This play is history. This play is current events.
So reads the director's note for Brown and Green's latest production, Two Rooms. The thought-provoking discourse and edgy timeliness that the play provides is the reason I left the dress rehearsal Tuesday night sincerely proud of the work of the seven students involved and contemplating my own answers to the questions they posed.
Directed by senior Adam Sampieri, the four actors weave a tale onstage that examines our perceptions of politics, terrorism, media, war, peace and, most of all, love. It grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you, forcing you to doubt even the most sacred tenets of American thought and treat them as questions of objectivity, fairness and humanity. It doesn't tell you what to think, but instead screams, "This is the issue. This is what happened. Think about it," as senior Caroline Kessler, who plays Lainie in the play, describes.
Two Rooms, written by the acclaimed playwright Lee Blessing, draws from conflicts in the former Soviet Union, Beirut and throughout the Middle East. Writing in the late '80s, Blessing offers us a message that is as powerful and pertinent now as ever. It is at once infinitely quotable and barely touchable on the surface.
Two Rooms juxtaposes the life of a political prisoner in a cell in Beirut with that of a woman on American soil. It draws parallels between the physical and mental barriers we construct for ourselves and those imposed upon us in captivity.
Michael Wells (junior Daniel Smith), once a professor at American University in Beirut, is taken hostage by Shiites as ammunition for their cause. In an act of solidarity, Michael's wife Lainie transforms a home office into a cell with blinds drawn. The only company she enjoys is that of reporter Walker Harris (sophomore Doug Mishkin), who incessantly probes her to expose to the national media the U.S. government's ineffectiveness in returning her husband.
As the show professes, Americans have little concept of what it's like to fight for the ground on which they stand. Kessler explains that since Sept. 11, Americans have begun to experience the terror that other nations have ingrained into a collective identity. The play's conclusion leaves the audience asking how we're going to affect change in a world where we are often captive by more than physical barriers: lack of understanding, communication or concern. In a moment that defines the show's eerie applicability to present times, a woman from the State Department (senior Kristen Jackson) declares to the hostage's wife, "The Crusades are here again."
Set designer senior Vinny Eng creates a space that offers the illusion of an absence of time, with all set pieces suspended in air with the exception of a rug at center stage that serves as the play's focal point. This dark, barren shrine is Lainie's "fortress to devotion"- the one place she can "feel imperfectly just what he's experiencing." For both Lainie and Michael, this is not about politics, but love.
When Eng and Kessler watched a performance of Two Rooms last summer, it ignited their desire to revive the Brown and Green theater company for the production of the show. The group, originally formed two years ago, produced a single show before quickly disappearing into the campus backdrop.
"We fell in love with the words and the way we felt when we heard the words," Eng said. It's hard not to empathize.
This campus complains of a lack of intellectualism and indifference to current affairs and ethical issues. I'd argue that Two Rooms is a place of past and present foreign relations, internal struggles and questions of truth - somewhere to be anything but apathetic.
- Kim Roller
Two Rooms runs Feb. 27, 28, March 1 and 2 at 8 p.m. in 209 East Duke Building, East Campus. Admission is free.
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