.jpg "061117_thearer_main")
SEEKING CONNECTIONS: Reporter + grieving wife. |
Lainie (Caris Vujcec) has stripped one room in her house of art, furniture, carpets, and even paint. She’s banished color and sunlight. The only comforts she allows are a bare mattress and the imagined presence of a man whom she imagines to be sleeping on a similar mattress, in a similar room, thousands of miles away. That man is her husband, Michael (Tom Butler), an American teacher being held as a hostage in 1980s Beirut, and Lainie is trying desperately to sustain their bond. The couple’s struggle in the face of chaotic world circumstances is the story of Lee Blessing’s harrowing 1988 drama Two Rooms, on stage at Portland Stage Company under the direction of Drew Barr.
The two rooms of the title are the stark chambers in which Michael and Lainie respectively endure his imprisonment, but they are staged as one room. It alternates as the setting for one and then the other lover’s monologues and imaginary conversations and, in doing so, also establishes a common psychological space — context-less, and easily a chamber in either lover’s mind — in which they try to meet and feel each other.
But for Lainie, the world impedes mercilessly upon this psychic haven she’s created. For one thing, there’s Ellen (the cool but admirably nuanced Moira Driscoll), Lainie’s liaison from the State Department, who’s cordial over tea but steely when it comes to laying down the party line. Lainie has the potential to create a real public-relations mess for the government, and Ellen’s job is to keep her placated despite the State Department’s evasive non-action in trying to free her husband.
Then, there’s the press. Instantly famous as a hostage wife, Lainie’s been barraged with phone calls from the very beginning, but a new challenge to her self-imposed solitude arrives in the person of reporter Walker Harris (Ken Forman, with affable fervor). An ambitious muck-raker, he encourages Lainie to use the media to force the government’s hand, and slowly wins his way into both her trust and the life that she keeps in Michael’s naked room.
As created by scenic designer Russell Metheny and lighting designer Rick Martin, this room is high and frighteningly blank but for its walls’ rough contours and seeping colors, which suggest concrete, stone, or clay. This Expressionistic setting of containment gives dazzling contrast to the rare occasions of concentrated light: rose or copper rectangles of light appear in different positions along the top of the wall, suggesting Michael’s only understanding of the passage of time; when an imagined Michael convinces Lainie to pull up the blind, the room and she are suddenly awash in gold.
Similarly, the moments that Michael and Lainie spend “together” stand in warm contrast to her otherwise often cold, angry, and emotionally primitive behavior. When she is with him, her body becomes supple, her face softens, she smiles, and there is music and ravishing leisure in her voice. In these moments of her illusion are our only glimpses of what once was the reality of this young woman, and Vujcec makes stark, intense work of the contrast.
