The script, which won Best Original Play on its 1982 debut, tells its story with such thunderous honesty that neither the passage of time nor Brian Heap’s mediocre restaging can diminish its impact.  Conceptually, Two Can Play exists at a busy four-way intersection—the gridlocked point of contact between male and female gender roles, and the national identities of Jamaica and America.

It is the story of Jim and Gloria, a firmly middle-class couple in a war-torn section of 1970s Kingston.  Their children are illegal immigrants in America, out of contact for fear of being deported.  Except for Jim’s deathly ill (and unseen) father, they live alone in their modestly-appointed house.  Troubles grow each day; gunshots rain each night.  And Jim wants out—he wants to leave Jamaica, and he wants to leave now.

Their attempt to reach America fills the first act, and the aftermath the second.  Along that journey, the ingrained rhythms of their relationship—who fixes dinner, where he goes on a Tuesday night, what she does in the bathroom—slowly fall out of step, until their interactions become the verbal equivalent of a horribly tone-deaf duet.  Rhone captures, like a photographer, a time-lapse portrait of the Jamaican marriage in collapse, its foundations eroded by year upon year of slights and oversights, squashed into the two-hour confines of modern drama.

Brian Heap, either due to a lack of resources, a lack of imagination, or some combination thereof, neglects to use most of the rudiments of theatre to enhance Rhone’s tour de force.  The set, intended to depict Jim and Gloria’s living quarters, is badly designed, scaled and arranged.  All exits and entrances happen, drearily, on the same upstage plane.  The size of the rooms, given their economic bracket, is improbably large.  And for walls, Heap uses an ad hoc collection of flats, seemingly grabbed from some long-forgotten storeroom, lacking even a color scheme to smooth the illusion.

Lighting and sound design are similarly uninspired, conferring little sense of day or night, much less the emotional states of the characters.  To understand what’s missing, imagine how unsatisfactory your car would be if it contained only the parts necessary to move from departure to destination.  The overall impression, in Two Can Play, is that of walking in on rehearsal night.  With a scheduled run of only six performances, such rough edges are unacceptable.

But you hardly notice those flaws, and maybe forget them entirely, once Alwyn Scott and Nadean Rawlins bring Jim and Gloria to life.  Rawlins is obviously the more intuitive and nuanced actor, but Scott manages to hold his own as the archetypal husband.  As Gloria, Rawlins finds the perpetually fatigued, frustrated equilibrium of her long-suffering housewife and allows the material to ratchet up her blood pressure, scene by scene, until the veins stand out in her neck.  She plays each moment with surety, unafraid to look ugly or foolish in front of an audience.

Scott, however, remains obstructed by his awareness that he is acting, and so cannot find the emotional range needed for Jim, a man whose artifices are harshly stripped away throughout the play.  His turn is competent, though unable to occupy the shadow of the original actor in the part—the late, great Charles Hyatt.

Trevor Rhone’s recent passing leaves Grace McGhie—the first Gloria—as the only remaining parent of Two Can Play.  Although recent headlines indicate that Kingston is still a bullet-riddled city, and although the line outside the American embassy grows ever longer, she can perhaps smile that at least two of her spiritual children (Rawlins and Scott) want to stay—and play—at home.

Who amongst us, almost four decades after its initial run, does not know its quintessentially Jamaican protagonist, the pragmatic and irrepressible trickster Ringo Smith?  He long ago escaped the typed page, long ago bounced off the Barn Theatre stage into our collective consciousness, more real to us than Paul Bogle or Marcus Garvey, men who lived and died but have since faded into the obscure purgatory of history textbooks and primary school walls.

Who amongst us, almost three million souls surrounded by white sand and water, is ignorant of its truths?  Smile Orange tells us about ourselves, as art should—about living in America’s shadow; about using what you have to get what you want; about wanting what you can’t have; about the white man and the black man and everything in between; and finally, about how Jamaica is, and must be, a place where these truths are self-evident.

And who amongst us is not indebted to its scribe, the incomparable Trevor Rhone?  The man cobbled together a rural childhood, a foreign education and an intractable dissatisfaction with his circumstance into a string of stage plays stretching from The Gadget (1969) and Smile Orange (1971) to Old Story Time (1979) and Two Can Play (1982). Even that impressive list underrepresents his contribution to the ongoing experiment called Jamaica—for instance, co-writing The Harder They Come (1972) with the late Perry Henzell.

Smile Orange was Rhone’s first hit, and deservedly so, running for 245 performances. Although the new production is at The Little Little Theatre, rather than the more historically resonant Barn, the magic lingers still. So much time has passed that the stage, dressed and waiting for actors, is by itself a kind of museum, a time capsule preserving the hopes, fears and laughs of a people who were scarcely ten years into independence—Miss Brandon’s curved desk, the pastel orange and sea green walls, the cursive hotel insignia, the scuffed furniture in the waiters’ area.

And then the lights are up, Ringo bustles down the aisle, Joe changes his coat, Miss Brandon fixes her make-up, and Smile Orange pulls you into its peculiar world, now simultaneously past and present. Ringo, once a young, lithe Carl Bradshaw, much later an energetic Glen Campbell, is now the wiry, madcap Donald Anderson, who slips comfortably into the iconic orange waistcoast and bowtie. Everaldo Creary is pitch-perfect as the bumbling, blubbering Buss Boy, Cyril—almost crippled with fear, his scenes with Anderson crackle and pop. Shaun Drysdale and Gracia Thompson as Joe and Miss Brandon are convincing, if not captivating; Hugh Douse, as the Assistant Manager Mr. O’Keefe, is less so.

Such a trifle cannot spoil the show, especially with Mr Rhone as director. But with such talent, why this play, yet again?  We still need cogent voices to skewer our lives in song and dance, on stage and screen. The world is different than it was forty years ago, when Mr Rhone and his friends turned a residence into a theatre, and thus a house into a home. Why not a new play, from hands informed by all that has gone before, by gadgets and games, schools and smiles, oranges and old stories?

If you haven’t seen Smile Orange, go and see it. If you have seen it, go and remind yourself. But in the warm afterglow of the production, when smiles come easily, if you see Trevor Rhone, tell him he still has the last laugh, inside, waiting to come out.