
The Two-Character Play (Out Cry)
by Tennessee Williams
The Bluver Theatre at The Drake
September 7 - 25, 2022
Directed by The Company and Peggy Mecham
SYNOPSIS OF SCENES
Before and after the performance: an evening in an unspecified locality.
During the performance: a nice afternoon in a deep Southern town called New Bethesda.

Costume Design
Millie Hiibel
Lighting Design
Shannon Zura
Scenic Design
Dirk Durossette
Sound Design
Christopher Colucci
Scenic Artist
Mona Maria Damian Ulmu
Technical Director
Tony Clemente
Production Manager
Bob Schmidt
Stage Management
Juliet Dempsey
Sound Engineer
Brent Hoyer
Photography
Johanna Austin / AustinArt.org
Photoshop Magic
Bill Brock
September 7 – 25
Wednesdays – Saturdays at 7:30 pm
Sundays at 2:30 pm
The Bluver Theatre at The Drake
302 S. Hicks Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102
Running Time: 90 minutes
The Two-Character Play has been Barrymore Recommended!
Reality and fantasy are interwoven with terrifying power as two actors on tour―brother and sister―find themselves deserted by the trope in a decrepit “state theatre in an unknown state.”
Faced (perhaps) by an audience expecting a performance, they enact “The Two-Character Play”―an illusions within an illusion, and “out cry” from isolation, panic and fear.
In the course of its evolution, several earlier versions of The Two-Character Play have been produced. The first, in 1967 in London and Chicago; the next, staged in 1973 in New York under the title Out Cry, was published by New Directions in 1973. The third version, produced in New York in 1975, was again titled The Two-Character Play, and is the one Tennessee Williams wished to include in New Directions’ The Theatre of Tennessee Williams series.
“I think it is my most beautiful play since Streetcar,” Tennessee Williams said, “and I’ve never stopped working on it….It is a cri de coeur, but then all creative work, all life, in a sense is a cri de coeur.”
“…a rarely-seen fever dream…an eternal folie à deux…they don’t just strike sparks.
They’re a raging conflagration that keeps changing form and direction.
Low on plot and high on poetry, it presents the painful spectacle of a talented, desperate mind chasing itself in circles.”
–Ben Brantley, The New York Times
“A doctor once told me that we were the bravest people he knew. I said “Why, that’s absurd, my brother and I are terrified of our shadows.” And he said, “Yes, I know, and that’s why I admire your courage so much…”” –Clare, from The Two-Character Play
BUY TICKETS
Please Note: There will be no performance on Sunday, September 18th.
The IRC is a 501C3 non-profit organization, and a member of The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and a participant in the Barrymore Awards, a program of Theatre Philadelphia. The IRC’s 2022 season is made possible, in part, by generous support from Wyncote Foundation; The Philadelphia Cultural Fund; The Bayard Walker, Jr. Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation; The Charlotte Cushman Foundation; The Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts program of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, administered regionally by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance; and The Virginia Brown Martin Fund of The Philadelphia Foundation, following a recommendation by Gene F. Dilks.
Reviews
The Two-Character Play (Outcry) (2022)
"I'm willing to venture that this material has never seemed so lucid, or emerged with such sweet poetry, as it does here."
--Cameron Kelsall, The Broad Street Review
"...brilliant, unflinching performances that tie us to their real-life counterparts as I’ve never seen before."
--David Fox, Parterre Box/Reclining Standards
"...leave it to Tina Brock and her mighty little Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium to choose to bring The Two Character Play to absurd life once more, and to make us feel all the crazy, despairing desperation it contains."
--Toby Zinman, Phindie
"The actors, consummate veterans, are ridiculously sublime... top of the line designers—sound, scene, lighting, costume, who know what they’re doing..."
--Kathryn Osenlund, Phindie
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
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2022 AUGUST 18-28 ● The Rose Tattoo in St, Louis
2022 SEPT 23-25 ● The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival
More information @ davidkaplandirector.com
Broad Street Review
September 10, 2022
by Cameron Kelsall
SAD SIBLING SQUABBLES
Philly Fringe 2022: IRC presents Tennessee Williams’s The Two-Character Play
Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium specializes in the weird and wonderful world of late-career Tennessee Williams. Actor and director Tina Brock may have met her match in The Two-Character Play, a spindly oddity offered in a rare revival as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
Yet Brock and her intrepid collaborators—co-star John Zak and co-director Peggy Mecham—don’t merely face the challenges of this sometimes incomprehensible, often hilarious exploration of life in the theater and the constraints of family. They vanquish them. I’m willing to venture that this material has never seemed so lucid, or emerged with such sweet poetry, as it does here.
