first night: out cry, The Two-Character Play by tennessee williams @ THE LOWER DEPTHS THEATRE

Tracey E. Collins and Kyle Daigrepont in Out Cry (photo by Britney Werner)

​Out Cry: the Two-Character Play
Lower Depths Theatre at Loyola University
Review by Dorian Hatchett

The best way to turn a palace into a prison is to lock the doors.  Out Cry: the Two-Character Play by Tennessee Williams examines the compulsion of the artist to create art, and the inherent fragility of the human psyche.  

Endless poetry written in praise of the adaptability and kindness of the human heart completely discounts the truth. That for every love sonnet or ballad of fortitude, there's a sinister library of loss and depravity. Our hearts are monsters. That's why our ribs are cages.  

Tracey E. Collins is Clare. She's forceful and vibrant and hyperbolic and made of fear and bravado in equal measure. Her and her brother are trapped in the vicious cycle of the poor artist. The need to perform, to create, to produce is constant and endless. Without creating, there is no audience. Without an audience, the actor is alone and hungry with only their own thoughts to keep them company.  

Kyle Daigrepont is Felice. He is secretive and steadfast. He sees his sister's whimsy as weakness. His creativity stems from a deep well of responsibility, and like so many men, he considers himself rational. He's not, of course, but instead has convinced himself that his emotions are simply factual rather than facetious.  

Out Cry is among the most rarely staged of Williams’ work. He rewrote it constantly, from the first draft in 1966, to a second and third version in 1975. The demands of such intensity and deep range on a cast of two makes it difficult to cast and even more difficult to perform. Collins and Daigrepont are sublime in their roles.

At times hard to watch, simply overwhelmed in second hand desperation, the rapt audience seemed acutely aware that what they were watching was the active dissembling of two people, broken again and again on the wheel of creative license and expectation, and sharing something that may be folie à deux, or may just be aching truth.

The line between character and actor is blurred time and time again, as the play within a play flows back and forth between Felice and Clare and their character's needs on the stage within a stage, and the personal triumphs and sorrows of the actors playing them, on the stage that is their lives.

The final, quiet resolution to simply continue the play, because nothing ever ends, is distressing, but also allows the audience and actor alike to let go of the responsibility of knowing, and move on to acceptance. To get lost in this play is an honor, but also a pyrrhic victory of the highest order. The stage may be a prison for the actor, but Out Cry takes no prisoners.  

Out Cry: the Two Character Play runs through September 21st at the Lower Depths Theatre at Loyola University. Click here for more information and ticketing

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