Two Rooms

Publish date: 2024-02-17

Lee Blessing's 1988 "Two Rooms" is that rare political play that survives beyond its period not merely because it remains timely, but because its characters and conflict cut close to the bone.

Lee Blessing’s 1988 “Two Rooms” is that rare political play that survives beyond its period not merely because it remains timely, but because its characters and conflict cut close to the bone. The four-hander about a hostage in Lebanon and his worried wife at home is a favorite among college theater programs, largely because it’s easy to produce and hard to screw up. The Roust Theater Company gets across most of Blessing’s bite but not a lot of his nuance — the little production could use some understatement to keep things tighter.

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The gimmick in “Two Rooms” is that there’s actually only one room. Here, it’s Casey Smith’s austere square of appropriately hideous linoleum, populated by turns with the lonely Michael Wells (Joe Osheroff), who keeps getting shuffled between anonymous rooms around Beirut, and the desperate Lainie Wells (Tracy Hostmyer), who has remade her husband’s old study in the image of his confinement.

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Lainie’s meetings with government liaison Ellen Van Oss (Tori Davis) have gotten her nowhere, and now she’s thinking more and more seriously about taking local reporter Walker Harris (Garrett Lee Hendricks) up on his offer to write a series of articles about Michael’s predicament. Ellen is understandably nonplussed, but you can’t help blaming her: She says things like “We recognize the reality of the situation, then we inject hope into that reality” by way of consolation.

Though Lainie is the protagonist, Ellen is by far the most interesting character in the piece, and it helps the production enormously that Davis is the actor most prone to underplaying her lines. At first blush, Ellen is a corporate android: an empty power suit and not much more, representative of all the inscrutable or just plain stupid choices the U.S. has made in the Middle East. As the play goes on, though, it becomes clear that Ellen isn’t cold; she’s just socially awkward, and patriotic for reasons that, when explained, are surprisingly good.

Director James Phillip Gates has made some sloppy choices in this production, notably the use of photos from Al Jazeera, a network founded eight years after this play was written. There’s also a highly inappropriate ad-libbed audience participation section after intermission during which Ellen, in character, quizzes us on what it means to be an American. But the real difficulty here is that Gates has directed his actors, especially Hostmyer, to take themselves as seriously as possible, as often as possible, and a play with this kind of emotional heft doesn’t need histrionics to bolster it.

Still, if you listen carefully, you can hear Ellen explaining her rationale, you can see that Lainie has become unreasonable, and you’re left with more questions than answers, just as it was when Blessing wrote the play 20 years ago.

At the climax, Ellen describes the problem that foreign policy exists to solve: Everyone has done his or her best work, including her enemies. “That’s why I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to walk out of this room anymore. Into what? A world filled with people doing their best?”

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Two Rooms

Frankel Theater; 72 seats; $18 top

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