The Two-Character Play

The Two-Character Play

Regina Bartkoff and Charles Schick, “The Two-Character Play”

I have been obsessed with Tennessee Williams’ The Two-Character Play foralmost my whole life at this point. I was captivated by it when I first discovered it. It scared me, beckoned me. It’s so rarely done. In fact, people don’t even know what it IS. It’s late Tennessee Williams, when he had lost the critical acclaim that swarmed around him as a younger man, and he was pushing the boundaries of his art, moving into abstract areas. Everyone wanted him to write another Streetcar or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He refused. Bob Dylan going electric, and turning his back (literally) on the boo-ing heckling audience. I’ve worked on it in every acting class I’ve ever taken, most memorably with John Strasberg (son of Lee). I feel protective of the play. Last year, a production of it actually happened in New York, starring Amanda Plummer and Brad Dourif. I went with my friend Dan. I was ready for my dream of the play to be RUINED. It wasn’t, although I don’t think Amanda Plummer was right for the role. This is a character who supposedly once played Cleopatra. You need someone grander. Faded grandeur, perhaps, but with the muscle-memory of Leading Lady attention. I was pleasantly surprised, though, by the production. It had some lovely moments, and seemed to realize how FUNNY the play was.

HOWEVER. Two nights ago, my friend Ted (also obsessed with this play) and I went to go see a production of Two-Character Play down in the East Village. Regina Bartkoff is an actress, and a longtime reader and commenter on my site. The first time I wrote about Two-Character Play, she commented, with the passion and fire and heat I recognized. She was obsessed with the play, too! The Internet can keep us separated, for sure, but it can also help us find one another. Regina first responded to a Two-Character Play reference on my site YEARS ago. A couple of months ago, she sent me an email, saying that she and her partner, Charles Schick, had finally received the rights to the play. And even though it came so quickly on the heels of the Amanda Plummer production, they decided to put it up. It was a years-long dream come true for the both of them. I was so excited for them! I hadn’t even MET them.

So Ted and I went to see it at their performance space, at 292 Theatre.

It was an absolutely captivating experience. Claire and Felice are brother and sister, trying to work through a traumatic event in their past by performing a play written by Felice. A play called The Two-Character Play. As they try to get through the play, with a dwindling audience out there in the dark, they start to mess with the play’s structure, making cuts, improvising, fighting over the narrative of their own childhood, basically. It’s a great play about theatre, and the art of acting: what it means to face the void.

Bartkoff and Schick had great rapport with one another, and it was such a delight to see how much humor and tenderness they found in this often very strange piece of work. Their increasing panic was palpable, as they realized they were locked in the theatre, no way out. One of the things I loved so much about both of them in these roles is that they were truly wrestling with the underlying subtext and drive of Williams’ play: “The play is the thing.” When an actor is lost, how does he find himself? He usually finds himself by “going back to the text”. Once you go “off text,” you are thrust into outer space, flailing for a handhold, and we see that go down in the Two-Character Play, as Felice and Claire force one another to face the unknown. The unknown territory of what lies BEYOND the script.

But when Regina and Charles’ Felice and Claire did decide to “go back into the play,” near the end, they did so with an aching tenderness. They were gentle with one another, helping one another get back into the mood so they could re-enter the play. In the Amanda Plummer production, the moment was played with panic, which made them both seem like fantasists who didn’t want to deal with reality. It seems to me this was missing the point. It is so easy to make a choice to “judge” characters, to play them as “crazy”, to distance yourself from their reality. But what happened to Felice and Claire here was they they looked at one another, a glance passed between them, and they knew that even though the doors and windows of the theatre were locked, there was actually a “way out”. And that was through “going back into the play.” Once inside the play, they would FIND their “way out.”

Seen in that context, and played in the way it was played by Schick and Bartkoff, the ending of the play did not seem tragic or “crazy” at all. They weren’t avoiding reality. They were facing it through the deeper and truer reality of theatre. It was redemptive. Hopeful. It was almost (not quite, but almost) triumphant. Artists are weird people. Let’s take that as a given. The majority of people in the world do not spend the majority of their time playing make-believe. But artists do. And “make believe” is often truer than reality. True Transformation can occur there.

The way Schick helped Bartkoff off with her coat, in order to get back into the summery world of the play, was gentle. She submitted to his help gently. She was ready. He was ready. They were going to find a way out. Together. It was not only refreshing to see the moment played that way, it was so moving that I was in tears.

It was a beautiful, haunting, playful, and funny production. Ted and I couldn’t stop talking about it as we walked crosstown for our subway. We hung out afterwards and got to meet Regina and Charles, and we stood around talking for a while, and it was a beautiful time of connection. I feel like I “know” Regina, just from her comments here, but it was so awesome to see her in real-time, to talk with her, to see her as an actress. She’s wonderful.

They are good and true artists, artists who have cracked open the tender hopeful heart of Tennessee Williams’ little-known play.

The production is running until April 26th. New Yorkers, if you’re looking for an intense and interesting night of theatre, highlighting a late play by one of our greatest playwrights, you should definitely check it out. Information here.