The Two-Character Play by Tennessee Williams(New Direct...

The Two-Character Play by Tennessee Williams

(New Directions, 1979)

 

I bought and read this copy of Tennessee Williams' oft-revised and retitled play many years ago, and I remember that I found it beautiful and intriguing.  I feel the same after re-reading it now.

The Two-Character Play is in many ways a very pure and piercing distillation of Williams' theater.  Its structure is simple, yet ingenious: the play takes place before and after a performance of The Two-Character Play, which was written by Felice and performed by him and his sister Clare.  In it, they play themselves: two adult children whose father murders their mother and then shoots himself.  They are left behind in the now haunted house, too damaged and frightened to leave it.  The situation in which the give their final performance of the play is equally pathetic: they have been abandoned by the company while on a long and financially disastrous tour, and must perform the play in a cold dark theater before a disappearing audience.

Felice and Clare are both terribly damaged yet resilient, and they know that if the tour fails, as it obviously has, their only alternatives are the State Mental Institution or death.  So there is a lot at stake and they fight valiantly and poignantly with and against each other to transcend themselves by finding an ending to the play, which they sink back into when all else is lost.

This play has never been successfully produced.  It may be unplayable, with the pathos and drama curdling into bathos and melodrama when enacted, but I think that with  two very fine actors and a brilliant director (and designer--the stage world is complicated) it could be heartbreaking and beautiful, for at its essence is an almost unbearable flickering flame of Williams' sad and broken genius.

Michele Williams as Claire and Dennis Coard as Felice  in a 2014 production of The Two-Character Play directed by Catherine Hill at the Winterfall Theater in Melbourne, Australia