly portrayed is impossible. Playwright Lauren Feldman didn't weigh the play down with exposition, and yet by the middle, you felt you could write these characters' entire shared histories. Whether it was Ehly playfully wiping flour across Elam's face, or Morris's loving, if occasionally bullheaded, attempts to deal with Tanner's infidelity, or the exquisitely subtle signs we were given that Tanner and Elam's relationship was blossoming into something more than platonic — any given 10 minutes of Fill Our Mouths was filled with enough smartly acted humanity to convince you that you'd been with these people from the beginning.
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