Two-Hander

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Brian from Dallas calling.

Hello, Brian. Welcome.

Hi, Brian. What’s up?

I work in theater, and we’ve got tons of jargon specific to working in my field.

But just the other day, I was walking down the street with a friend of mine, and I mentioned that a show that we were about to do is a two-hander.

And she didn’t know what that meant, and I said, oh, it’s just a play with two people in it.

At which point, she asked, why is it called that?

And I did not have an answer.

So I was curious if you guys knew.

We’ve done a lot of one-person shows, but I never call that a one-hander.

So that’s my question.

So a two-hander, tell me if I’m wrong, it’s not just two people, but it’s two people who are kind of diametrically opposed, right?

There’s an element of separation or distance between them, like they’re very different characters or they’re at very different places in their lives or something like that.

Isn’t there often like there’s like a black and whiteness about it?

Absolutely, absolutely.

And the principal conflict revolves around how those people interact.

Right. Is it going to be reconciliation or war all the way down, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So the hand part of that is the interesting part.

We know the two, obviously, just means two people.

The hand part refers to people in theater.

As far back as the 1500s, a hand was somebody who worked in theater, either on the stage or writing the works or behind the scenes as part of the crew.

It’s very similar to seafaring, you know, where you say all hands on deck.

It’s that same kind of hand.

And the reason we use hand to mean a whole person is something called metonymy in linguistics, where the smaller part of something stands in for the larger whole.

So a hand being a whole person is a great example of metonymy.

We do this in a bunch of other, how many faces were there, right?

Or we mean how many people were there.

We don’t actually mean did they take off their face and put it in the chair.

Yeah, let’s do a nose count.

Yeah, let’s do a nose count. Let’s do a head count. That sort of thing.

We also have three-hander, which is a little different, but it’s still three people operating primarily alone on the stage together in a variety of different ways.

So what’s river dance?

Forty-hander?

A forty-hander, yeah.

A stomper? Isn’t it the variety language for a dance show? A stomper-hofer. Maybe that’s it.

There you go.

Yeah, that clears up that whole hand issue, and I guess it’s very similar to a stage hand.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah, it’s the same hand.

Yeah.

We’ve kind of just moved that to crew members as opposed to actors.

A hand would be a person working on the stage as opposed to an actor who’s working on a stage but in a very different way.

Yeah, that’s it.

It’s as simple as that.

A two-hander, by the way, if you can catch it done really well between primo actors, is a real special treat because you’re so immersed in these stellar performances.

There’s something, I don’t know what it is.

It’s kind of like sitting in a cafe next to lovers or something where they’re having their they’re hashing it all out.

It’s just one of the thrilling experiences of theater, in my opinion.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s two people who are very exposed.

Yeah.

Yeah. The honesty and the rawness of having to get up there and be alone and not having having very few crutches.

Yeah.

Brian, thank you so much for your call. Really appreciate it.

Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Have a good one.

Take care now. Bye bye.

Bye bye.

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