The University Players will pay tribute to the late Trevor Rhone with a staging of his award-winning comedy Two Can Play, which will be presented in six performances, beginning on Saturday and continuing through to Monday, October 26 at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts, UWI, Mona.

Two Can Play, a work which won the award for Best Jamaican Play in 1982, features performances by 2008 Actor Boy Award nominees Nadean Rawlins and Alwyn Scott, and is directed by Brian Heap, who also won this year's award for Best Director. The most recent University Players' appearance by Rawlins and Alwyn Scott was in A.R. Gurney's Love Letters, which was presented earlier this year. In Two Can Play, Scott and Rawlins play Jim and Gloria, a Jamaican couple who try their wildest schemes to escape Kingston's gun crime in the 1970s and establish residence in the United States.

In his original foreword to the play, then Prime Minister Michael Manley wrote:

"Two Can Play is about love and estrangement; about domination and liberation; about confusion and compassion. It is about two human beings who nearly lose one another - but who eventually struggle back together through uncertainty, through quarrels, through humiliation. Ultimately, Gloria and Jim survive because they learn to communicate and finally to rediscover one another - not so much as they were, but as what they each can try to become."

Involved since 2003

Rawlins has been involved, either as performer or producer, with all the University Players' productions since the group's revival in 2003. She says, "Each production by the players brings its own challenges. That's why so many actors in Jamaica are willing to give freely of their time to participate. All of us learn something, and at the same time are thrilled to be performing for such appreciative audiences."

The first show at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts on Saturday starts at 8 p.m. A special performance will be held at 6 p.m. on Sunday to benefit the McSyl Basic School in Bellas Gate, to which Rhone had committed his support shortly before his passing. Thereafter, performances will be on Thursday, October 22 and Friday, October 23 at 8 p.m., Sunday, October 25 at 6.p.m. and Monday, October 26 at 8 p.m.