The ballad of ‘Tammy/Lisa’ brings this comic dynamo to Boise Contemporary Theater
Meet Tammy Lisa, a country singer with a broken heart of gold, and the other side of comic actress Lauren Weedman.
“She’s become an alter-ego,” Weedman says. “Or she’s the shadow self, she’s my id, she’s who I used to be, she’s who I should be. She’s Lucinda Williams (her muse).”
However, Tammy Lisa is more than a character — she’s truly part of Weedman’s journey, a piece of her inner adopted child that she has been exploring — sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly — through her own brand of personal narrative theater for more than a decade.
“My birth mother and father, who were 15 and 16, were each allowed to choose a name for me,” Weedman says. ”My birth mother chose Tammy, my birth father chose Lisa, so if they had kept me, I would have been Tammy Lisa. Now, as I get older, I sometimes feel closer to those roots than those of the upper-middle-class family who adopted me.”
Weedman’s shows are a sort of high-wire act, with her walking the line between traditional comedy and personal tragedy. The struggle to keep that balance elevates her shows from simple entertainment into an experience. That’s one of her fortes and a hallmark of her repertoire of one-woman, multicharacter shows that she crafts out of her personal experiences. In them, she explores her life with brutal, hysterical honesty.
And she lays it all out on the boards with each performance. Her show “Tammy Lisa/Misery to Meaning” is playing through Saturday, Dec. 7, at Boise Contemporary Theater.
Born and raised in Indiana, Weedman started her performance career as a standup comic in Seattle, where her quick wit and twisted view of the world led her to become one of the few female corespondents on “The Daily Show” in the early 2000s. She’s given memorable performances on a variety of TV shows, from “Reno 911!” to HBO’s “Looking” and Netflix’s “Arrested Development,” and in films such as “The Five-Year Engagement.”
She’s become a semi-regular at BCT since she brought her first show, “Bust,” here in 2007.
That multicharacter tour-de-force explored her search for deeper meaning in her life in Hollywood by volunteering at the women’s wing of the Los Angeles County Jail.
She has returned to Idaho every couple of years or so to make and perform theater. BCT is a creative haven, she says.
“I love this space and the audiences are great,” she says. “People are so kind about stuff and open to new things. Now I have friends here that I want to see, [since] I’ve been coming here so long.
”OK, I sound like a grandma: Back when I was first coming here, I didn’t even close my car door when I was driving, I was so relaxed. Now, before I change lanes I have to check. That seems weird for Boise. Oh, God, there’s a car there, and there’s one over there, too. I can’t find parking sometimes— that’s really weird to me.”
Her previous shows have followed her hopes and fears of becoming a mom, and then her marriage, divorce and single parenthood to a 10-year-old, all underlined by the challenges that come with being a woman in Hollywood.
Yes, it’s all funny — incredibly funny — and fueled by Weedman’s rapid-fire delivery. She pulls in a dizzying array of references from multiple genres, non sequiturs and alternative realities. This woman can’t be stopped. The comedy comes at you fast.
On her last visit, in 2016, she introduced Boise audiences to Tammy Lisa in “What Went Wrong,” a cabaret performance in which she sang songs as Tammy Lisa, and injected the narrative of her post-divorce struggles as Weedman.
Here she goes further, and it’s even more personal, as she delves into issues of identity, future hopes and fears, dreams, finances and basically functioning in society.
For this show she has worked with first-time director Erica Beeney, who comes from both TV and film. “She’s new to this,” Weedman says, “But I knew she would get it, and she did.”
She also worked with Boise musician Thomas Paul for this iteration of Tammy Lisa’s original music. This isn’t a musical, she says, but more of a play with music.
Weedman says she worked on this show for about seven years, in between other projects, TV appearances, life and her now 10-year-old son’s schedule.
“This being a single mom is a real time crunch,” she says.
Go see it
“Tammy Lisa/Misery to Meaning,” 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 29, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 30, 7 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 4, and Thursday, Dec. 5, 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 6, 2 and 8 p.m Saturday, Dec. 7. Boise Contemporary Theater, 854 Fulton St. $28-38 general, $18 students for any performance at BCTheater.org or 208-331-9224.
