A Journey Across 40 Years of Friendship

Five scenes spanning 40 years, Julie Jensen’s “Two-Headed” is about a lifelong friendship tested, challenged and shaped by the Mormon Church and patriarchal America. “I wanted to see how big a story I could tell with two people,” explained Jensen, a native of Beaver, Utah, whose most recent Los Angeles success was “Last Lists of My Mad Mother.”

In her 1998 work, subtitled a “play of history,” Jensen displays a taut sense of craft. The tautness has a downside; namely, a hypercalibrated quality to the banter. It’s tight enough to squeak. Yet “Two-Headed” offers a lot for two performers to investigate. There’s a coiled anger to Jensen’s work. The Timescape Arts Group production, part of the “Hot Properties” season presented by the L.A. County Arts Commission and A.S.K. Theater Projects, is a thing of precision and short, sharp conversational shocks.

The play’s characters start out at age 10 and end up at 50. Scene 1 unfolds in 1857, on the day of the Mountain Meadow massacre, in which Mormons called an attack on westward immigrants on the old Spanish Trail near Cedar City, Utah.

Lavinia (Mary Mara) witnessed the slaughter and has in her possession a souvenir--silk underwear worn by one of the dead. Fretful Hettie (Colette Kilroy) doesn’t believe Lavinia’s tale. She’s more interested in what Lavinia says can be found in the root cellar nearby: a pickled two-headed calf.

The unseen character Jane, object of Lavinia’s adoration, dies before Scene 2. She lies in an onstage coffin, with hungry crows heard squawking overhead. By now we see Lavinia increasingly fed up with Latter-day Saints doctrine. Lavinia’s father, disgraced by his shadowy involvement in the Mountain Meadow massacre, takes Hettie before Scene 3 as one of his wives, “plural marriages” being legal at this point in the 19th century. Major events remain offstage in “Two-Headed.” Jensen’s focus is on history’s offbeats. By the end, the women achieve something like peace, perspective, a horizon to call their own.

Jensen’s exchanges often play like telegraph dispatches, quick and jabbing. Director Veronica Brady lifts the performances slightly above the realistic plane. It works, mostly, and “Two-Headed” is right for the cozy scale of the (Inside) the Ford theater. Kilroy is very fine throughout, glancing on the more obvious pieties in Hettie, leavening everything with subtle wit.

Mara is more frustrating. Technically strong and displaying a varied ear for the dialogue, she manages to do a little too much in every scene for my taste and, I think, for the good of Jensen’s play. When she thumps wet clothes on a tree branch, the scene becomes about a furious woman thumping clothes on a tree branch, rather than that and other things.

As written, there’s too much of the savage truth-teller in Lavinia to begin with. With Jensen pointing up her characters’ contrasts awfully neatly and clearly, “Two-Headed” robs itself and its story of a layer of mystery. But the play has other things going for it. And this West Coast premiere is 1 2/3 effective.

*

* “Two-Headed,” (Inside) the Ford, John Anson Ford Theatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Feb. 25. $15-$20. (323) 461-3673. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

Colette Kilroy: Hettie

Mary Mara: Lavinia

Written by Julie Jensen. Directed by Veronica Brady. Scenic design by Patty Briles. Costumes by Sandy Kenyon. Lighting by Robert (Bobby) Fromer. Music and sound designer: Shark. Production stage manager: Amy London.