Review: TWO ROOMS Presents Two Portraits of Hostage Torment – and Two Portraits of Manipulation

Lee Blessing isn't one of those playwrights who typically come to mind when we make out our shortlists of voices that need to be heard, essential plays we must program. Yet with the current Three Bone Theatre production of TWO ROOMS at UpStage, I've now seen at least a half dozen Blessing plays in Charlotte, nearly as many as those written by the far more prestigious David Mamet and Tennessee Williams, more than we've had from Arthur Miller.

Eleemosynary, The Real Billy the Kid, and A Walk in the Woods are the Blessing pieces I've seen with the most staying power. Less celebrated or produced than any of those, Two Rooms surprised me, showing what Blessing can do when he's fired up, lets loose of his elegant braininess, and passionately dramatizes his points. It's also more topically urgent than those more familiar titles, dealing with terrorism and hostage situations that still plague us 25 years after this play was written, questioning the roles that our government and our press corps should play when terrorists use their captives as political pawns and bargaining chips.

Michael was an instructor at an American university in Beirut when he was taken captive. He's blindfolded and alone in an unlit room when we first see him, already unsure how long he's been there. Yet he speaks out, not to us but in messages he imagines himself composing to his wife Lainie. She has escaped from Beirut and has transformed his office in the US into a replica of his prison cell by removing all his possessions and blocking out all of the light coming from outside.

Lainie says that she has done all this so she can feel Michael's presence, but it's obvious that, to some degree, she's identifying with him and replicating his torments. Michael's room and Lainie's room are very much the same room at UpStage, but her imaginings are more vivid, bringing her husband to her across the miles and removing his blindfold when they converse. Considering how loudly Michael bemoans his foolishness, staying in a city where the inevitability of his fate surrounded him every time he walked the anarchic streets, I was surprised how the atmosphere mellowed to a near meditative calm as Lainie put down a simple area rug in her vacant room.

The dynamism of TWO ROOMS comes from the two people who intrude upon Lainie as she habitually seeks to evoke the spirit of her husband. Each of them has an agenda. Ellen, assigned to Lainie by the State Department, wants to keep Lainie pacified and quiet, maybe even informed of new developments if there are any negotiations about Michael's release. But of course, the US staunchly refuses to negotiate with terrorists, so Ellen's main object seems to be making sure that Lainie is neutralized.

Walker, a newspaper reporter, wants Lainie to speak out, more fully convinced than the increasingly suspicious wife that the government is doing absolutely nothing to effect her husband's freedom. Is it really dangerous for Lainie to talk with the press? Do Walker's motives really go no further than landing an exclusive interview? Watching Lainie's encounters with the government and the press, I could share her shaky trust in both of them. Both seem to want to do what's best for Michael. But what is best? Does anybody know?

Two days after the Paris massacres, those questions seemed as fresh and insoluble as they were in 1990. Director Thom Tonetti certainly isn't spoiling things by tilting toward either Ellen or Walker. Nor has he decreed that Tom LaPorte should be cuddly and Gandhi-like enduring his captivity as Michael. LaPorte is rather shrill in his outcries and tends to bellow his discontents. He seems to have gotten it into his head that the injustice visited upon him by marauding youths of Beirut - some of them may have been his students! -requires urgent action right now rather than prudential patience and hope. Folks at the State Department might be upset if they witnessed the rawness of Michael's impatience, anger, and despair.

As expected, Carmen Bartlett shows us that Lainie's sufferings are very much parallel to Michael's. But her freedom, while an undeniable luxury, adds torments of their own. Aside from saddling her with guilt - after all, she had lived in Beirut with her husband prior to his abduction - Lainie's freedom afflicts her with choices. Should she be the quiet, stoical housewife living on hope as our do-nothing government advises or should she risk enflaming the terrorists by shouting out her frustrations to the media?

Hair combed severely back, Jen Altizer is the picture of cold efficiency as Ellen. She has more than enough self-control to make you question whether anything she says isn't merely the company line - whether she has any personal empathy toward Lainie. Along the way, as the ordeal goes on and she unavoidably gets to know Lainie and her torment, we can also see the stress wearing on Ellen. Her government, Lainie, and Walker all give her ample reasons for frustration.

With a slovenliness that corresponds well with what you might observe in several of our Charlotte journalists, Joe Rux makes Walker a reporter whose heart is definitely in the right place vis-à-vis Michael. Yet he's not immune to charges of being indiscreet, a dangerous loose cannon, or even persistently and recklessly ambitious. Since his heart is in the right place, a certain intimacy forms between Lainie and Walker on their vigils. Nor is Walker insensitive to the fact that Lainie's vigil, hoping for her husband's safe return, is more important than his, hoping for his exclusive interview.

We're not in the lofty realm of Cold War summitry here as we were in Blessing's A Walk in the Woods, but on a more earthly plane, Ellen and Walker serve similarly as ambassadors, respectively representing the government and the press. On some level - the level at which we count on these institutions to protect us and safeguard our freedoms - Michael and Lainie come to represent "We the People." No, this isn't easy stuff, and it doesn't seem to be getting any easier.

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