WingSpan Theater Company opened Tennessee Williams’s 1967 surreal drama, The Two Character Play, October 9, 2014 at The Bath House Cultural Center. Kevin Scott Keating and Lulu Ward star.
Felice (Keating), an aging actor heading into obscurity, and his sister, Clare (Ward), are trapped in an untenable situation. Felice, also a writer and director, is desperately attempting to get his play produced. All their company members and stagehands have left the group since they haven't been paid. Felice and Clare remain on a stage in a theater in an unnamed backwater town with only a partial set thrown up by the stagehands before they left. Felice and Clare also aren't sure of their lines, but Felice assures Clare that "if we dry up, we'll just improvise." They are also forced to improvise the missing props and parts of the set. In Act II, we learn that their father killed their mother and then himself after she threatened to have him committed to the lunatic asylum.
Felice and Clare are prisoners in the theater, as the doors are locked, and they have no way out. Since they have no money for a hotel, they decide they may as well sleep on the set. As Felice says, practically and metaphorically, “theaters are prisons for actors and playwrights.” During the course of the play, there are moments when Clare channels Blanche Du Bois (A Streetcar Named Desire), and both characters evoke moments in Patrick Hamilton's Gaslight. Toss in a few sprinkles of Night of the Iguana and a pinch of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and you have a recipe conjuring up all the nut cases for which Williams is famous.
The Two Character Play is partly autobiographical, with Clare patterned after Williams's mentally unbalanced sister, Rose, and Felice patterned after Williams. The actors weave in and out of their characters in the play-within-a-play as well as their real-life characters, and neither they nor the audience are quite sure which is reality and which is illusion. The play ends with -- or does it?
Keating and Ward turn in masterful performances, and WingSpan founding artistic director, Susan Sargeant, stages this play flawlessly. The performance would be even more riveting if the actors turned down the vocal volume which is ear splitting in this intimate black-box theater where less is more.
