‘Two Rooms’ Is Steeped in Politics, History

Can a politically motivated play be meaningful to an audience 10 years later?

Director Nelson Handel, who is staging the L.A. premiere of Lee Blessing’s “Two Rooms” at North Hollywood’s Jewel Box Theatre, thinks the play’s message is stronger today than when Blessing wrote it in the 1980s.

Handel was given the L.A. performing rights to the play by Blessing four or five years ago. He is glad, he said, that he hasn’t been able to stage the work till now.

“It’s a very potent and dynamic script,” Handel said. “I kept pulling it out and reading it, and as the years went by I thought it became more resonant, and more relevant to our time.”

The middle ‘80s was a time of fear and uncertainty, Handel said, when the Beirut hostage crisis was uppermost in the minds of the American public.

“Back then, it was a little close to the events, and it felt a little ripped from the headlines,” he said. “The themes of the public and the private, how politics affect the individual, and the nature of individual action and political power have become more salient to our lives. The play has a scope now that it didn’t have then.”

The plot concerns a college professor named Laine Wells, whose husband is being held hostage in Beirut. Unable to maneuver the authorities to action, Wells moves into her husband’s study, stripping it completely to approximate the cell he is in halfway around the world. It becomes two rooms, a hopeless prison and a center for her anger and frustration.

“Into this room,” Handel said, “she invites two people. One is a liberal, crusading reporter who encourages her to tell her story to the public and to put pressure on the government. The other is a conservative member of the Reagan State Department, whose charge is to keep her quiet, to keep her from embarrassing herself and the government by complicating their negotiations. In this room they play out their little chess game.”

In his cell, the husband speaks monologues in the form of love letters to his wife.

What attracted Handel to the play, he said, is that it looks at the political through the lens of the personal. On one side it’s the story of a love torn apart. Onto this is grafted Blessing’s exploration of power, how people create power in the world, and how power infects people.

“That’s something that we all know something about,” Handel said.

Handel is working with Rose Portillo, who plays Laine Wells. Both the director and actor are drawn to plays with political themes. Portillo was in the original Mark Taper Forum and Broadway productions of “Zoot Suit,” and also starred in San Diego Repertory’s West Coast premiere of “Death and the Maiden.”

“There’s such strong poetry in this piece, and there’s enough distance from the actual events that the poetry can be heard now,” Portillo said. “And there is the journey this woman takes in finding her own voice.”

The play also affords a view of the consequences of politics on the lives of ordinary people--who get killed, get kidnapped, have their lives torn apart.

“This play,” Handel said, “takes us inside those lives in a way that connects it to us personally.”

Portillo expanded on Handel’s statement. “We are reflections of each other, reflections of society in our homes, in our personal lives,” she said. “This piece holds the mirror out there, so you can see how the personal is political, and the political is personal.”

* “Two Rooms,” Jewel Box Theatre, 10426 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Ends March 9. $22. (213) 660-8587.

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Bits and Pieces: In an effort to save their venue, Interact Theatre Company had scheduled a benefit performance of their current hit production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” for the middle of January. But scheduling difficulties forced them to move the event to Feb. 16. So there’s still time to give some support to this little gem of a Valley company, whose fund-raising deadline is imminent. The tickets for this bash are $50, which includes a champagne and hors d’oeuvres reception at 6:30 p.m., and the special performance of “Into the Woods,” which begins at 7:30 p.m. For reservations, call (213) 876-8980.

Playwright-director Angela Wayne Randazzo’s “A Crash Course in Herstory” is playing Sundays at 2 p.m. through Feb. 2, at The Bitter Truth in North Hollywood. The play, according to press material, presents historical events from a decidedly feminist perspective and simultaneously punctures stereotypes. For reservations, call (818) 766-9702.