Written in 1969 and revised constantly during the final years of Williams’s life, The Two-Character Play follows a traveling brother-and-sister act on its last legs. Stranded in an unnamed Southern city in the middle of a tour that’s seen better days, Felice (Zak) and Clare (Brock) find themselves dead broke, abandoned by their company, and facing a hostile audience. What are they to do but soldier on?
The action collapses into a vivid haze of vaudevillian grandeur and harsh reality. As Felice and Clare enact the title entertainment for their hungry spectators—a melodramatic comedy about a pair of siblings dealing with the aftermath of their parents’ deaths—it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the facts of their lives from the fictions they portray.
Williams siblings
That’s at least part of the loopy fun of the piece, which finds energetic life in this production’s fleet pacing. Zak and Brock convey the anxious, delirious emotions of two people who only feel comfortable when they are inhabiting someone else’s skin. Felice and Clare frequently discuss the dangers of getting lost in the play—the potential trauma of extreme dissociation—but the audience senses they feel most alive when they slip behind the veil of make-believe.
That ebullience contrasts achingly with the bitter truth of the siblings’ backstage existence. Brock, never better as an actor, finds uncomfortable truths in Clare’s paranoia and her growing dependence on alcohol and amphetamines. Zak, a fine comic performer who’s just as adept in drama, shows the sad-sack responsibilities of holding their act together.
In the end, The Two-Character Play is also a tense and occasionally agonizing portrait of familial codependency. The relationship between Felice and Clare shares similarities with the sibling pairs found in Williams’s more heralded works: the doleful bond between Tom and Laura in The Glass Menagerie, the passionate antagonism of Blanche and Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire. It also echoes the playwright’s own devotion to his sister Rose, who was lobotomized in the 1940s. Brock, Zak, and Mecham’s direction communicates these uncomfortable but necessary bonds.
Ridiculous and recognizable
Dirk Durossette’s scenic design turns the Bluver Theatre at the Drake into a dilapidated, seedy showplace, which Shannon Dura lights in appropriately misty shadows. Millie Hiibel’s costumes limn the worlds of reality and fantasy, much like the text itself: Felice and Clare frequently look both ridiculous and recognizable. Christopher Mark Colucci has crafted an eerie soundtrack that underscores the action in just the right moments.
Near the start of the show, Clare reminds Felice of an encounter she had with a doctor, who remarked on their bravery. “I said, Why, that’s absurd,” she tells him. “My brother and I are terrified of our shadows.” That may be so, but Brock and her company are fearless.
WHAT, WHEN, WHERE
The Two-Character Play. By Tennessee Williams. Directed by Tina Brock, John Zak, and Peggy Mecham. $17-25. Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium. Through September 25, 2022, at the Bluver Theatre at the Drake, 302 Hicks Street, Philadelphia.
www.idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org.
Masks are required at all times in the theater.
ACCESSIBILITY
The Bluver Theatre at the Drake is a wheelchair-accessible venue with all-gender restrooms.
Parterre Box/Reclining Standards
September 11, 2022
by David Fox
Two characters in search of anagnorisis
Philadelphia's memorably if quirkily named Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium deserves to be better known.
In recent months, several prominent New York critics have acknowledged and celebrated a few theaters outside the Big Apple. As a Philadelphian, it’s gratifying to see some national recognition sent our way, although those mentions are usually limited to a couple of well-known companies – the Wilma, and Pig Iron in particular.
Deserving as they are, much of the most consistently strong and innovative work comes from smaller companies that should be better known. For me, the memorably if quirkily named Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium (IRC as it’s known locally) is at the top of that list.
The company, co-founded in 2006 by Producing Artistic Director and actor Tina Brock along with Bob Schmidt, has specialized in Absurdism, but not always in the way audiences might expect. Some classic examples of that genre feature prominently, including multiple productions of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and The Chairs.
But for my money, IRC’s work is most interesting—even revelatory—when Brock and company turn their absurdist interests to works that largely lie outside that category. The last four years have included exceptionally strong productions of plays as diverse as Christopher Durang’s Betty’s Summer Vacation, William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba, and Tennessee Williams’ Eccentricities of a Nightingale.
Another Williams’ rarity is on tap now for their return to live theater—The Two Character Play—and IRC’s interest in absurdism is an especially apt lens here.
