STAGE REVIEW : Room for Improvement in La Jolla’s ‘Two Rooms’

Who knows why scripts get written? In the case of Lee Blessing’s “Two Rooms” at the La Jolla Playhouse, it may be because La Jolla’s artistic director, Des McAnuff, wanted a play about hostages; or because Blessing wanted to try a piece where two rooms halfway across the world were represented by one room; or because somebody wanted a play for Amanda Plummer.

“Two Rooms” opened Sunday at the playhouse’s adjunct theater, the Warren, and it is definitely a play for Amanda Plummer. She plays the wife of an American photographer held hostage in Lebanon (Jon De Vries.) She copes with this by sitting cross-legged on the floor of his office, which she has stripped as bare as his prison cell, and holding imaginary conversations with him, like Laura talking to her glass animals.

He is doing much the same thing in his cell, so a kind of communication is going on, at least for the theater audience--how satisfying it is for the participants we can’t tell.

But it’s fine with the U.S. State Department, represented by Jo Henderson. (Whom we immediately distrust, because she keeps thrusting her hands into the pockets of her tailored skirts like a man--it’s a wonder that McAnuff didn’t give her a pipe.) In Henderson’s view, it’s “appropriate behavior” for the wife of a hostage to lie low and leave the business of getting her husband back to “the professionals.”

This seems inappropriate behavior to reporter Brent Jennings, who wants Plummer to give him a big interview which will get the news out that hostage families don’t think the government is moving quickly enough (if at all) to get their loved ones home.

Plummer accuses him of merely wanting to get a big scoop, but for a time he convinces her that he really cares about people. So she does go public with her message, feeling that she has betrayed something very private and precious--and her decision doesn’t speed “the process” at all. In fact, it turns the system against her. She and her husband are reunited, but not in the flesh.

No actress since Mia Farrow plays child-women more vividly than Plummer, and it’s hard to see how else she could play this role. But one wishes Blessing had conceived the wife as an adult woman living in a world of real choices rather than this oversensitive waif. (Including the question of how to make a living during this crisis--Blessing vaguely defines Plummer as an “ecologist,” which seems to involve only two quick trips to the marshes every week.)

There’s an almost sickly amount of idealization going on here, a confusion between spiritual values and passivity. Rather than a person in touch with deeper truths than the compromised people around her, Plummer’s character comes off as a neurotic who might be hard-pressed to put up with an actual, in-the-flesh husband.

That’s counterproductive for any message that the play might have to offer about the risks of paying tribute to Caesar (here, the cynical process that surrounds both the taking and the liberating of political prisoners). It is also counterproductive to drama, which needs heroes--people working out of some sense of themselves--not victims.

The plot is also full of problems, possibly because the play feels as if it’s still in an early draft. Where, for example, are the couple’s parents and friends through this crisis? Has the wife chosen to isolate herself from them? (That would be interesting.)

Why, if the journalist is such an opportunist, does he overlook the golden opportunity to stage a confrontation between the wife and the government when her husband’s remains are shipped back to the States? (That really would make all the networks.)

“Two Rooms” is an idea for a play, but the idea has only been roughed out so far, and it’s to the credit of McAnuff and his company that the holes in the script aren’t more apparent than they are.

Henderson, for example, does a very smart job with her State Department agent, a straw man if there ever was one. De Vries as the imprisoned husband avoids the self-pity that absolutely would have sunk the play--despite the horrors he’s going through, we see that he’s also having the greatest adventure of his life.

Jennings is in trouble as the reporter, though: Lines that should crackle--as when he reveals his real cynicism--only sputter. As for Plummer, one would be more worried about her mannerisms if one hadn’t seen her play Eliza Doolittle last summer on Broadway. She does know how to play a grown-up if someone would write her one.

Plays Tuesdays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Closes July 31. Tickets $15-$24. Gilman and Rupertus drives, UCSD campus, La Jolla. (619) 534-3960.