Among the darkened eaves of the Silliman Dramatic Attic, one can't help but feel a sense of claustrophobia. This entrapment is further intensified in the Silliman Dramat's production of Lee Blessing's Two Rooms, directed by Kellen Hertz, SM '97. Blessing's story chronicles a woman driven to make a room in her house as bare as the chamber in which her husband is being held hostage thousands of miles away.
The play opens with a monologue by Michael Wells (David Kear, SY '97), an American university professor being held hostage in Lebanon, a situation most could never envision, let alone experience. He is trapped in a "city in the hands of teenage boys, teenagers with AK-47s." His wife, Lainie (E.B. Randall, JE '96), waits at home in America, in a room that was once her husband's study. Without furniture, fresh air, or teaching work, Lainie forms a stifled relationship with a reporter, Walker Harris (Andrew Grusetskie, TD '98), who becomes emotionally involved with her as he writes a series of articles on her husband's situation. Walker probes into Lainie's life both on a personal and political level, making her private battles intensely public. She is cajoled into giving interviews and finally appearing on national television for the sake of her husband, yet possibly at the expense of other hostages. The fourth character in Lainie's sphere-or rather, box-is Ellen van Oss (Maia Brewton, DC '98), an adviser assigned to her by the State Department. Ellen acts as if she must afford some degree of emotional disconnection from her work in order to survive. Lainie is beleagered by these outsiders as she copes with the painful possibility of her husband's impending death.
Kear gives a powerful performance, as does Randall. Both play their roles with a passionate intensity that is carefully realized, an especially difficult task in such a small space. Brewton plays Ellen with measured poise, while Grusetskie skillfully portrays a reporter balancing a fine line between professional ambition and personal emotion. Hertz has worked hard with her actors, and it has paid off.
In a play with simple costumes, lighting, and visuals (some of the slides projected are actual photographs taken by former hostage Terry Anderson), it is Blessing's language that occupies center stage. Lainie's beautiful descriptions of birds (she is an ornithologist) become a simple metaphor for the art of survival, as her husband struggles with the same issues on the other side of the globe. Ellen lectures to the audience on the hostage situation as slides flash behind her, as if we are somehow to understand the justification for Michael's capture. Blessing demonstrates that there is little difference between the political and the personal. "I saw a hand lying in the street, unclaimed," Michael says in one of his monologues. "It wasn't so horrible as terrifyingly lonely." While Lainie expresses herself often by remaining silent, with muteness in the face of horror, it is also she who understands Michael's situation the best. "War isn't a tear in the fabric," she says. "War is the fabric."
Blessing wrote the play in 1990, commissioned by the La Jolla Playhouse. Given the politically and emotionally charged nature of the work, I wondered if Hertz might have some personal connection with the subject matter. "I wanted to explore how two consciousnesses can come together in one space," the director says. "And it's just a beautiful play." Indeed, Lainie and Michael's psyches do come together in a single space, both metaphorically as well as in their dreams and hopes. They are two people emotionally attached while physically disconnected. Lainie is driven to mourn for her husband as well as to hope he is alive, perhaps the most claustrophobic situation of all. In the final moments of the play, she sums up her disgust with the government, the media, and her husband's captors. "Everyone has done his best," she says, "and that's what frightens me."
Copyright 1996, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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