As with so much later Williams, the piece has a checkered and rather bleak history. It premiered in London in 1967 and, reworked and retitled as Out Cry, made its way to Broadway—very briefly—in March 1973. A 2013 off-Broadway revival, again called The Two Character Play, fared rather better, though the behind-the-scenes antics of star Amanda Plummer threatened to overshadow the show itself.
I should say that in all versions I know, the core idea is the same: Felice and Clare are brother and sister, both presumably actors, and both mysteriously abandoned in a theater somewhere and sometime in the midst of a tour.
“Presumably” is a key word here. Again, as is so often the case with later Williams’ work, audiences will be better off if they check their desire for narrative coherence and conventional logic at the door.
To start with, there is Williams’ The Two Character Play—and the play-within-a-play that Felice and Clare are performing—which is also called “ The Two Character Play.” Are they separate? Intersecting? All one entity? After seeing and reading it at least a couple of time, I still couldn’t tell you. It’s one of many tantalizing ambiguities that prove stubbornly resistant to analysis.
To their credit, the IRC production (which lists “The Company and Peggy Meacham” as directors) is content to let the audience wonder. Their approach instead is to steep us in a world that hauntingly blends backstage, onstage and the grim but mysteriously vague history that led to what we are watching.
Parts of the stage design by Dirk Durosette evoke a homey if slightly faded parlor from perhaps the 1920s—but look above it and you’ll see a kind of doll house suspended in the air. Off to the side sits a scaffold that looks like just what a contemporary designer would work on to install a set.
Cheerful technicolor scrims painted with sunflowers seem to appear and disappear before our eyes. Costumes by Millie Hiibel, Lighting by Shannon Zura, and sound by Christopher Colucci reinforce the ghostly but gripping sense of Felice and Clare’s “reality.”
It’s an appropriately destabilizing world to lead us into the play’s heart—a conversation between brother and sister that is permeated by the specter of family violence. We don’t know exactly what happened—and likely, Felice and Clare wouldn’t agree on that point—but it’s clearly been emotionally crippling.
The two seem condemned to live within this conversation while they are physically stuck inside the theater. For both, the very idea of the outside world is desired, feared, and ultimately unattainable.
It is in many ways a difficult work—funny, heartbreaking, but difficult. Yet Williams’ own devotion to The Two Character Play—he called it “the very heart of my life,” and continued to work on it for years—opens the door for us.
Siblings Felice and Clare almost certainly stand in for Williams himself and his adored sister Rose, who in her early 20s was subjected to a prefrontal lobotomy, and was institutionalized for the rest of her long life. The reasons for the surgery remain cloudy—suggestions of schizophrenia are noted, but her catalogue of symptoms is difficult to categorize, and many accounts of her behavior suggest that she was also a bit of hellion.
What clearly emerges is that Rose was a source of deep embarrassment to her parents—and that Tennessee never forgave himself for failing to “save” her. After the surgery, he, and later his estate, paid for her care; Rose would outlive Tennessee by 13 years.
It’s universally understood that Rose served as the model for Laura in The Glass Menagerie, and most of us “know” her through this loving but domesticated and sentimentalized portrait. Astute audiences, though, might take note of Williams’ warning at the very beginning that we should not entirely trust his “memory play,” as he packs “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
The true revelation of IRC’s The Two Character Play is to so vividly connect Felice and Clare to Tennessee and Rose, and to provide a sense of that relationship which deeply enriches our understanding of the playwrights more familiar works.
The two actors here give brilliant, unflinching performances that tie us to their real-life counterparts as I’ve never seen before. John Zak (Felice) uncannily distills the Williams’ louche, shopworn sense of Southern grandeur.
Even more astonishing is Tina Brock’s Clare—and the resulting, illuminated-by-lightning sense of Rose Williams in all her complexity. By turns crude and coquettish, fierce and fragile, brilliantly funny and soul-crushingly tragic—Brock is simply unforgettable.
This is a show to make the trip from New York to see. Among many other virtues, it provides invaluable insights into the more familiar canon of America’s greatest playwright.
Photos by Johanna Austin
Phindie.com
September 9, 2022
by Toby Zinman
TWO-CHARACTER PLAY (IRC): 2022 Fringe review
Nobody writes crazy, despairing, desperate women like Tennessee. Late in his career, in the last years of his own crazy, despairing, desperate life, he wrote a bunch of plays that were trashed by the critics and walked-out-on by audiences. One of them was The Two-Character Play, originally titled, “Out Cry”—both titles are perfectly descriptive of the show.
