The Two of You’s three characters often break the fourth wall in an offbeat new work

By James MacKillop

Ithaca’s Kitchen Theatre Company, long ago hailed as upstate’s only off-Broadway theater, this year has become an incubator for new playwriting. Elsewhere what few “world premieres” one sees have been mixed pleasures; reactions are heightened with the author present, and that’s usually the end of it. Rachel Lampert, Kitchen’s artistic director, has run things differently. Her own original shows, musicals, dramas and dance narratives regularly do better business for her than works by Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco or Arthur Miller. 

Lampert’s The Soup Comes Last, performed in 2004 and 2008, and Adam Bock’s The Drunken City, which premiered at the Kitchen in summer 2005, have both gone on to acclaim in New York City. This year the betting is on Brian Dykstra’s two new plays, the first of which, The Two of You, has just opened.

Despite his short-term residence in Ithaca, Dykstra cannot be called a local author. Dykstra had national and international (Edinburgh Festival) exposure before his ecology-themed Clean Alternatives made a strong debut in Ithaca in 2006. Since then the Kitchen has staged his Strangerhorse (2007) and hosted his one-man self-described rant The Jesus Factor (2007 and 2008), which landed him on Rush Limbaugh’s big-brotherish “Watch List,” as an artist to be shunned by reactionaries. A rare white face on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, Dykstra’s voice is his own. Up close he’s like a cross between David Mamet and Noel Coward, without the coarseness of the former or the snobbery of the latter. Dykstra characters speak well but rapidly.

Henry aka Hank (Matthew Boston) is a moderately successful academic at an unnamed university in Boston, happily married for 20 years to Parker (Nance Williamson), a business professional of some kind with perhaps a bit more moxie than her husband. The set, designed by Brian Prather and lit by E.D. Intemann. makes the Kitchen’s postage-stamp stage look bigger than we’re used to seeing, indicative of urban affluence. We see the Boston skyline (Prudential and Hancock buildings) through a window, and there are plenty of books as well as upmarket furnishings. With things going so swimmingly for Henry and Parker, it would seem that there’s no opening to stick a wedge of tension between them—until the arrival of a beautiful young blonde with the unlikely name of January Aloha Ireland (Heather Frase).