Berkshires arts reviews

July 27, 2007 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Having lived in the Berkshires for years, I have come to know that exciting and provocative plays are a staple of the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Unicorn Theatre.

However, I went to Julie Jensen’s “Two-Headed” mainly to see again the two skilled actresses Corinna May and Diane Prusha who are strong contenders in any season for an acting award at the summer’s end, no matter what play they appear in.

Corrina May and Diane Prusha; photos by Kevin Sprague
In this play they are, as usual, magnificent, and the play, the subject matter which I was not sure I cared about, deeply moving, brilliantly staged and far-far more than “A play about Mormons.”

The matinee I saw was so riveting in its ninety minute, no intermission performance, that I would have willingly, after its standing ovation, taken a fifteen minute intermission stretch and returned to my seat to see it again.

Arrive early and have time to take in the setting, handsomely created by Aaron P. Mastin. Center stage is dominated by a huge tree. The action of the play, covering a forty year period in the late 19th century, begins and ends on the branches of the tree.

Up-stage right is a clothes line, very basic to the imaginative direction of Director Marc Geller. That clothes line links the scenes so brilliantly that years can pass and scenes change beneath the tree. And by the time the play ends, we will know what is locked in the great storage chest under it..

When the play begins the two actors are ten years old. Lavinia (May) is up in the tree, vivacious, rebellious, full of denial. She is teasing her (to be life-long friend) Hettie (Prusha) a less vivid, shy and literal-minded child. But her teasing is a part of her own dis-ease. She talks of her friend Janie and her desire that the two of them can grow up to be teachers. (an unlikely dream in a world where women are expected to become breeders.) She knows secrets that scare her and which she cannot quite bring herself to share with Hettie. She shares a locket but not its significance.

As the scenes change, the two women age, Hettie, at ease with her self-image and accepting of the role her life and religion have given her; and Lavinia, unable to combat her situation in action, finally accepting the polygamy that ruefully makes ridiculous a situation in which eventually Hettie is the second wife of Lavinia’s father so that Hettie’s children become literally Lavinia’s sisters..

The Mountain Meadows Massacre took place on Sept 11, 1857.

It remains a great blot on Mormon history. 127 men, women and children were killed in Utah on their way to settle in California. Their wagon trains were attacked as they passed through territory settled by the Mormons. A child was in the tree.

The child, Lavinia, has tried to repress the memory. In the play, her character, intelligent and defiant but in the end pulled into an outward conformity, is the more fascinating one.

But Hettie, as Prusha plays her, too accepting a plight she cannot control, is as compelling in her own way ,and though she is not as nimble as the slim agile Lavinia, will still in the end scale the tree, half understanding, too late, what two-headed really means. What the locked storage shed really holds. That the two-headed calf was only a metaphor which the play so brilliantly calls up..

That two-headed image is present again and again in the staging which at times can place characters far right and left of each other for a few moments. It can never be forgotten by Lavinia, but is there all through the years as the women age in shared moments—the two quilting under the tree and grieving for the first Janie, whose memory lives on in he naming of one of Lavinia’s children and Lavinia’s fierce dreams for her.

That two-headed image is there with Hettie, mother of eight and rotundly pregnant, coming for help from Lavinia, resentful wife, scrubbing clothes for the wash-line.

At the end of the play, when even the orotund Hettie has ascended the tree, I found myself moved to tears.

And the play became a much larger one, including the slaughter of innocents (and innocence) in many places and at many times, including, regretfully our own.

This is a provocative play, beautifully performed. The nights of post-play discussions will surely be lively ones.

And as a production it is flawless with the music and lights that weave the scene changes by the clothes line, the costumes, so designed that the characters can effortlessly age from ten to fifty, and the direction that keeps the stage of this two character play active and compelling.

William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” written in 1921 has been quoted often during recent days to deplore the times in which we live. They could as well be cited for the event that stands behind this play:

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned…”

This is an extremely moving play, impeccably presented.

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