A Director's Notes

THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY AND MATISSE

BY DAVID KAPLAN

In the winter of 2012, a few months before Tennessee Williams’ The Two-Character Play  began a run in Manhattan, there was a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art about Matisse becoming Matisse.  Forty-nine paintings were shown for purposes of comparison. With Tennessee Williams and his repurposing of realism in mind, I stopped to stare at a pair of paintings. On the canvas I suppose was painted first, Matisse depicted the corner of a room with a view—of Nice I think. There’s curved iron grille work below a window, two goldfish hang in a glass bucket, a leggy houseplant curves up out of a little terracotta pot, there’s a plain table, a pillowed couch, an empty bowl, all of these painted as if in the diffused blue of twilight, arranged as conventionally as they would be in a photograph.

The other painting of the pair contains the same things arranged in a different composition: the iron curves float in the air behind and below the fish, which still hang in the glass bucket. The plant droops from behind the bucket. We don’t see the little terracotta pot, an orange on the table replaces it, rhyming the color of the fish. The couch and the pillows are flattened to colored trapezoids as are the walls and the floor. There is no view, there is no room.

We’re looking at a point of view.

And that’s how Matisse became Matisse, by mastering the elements of realistic composition and then recombining them into something essential, thereby creating a painting that was frankly a painting—and its subject matter is as much painting as it is any nice or Nice view.

Tennessee Williams is doing the same with The Two-Character Play: the conspiratorial relationship of brother and sister he’d written about in The Glass Menagerie—and lived all his life—is reconfigured past realism or reality to become a play about a play.

Why? Because, three decades after Glass Menagerie opened in Chicago, Tennessee Williams had thirty more years to think about his subject matter, and he knew more, and he felt more—and differently —about his subject matter. Her name, Rose, crops up in nearly every Williams’ play like the Ninas in a Hirschfeld, but in this play once only, when the playwright-brother tells his sister:

“I know what to do.”

And she replies:

“Oh, do you? What is it? To sit there staring all day at a threadbare rose in a carpet until it withers?”

Three decades after The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway, the playwright had time enough to reflect upon his ability to turn memories into stage business: enjoying international fame, making a good living by entertaining strangers with the intimacies of his family, while Rose was lobotomized and kept apart from the world in a series of institutions. In The Two-Character Play a brother has written a play for himself and his sister to perform, and the playwright’s sister has feelings about being cast in her brother’s play, which she’s been touring around the world for, well, probably as long as The Glass Menagerie has been tinkling away on stages throughout the world.

The same elements that construct the illusion of the Menagerie living-room recombine in The Two-Character Play’s stagy setting: the soap bubble of happy memories, self-crippling shyness, the braggadocio of a born story-teller, Southern gentility facing the shame of owing money at the Jewish Deli—Garfinkel’s in Menagerie, Grossman’s in Two-Character.

The Two-Character Play is a play about the making and makers of artifice, fueled by the same realities that fuel the Glass Menagerie: the realities of pride and regret, love and disappointment, and—as in all of Williams’ plays—the reality that words can be incantations of light against the dark.

By removing the responsibility of creating a stage illusion from his words, in The Two-Character Play Williams frees his play from portraiture and plotline as decisively as Matisse pulls our eyes out of the corner of a room to look instead at the center of an essence. In The Two-Character Play we look and listen to the essence of Williams’ writing, as the playwright-brother says to his sister while the stage lights dim:

“If we can imagine summer, we can imagine more light.”
Which brings the sister to a question:

“If we're lost in the play?”

In some editions of the text her words end with period, so it’s not a question but the sister’s statement. In all editions there’s the same response.

“Yes, completely lost in The Two-Character Play.”

 (In 2011, the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival presented The Two-Character Play directed by Gene David Kirk with the London production's stars, Catherine Cusack and Paul McEwan.)

Tenn Years: Tennessee Williams on Stage, essays by David Kaplan
Hansen Publishing Group, 2015

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954)
Interior with Goldfish, 1914
Oil on canvas; 57 7/8 x 38 3/16 in. (147 x 97 cm)
Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, Bequest of Baronne Eva Gourgaud, 1965
© 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

 

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954)
Goldfish and Palette, 1914
Oil on canvas; 57 3/4 x 44 1/4 in. (146.5 x 112.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift and bequest of Florene M. Schoenborn and Samuel A. Marx, 1964
© 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York