So, with this show’s odd history of failure, leave it to Tina Brock and her mighty little Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium to choose to bring The Two Character Play to absurd life once more, and to make us feel the all the crazy, despairing desperation it contains. The success of this production—despite the inevitable confusions the script causes—is due to Brock’s terrific performance as Clare. John Zak plays Felice, her brother who is crazy, etc etc in his own right, but whose Southern accent is sometimes difficult to understand. (Didja see my slide from character to actor? Very much to the point More on this in a moment.). Brock and Zak have performed together before, and their chemistry serves the show well.
The point, if there is one, is that the brother (Williams’ surrogate) and his sister (surrogate for Williams’ sister Rose who debuted in the Williams canon in Glass Menagerie) are actors who have been touring a show called The Two-Character Play and have finally hit rock bottom. Their company has deserted them, the audience has fled and the theater is freezing cold, in contrast to the hot Southern afternoon of the play-within-the-play’s action.
They’re broke. The phone is disconnected; worse, they are trapped in the theater building which is locked, and, worst of all, they are trapped in their own irrational fears of going outside. The shifts up and back between the play and the play within the play are not as clear as they might be, although it finally doesn’t matter much. We understand that these are doomed people who will either starve (literally and metaphorically) or freeze.
Thus the theater becomes their prison—like the script Felice keeps getting “lost” in—and the doorless set (designed by Dirk Durossette) is suitably messy and impressionistic. A huge papier-mâché figure who oversees the action is deeply disconcerting. Clare’s costume (designed by Millie Hiibel) look like clothes, while Felice’s clothes look like a costume. Peggy Mecham who directs has wisely cut the intermission and gives us the play in 90 minutes.
[Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium at the Bluver Theater at the Drake, 302 S. Hicks Street] September 7-25, 2022; idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org
Phindie.com
September 15, 2022
by Kathryn Osenlund
Watching THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY (OUT-CRY) by Tennessee Williams
This play-within-a-play about a play takes place on the Bluver Theatre’s tiny stage, brightly lit, although called dim by the characters. The audience, up close and personal, is referred to frequently. The Two Character Play (Outcry) concerns a brother, Felice, and his fragile sister, Clare, trapped in a theater they cannot escape. Clare, caught in her own psychological prison, has heavy shades of The Glass Menagerie and Tennessee’s sister, Rose.
Clare and Felice, survivors of a horrific family tragedy, maintain a measure of understated compassion for each other and sustain hope where there is no hope, even as piano banging and unending bitter arguments distract them from their intractable plight. Tennessee Williams leaks out their story: There’s a father’s psychic paraphernalia and a growing sense of menace and a story of something that happened begins to spool out.
The actors, consummate veterans, are ridiculously sublime. John Zak can handle sensitive material or rough material, as he did in The Eccentricities of a Nightingale and The Alchemist. Also Jihad Jones & the Kalashnikov Babes, and even Caliban in The Tempest. Tina Brock, very well known for her Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, her absurdist bent, and her tight directing, needs no introduction.
Good direction by The Company and Peggy Mecham (Director, Irish Heritage Theatre) and top of the line designers—sound, scene, lighting, costume, who know what they’re doing… and so fitting to have Edvard Munch art on a screen.
Williams forces us to look into the haunted and mystic place where he had trapped himself in his life. Theater made him and raised him high. Much was expected – too much. Critics targeted Williams and made a Saint Sebastian of him. He went on because there was nothing to do but continue, and in the process spilled his guts out upon the boards. Pills and alcohol provided short-term succor but finally couldn’t pry blood from a drained play-dog. This is the way the world ends, this is his horrid cry in the gas-lit wilderness, the play he called ‘the very heart of my life.’ Tom Williams wound down like a clock until his ordeal ended, leaving behind an unequalled canon.
Sadness, self- imprisonment, sunflowers, and a monstrous grotesque statue hiding on the side of the stage. Watching The Two Character Play is harrowing. It can’t be tossed off as a bit of momentary whimsy. It’s a sterling performance by both actors of a pretty damn depressing play. While it is prime theater and arguably good for your soul, no one but a stone masochist would willingly sit through it twice. Should I go home or should I just shoot myself?
[Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium at the Bluver Theater at the Drake, 302 S. Hicks Street] September 7-25, 2022; idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org
Note: I count two degrees of separation between Tennessee and me: my best friend’s father slept with Tom, but not like that. They were boys in St. Louis. Tom Williams had ridden his bike over to the house. It got late, and rather than let him ride home in the dark, Tom was invited to stay the night. So the boys shared the bed.