Tim Realbuto’s YES, billed as a 90-minute, one act play, plus an epilogue, has the heft and feel of a fuller length performance. I can’t image a second act. But for Realbuto, who wrote, directed, and puts in a powerful performance in this riveting play, it wouldn’t be unwelcomed. His ‘one act’ production was so wonderfully executed, so beautifully realized, that I left the theater craving more Realbuto, as well as more from his equally-brilliantly co-star, Joe Blute. No doubt, YES which played to great acclaim at the Detroit Fringe Festival earlier this year—as well as NYC’s Emerging Artists Theatre series—will be seeing renewed life at other venues across the country.

YES opens with the hefty Realbuto, playing Patrick Ness, a mid-thirties, down-and-out actor, reduced to giving private acting lessons in a liquor-strewn, messy loft apartment. He is awakened by loud knocking, to find Jeremiah Rosenhaft (Blute), a prospective acting student, standing at his door. From the moment the sloppily dressed Realbuto lumbers across the stage in this scene, shades of Orson Welles come to mind. Later on, as the play progresses and Realbuto’s acting becomes more electrified, visions of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman begin to surface.

As the play unfolds, we learn that Patrick recently attended a high school production of Romeo and Juliet, in which Jeremiah played Romeo. YES  is something of a mystery – think Pirandello – as we are never quite sure what is real and what is not, what took place and what didn’t in the lives of each character. The stories they are telling appear to be shaky. Are they telling the truth or are they acting for each other’s benefit?

Even the origins of this initial meeting between Patrick and Jeremiah is questionable. Was it solely Jeremiah’s high school acting teacher’s idea? Was it Patrick’s interest in Jeremiah that brought this student to his door? Or was it Jeremiah himself, claiming to have had an epiphany after seeing Patrick in a play in Central Park? And then, there is the central question of the play: what exactly is it that each character wants and eventually gets—for better or worse—from one another?

In between bouts of drinking alcohol and snorting cocaine, Patrick begins, under the guise of giving Jeremiah acting lessons, to take charge of his seemingly innocent seventeen-year old student.  Patrick’s rapid-fire rules about becoming a great actor are delivered non-stop, as if from a machine gun. Among them: don’t act for fame, don’t act for awards, and throw everything out the window that you learned about acting. “Don’t ever act again” he tells the kid, “Just be.” He even suggests, as he did himself, that Jeremiah change his name. Looking for a pencil to jot down these rules, Patrick insultingly tells the already overwhelmed Jeremiah, “You don’t need a pencil if you have a brain.”

Perhaps drawing on his own life, the first scene finds Patrick talking about the hardships of being an actor. “Living in a moment, a truthful moment for the whole world to see is the hardest thing you could ever possibly do. Living any longer than you have to is quite the task.” At the same time, he seems to shaping Jeremiah’s views for some future use. A gentle seduction seems to be taking place. “You are definitely a leading man and not a character actor,” he tells his student. Patrick’s harrowing “YES game” ensues, in which a confused Jeremiah is required to answer ‘yes’ to any question Patrick poses. “Now, I’m going to ask you a series of questions. The only answer you can give me, no matter what, is ‘yes’. Every time you say the word, it should have a completely different intention. And don’t break eye contact.”

In a second lesson, held on another day, where both performers accrue thrice the dramatic power of the first encounter, Patrick and Jeremiah go at each, both mentally and physically. At one point, Jeremiah asks Patrick’s about his life. In a few abbreviated lines—offhandedly recited—Patrick rattles off a few plausible details. His mother didn’t want him, his father left home, “all the kids called me names when I was growing up, and I became an actor so that I can pretend to be someone else.” “Did all of that stuff really happen to you” Jeremiah asks? “It was a performance,” Patrick replies. “I was only acting, whether it really happened or not doesn’t matter in the slightest. Did I convince you? Did you think what I said was the truth? In that moment, at least to you, it was. Now, you convince me.”

Under the forceful hand of Patrick, who still holds the power, and now shirtless at Patrick’s command, Jeremiah now says, “I had a normal upbringing.” Not accepting this on its surface, Patrick goads Jeremiah to delve deeper into the truth of his life. Though painful, as well as cathartic for the weeping Jeremiah, one gets the feeling, after he tells his story, that he has finally come of age. This moment was also painful for the audience. I had tears in my eyes, and the lady behind me cried out, “Oh no!” As for Patrick, Jeremiah’s vulnerability, now fully in the hands of his teacher—both literally and figuratively—adds more than a tinge of eroticism to their relationship.

The epilogue jumps ahead some five years. We are now watching Welcome To Hollywood Tonight!, a TV show, in which Jeremiah, now a big film star with a newly acquired air of confidence, is being interviewed by TV host, Mark Bradley, played by Realbuto. They discuss his role in a hit movie, ironically entitled, In Control. No longer slovenly dressed, Realbuto is barely recognizable in suit and tie, sporting a different haircut and wearing heavy, black-rimmed glasses.

Sitting side-by-side on two chairs, Bradley, in a newly acquired upbeat voice, peppers Jeremiah with the usual mundane questions. Everything goes along well until Jeremiah is asked what effect his old acting teacher Patrick Ness had on his career. “Did he make you a better actor, a better person,” Bradley asks? Resurrecting Ness, a subject Jeremiah is uncomfortable with, he is totally unnerved. It is the coda of the play. Without revealing the details, it is uncanny, surreal, frightening, and a stroke of genius on the part of the playwright, director and both actors.

YES falls into a category, a genre, if you will, in which two characters, metaphorically speaking, battle to the death. David Mamet’s play Oleanna, a power struggle between a university professor and one of his female students who accuses him of sexual exploitation, comes to mind; as does David Ives, Venus in Furs, pitting an actress against a playwright director. A similar combativeness is found in Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, where May and Eddie, former lovers, meet again in a desert motel.

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Editor

YES is currently running at the Hudson Guild Theatre at 441 West 26^th Street (between 9^th and 129^th Avenues) there are two remaining performances, Saturday, January 23 at 8:30 PM and Sunday, January 24 at 1:00 PM. Tickets are prices at $23 and can be purchased by visiting brownpapertickets.com/event/2461428