Two-Person Play

A two-person play demands special treatment to be successful. Obviously, it is difficult for only two people to hold an audience's attention for ninety minutes. To do so, the actors have to captivate the audience with rich dialogue and the sheer strength of the characters' personalities. The audience has to care about what is happening between the two people onstage. Physical actions, such as Weller's overturning of the table, and sight gags, such as Fonsia's forgetting the card stuck between her lips, help keep the audience busy watching every gesture as well as hanging on every word. In such a concentrated format, every little action carries a lot of weight.

Movements around the stage relieve the tedium, but they must be motivated, of course, by what is going on. Random movements for the sake of breaking up the scene do not fool the audience. In The Gin...