‘The Two Hander’
Written by Julia Blauvelt
Directed by SuzAnne Barabas
New Jersey Repertory Company, Long Branch, New Jersey
Through May 19

“The Two-Hander,” is a play about therapy, a practice that is itself a bit theatrical. It has a stage (the therapist’s office), a prop,(the couch), two protagonists (the therapist and patient), and a script (questions about childhood, say). Like the theater, therapy can be both sincere and stilted. They both trade in masks, and maintain that you can talk yourself into trouble or to the truth. “The Two-Hander” reminds that theater can be its own therapy.

The play, written by Julia Blauvelt and directed by SuzAnne Barabas, stars Jill Eikenberry as Diana Walker, a therapist with a Classics degree who quotes Ovid, eats out of Chinese food cartons, and contends with an office rapidly falling to ruin. Her patient is Claire Fields, played by Ella Dershowitz. Their sessions  stretch over more than a year, and their relationship runs hot and cold, intimate and estranged. Both women are in full possession of their roles.

Claire arrives at Diana’s office a mess — self critical and fearful, a portrait of contemporary urban millennial ennui. She is a writer who can’t write and instead works at “Tickets, Tickets, Tickets,” not the vocation she imagined when she put fingers to keyboard in college. Her relationship with her boyfriend is best described as something between a cul-de-sac and a dead end. Unnamed childhood trauma stalk her like a stubborn shadow.

Diana has her own demons. For one, she is in constant conversational combat with her superintendent, Gary, to fix the heat in the winter and the air conditioner in the summer. This is memento mori by way of a HVAC system. More seriously, Diana’s mind, once a steel trap for the details of poetry and patients, is melting away. “The Two Hander” is, among other things, an affecting portrayal of a lioness in winter. 

The writing is sharp and the staging is persuasive, so much so that I heard one audience member remark that she felt that she was in her own therapist’s office. Ms. Dershowitz, whose father is a Sun columnist, and Ms. Eikenberry expertly convey the pulse of these sessions — the staccato frustrations, grinding boredom, and occasional breakthrough. Claire, we are meant to understand, has much work to do to become the best version of herself. 

Ever since Sigmund Freud began expounding on Eros and Id at his apartments at Berggasse at Vienna, therapy has attracted its share of skeptics. Another Viennese, Karl Kraus, quipped that “it is the disease of which it purports to be the cure.” More recently, the writer Abigail Shrier blames the mental health industry for making children miserable. The JAMA Forum reports that 38 percent more people are in treatment now than were before the pandemic. 

Are we happier, though? The White House declared last year that “Our nation is facing a mental health crisis.” A study published last year found that across 19 clinical trials, the “evidence for shorter versus longer-term psychotherapy for adult mental health disorders is currently unclear” and that more trials “are urgently needed.” Another study discovered that dancing and walking are more effective at treating depression than therapy.

“The Two Hander” delivers a muddled verdict on that score. The final session — the play’s denouement — is a confrontation of rage and tears. If this is progress, it is an ambiguous sort. Claire, incandescent with disillusion, feels betrayed by Diana’s faltering mind. They reconcile, but one wonders about the worth of all those sessions. Still, Ms. Dershowitz and Ms. Eikenberry achieve indelible performances that will long sear the subconscious even of the skeptical.