Tennessee Williams's "Two Character Play'

"They don't understand it, but they will, one day."

Those were Tennessee Williams's apocryphal words about his autobiographical play, Outcry, now receiving a searing revival at the New World Stages in New York. It's been renamed The Two Character Play, and while it took me all of its two hours to get a glimmer of what was going on, the effort was more than worthwhile.

It's quite a surprise to discover a rarely performed play by the author of A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof — one that sums up his extraordinary life in the theater.

It's a bewildering ride. The bare set (save for a random sofa and chair) and the two strange characters who wander in at the top call to mind Beckett's bleakest landscapes, rather than the exotic, flamboyant settings of Williams's early plays (Streetcar, Cat, Night of the Iguana).

Brink of delusion

"To play with fear is to play with fire," goes the first line. Wait a moment— where are we now? In a Pinter play? No, more like Pirandello's Six Characters In Search of An Author, we soon learn, as The Two Character Play turns out to be a highly metatheatrical exercise.

As far as I was could determine, Williams's two characters, Clare and Felice, are preparing for and performing a play called The Two Character Play, written by Felice himself"“ a play they've been touring and performing for some time. They're exhausted (to the brink of delusion, in the case of Clare), and yet they persist.

During the course of the evening, Claire and Felice (played with brilliant intensity by Amanda Plummer and Brad Dourif) will break character and talk to each other (as well as the audience) as actors— about the agony of writing and performing in the theater.

Sanity or madness?

Felice is a dead ringer for the title character in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, while the fragile Clare is an amalgam of Laura (Menagerie), Blanche (Streetcar) and Alexandra del Lago (Sweet Bird of Youth). At times you don't know whether you're witnessing real life or a play or a play-within-a-play— reality or illusion, sanity or madness.

But you don't doubt that you're witnessing autobiography. In fact, at times I found The Two Character Play too painful to watch, owing to the unmistakable "outcry" of Tennessee Williams's own voice that kept resounding throughout the performance.

The Two Character Play was written deep in the early "'70s, the period of Williams's tragic decline. After his stunning successes in the 1940s and 1950s and then The Night of the Iguana (1961), Williams's playwriting career had taken a sharp dramatic downturn. A combination of harsh reviews plus the institutionalization of his beloved sister Rose (after a lobotomy) left him vulnerable and paranoid. He sank deeper into depression, alcoholism and drugs.

Comeback attempt

"This is his last play," Clare tells the audience, referring to her co- actor/playwright Felice toward the end of The Two Character Play. "There's nothing after this."

That could have been Williams's epitaph, too: The Two Character Play opened on Broadway in 1973 and ran only ten performances. But Williams bravely went on to write ten more plays, trying desperately to make a comeback, before he was found dead in the Hotel Elysee in New York in 1983, at the age of 71.

"This theater is our prison", cries Clare, when she and Felice realize that they're trapped inside the theater after their performance and can't get out. Was that Williams's cry, too?

Possibly. And yet it's what kept him going for another decade.

"It's our home," adds Clare "“ and it was Tennessee Williams's, too.

One night in Philadelphia

The Two Character Play is an agonizing glimpse into the darkness of Tennessee Williams's soul in decline. And yet I can't get the image of the playwright's smiling face out of my mind.

Years ago, in the mid-'70s, just after he wrote this play, I attended a performance of Iguana at Temple University and found myself sitting in the audience in front of a man who couldn't stop laughing. I turned around, and sure enough, it was the playwright himself. No one in the theater enjoyed the performance more than he.

Williams called The Two Character Play his cri de coeur—his "cry from the heart." "It is my most beautiful play since Streetcar," he insisted. I think he would have been pleased to know that, with this bracing new production, someone has heard his cry.






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