'Two Rooms' shows difficulties of Middle East hostage situation

By Tim Sturtridge

Over the weekend students put together a ride of tension and fear and told an essay on the hell of other people.

“ Two Rooms” is not a play for the faint-hearted; it focuses on a hostage situation in Beirut, Lebanon. The hostage is an American professor who has been kidnapped by Shiite Muslims.

Fresno State’s Experimental Theatre Company, a completely student-orientated production company, brought the play to life. The play was held in the Lab School Theater. The intimate surrounds of the room brought the audience closer to the vulnerability of the two main protagonists—Michael, the kidnapped professor, and his wife, Lainie.

A cast of four acted on the sparse stage that featured few props to bring out the lonely, desperate despair and glimpses of hope the professor and his wife endure.

The play follows Michael, played by Blake Ellis, through two years of his three-year-long captivity in Beirut. Ellis comes on stage with cuts and bruises that, throughout the play, communicate his suffering to the audience.

Ellis’ character reveals his insights on Middle-Eastern conflict that he gains from his imprisonment. Americans have forgotten the desire of all humans to fight for land to call their own, he says. From inside his cramped cell, he tells how the Arabs view as an imperial sacrifice giving their lives to further their own people’s advancement.

“ War isn’t a tear in the fabric of things, war is the fabric itself,” Michael said.

Michael comes out in clean clothes near the end of the play, face free of cuts and bruises. He explains how he was being moved once again by his captors to a different location. He was brought momentarily into the outside world. He said for a brief time he felt free of his chains and thought of all that is good and bad in the world with unique clarity. Shortly after this, he was shot to death.

Lainie was played by Melissa Riordan. In an attempt to bring herself closer to her husband, she clears her husband’s home office and stays inside with the window closed. Riordan succeeds in putting herself in a position of feeling her husband’s pain and isolation.

A state department official and a reporter regularly visit Lainie.

The government constantly tells Riordan’s character the only thing she can do is hope. But after a year, her patience has been tested to the limit. She becomes involved with a reporter who cajoles her into speaking out on behalf of her and her husband, an act that goes against the government’s wishes.

The reporter, played by Anthony Riconan, uses the couple’s case to push his own agenda against the government and is convincing as the archetypal overzealous journalist.

Hannah Jenkins brings to life the state department official and staggers and stifles Lainie to the point of suffocation.

The dream sequences in which Michael and Lainie are together are moving. Josh Feemster demonstrates a keen eye for direction. While the scenes in “Two Rooms” feel repetitive at times, it’s excusable in that the play does follow a two-year span and these scenes add to the anguish of the slow-moving bureaucratic system we endure with the main protagonists.