HARTFORD — Grief begets isolation, and isolation begets loneliness in “Reverberation,” a keenly felt, haunting drama by Matthew Lopez about two New Yorkers adrift in their lives who strike up a sustaining friendship. The play, making its premiere here at Hartford Stage, has the cool but precise observational feel of current television shows about singles in the city like HBO’s “Girls” and “Looking,” at least until an ill-judged spasm of violence at the end shatters the elliptical mood.
The provocative opening scene begins with Jonathan, played by Luke MacFarlane (ABC’s “Brothers & Sisters”), having raucous sex with Wes (Carl Lundstedt). As soon as they’re finished, Jonathan jumps into his clothes and grabs another swig from a drink, to the surprise and disappointment of Wes, who attempts post-coital getting-to-know-you talk.
Although they met on Grindr — the smartphone app that has replaced the bar as the clearinghouse of casual gay sex — Jonathan, at 35, is more than a decade older than Wes. (“Wow, you’re the oldest guy I’ve ever had sex with.”) Their worldviews are some distance apart, too. Wes is impressed that Jonathan’s apartment is awash in books and that paintings cover the walls. Jonathan extols the primacy of print, even down to the choice of fonts: “Garamond. Cambria. Baskerville,” he muses, as if referring to lost civilizations. “If that wasn’t important, they wouldn’t put that note at the end of so many books. Kindles just reduce all that to Times New Roman.”
Almost by way of getting rid of him, Jonathan hands over a copy of what he impulsively calls his favorite book, James Baldwin’s “Another Country.” But when Wes offers to return it, Jonathan makes it clear that it’s meant to be a permanent parting gift.
Yet Jonathan’s withdrawn aspect doesn’t just extend to sex partners, as we learn when his new upstairs neighbor, Claire (Aya Cash), warmly introduces herself and suggests that they walk to the subway together; making a feeble excuse, Jonathan demurs.
Mr. MacFarlane imbues Jonathan with a contained intensity that telegraphs a deep wound still festering somewhere, kept tightly under lock. Casual sex, and less casual drinking, numb the pain, but as Claire slowly insinuates herself into his life, sprigs of emotion begin to spring up through his hardened surfaces.
Claire, a free spirit who has washed up in Queens after trawling the world, works in retail and envies Jonathan’s seemingly settled state, or at least the sophisticated clutter of his apartment, in striking contrast to her nearly empty one. “It’s like being given a glimpse of what my life would be like if I hadn’t made every wrong decision in the book,” she says. Her latest bad choice was “borrowing” an evening dress from her workplace, one whose zipper neither she nor Jonathan (who’s waiting for another hookup) can manage to get unstuck.
Little of obvious dramatic significance takes place for much of “Reverberation,” which has been directed with a painterly eye and the right sense of unhurried pacing by Maxwell Williams. Andromache Chalfant’s detailed set, showing us full slices of both apartments on top of one another, makes a significant contribution to the production. Some of the most moving images are silent ones, as Jonathan and Claire sit in their separate apartments, asleep or awake, or sleepwalking through the day, suggesting the anonymous, enigmatic figures in Edward Hopper paintings.
Mr. Lopez, whose Civil War-set “The Whipping Man” has been widely produced in regional theaters (and was seen in New York at Manhattan Theater Club), allows us to get to know his characters as they get to know each other, haltingly and casually. The relationship between Claire and Jonathan is drawn with an astute feel for the way meaningful intimacies can grow from chance circumstances and proximity. And although neither articulates it, Claire and Jonathan are drawn together by a mutual need for an emotional attachment.
After Claire makes a clumsy attempt at seduction (“Oh God, I’m sorry, I thought that’s where we were going,” she says in mortification), Jonathan gradually begins warming to her, taking an almost fatherly interest in her wayward love life, which mostly involves dating older, inappropriate men with deep pockets. Ms. Cash brings a winning insouciance to her portrayal that brings out the sweetness and self-aware humor in Claire’s haplessness.
Jonathan, who is prone to nightmares, takes to inviting Claire to sleep in his bed some nights, and he eventually opens up to reveal the source of his unspoken anguish: a traumatic incident of violence in his past. That he has not been able to fully recover has been apparent, but how deeply it has scarred his psyche becomes clear only when Wes, played with bright buoyancy by Mr. Lundstedt, makes a sudden reappearance, bubbling over with nervousness and babbling about “Another Country.”
Here, unfortunately, is where Mr. Lopez’s gently wrought play lurches into a more lurid register. While some clues have been dropped in the text that the reserved but kindly Jonathan we have come to know may still be harboring other layers, what takes place feels too sensational (or contrived) and would need far more elucidation to feel dramatically earned.
Even without this misstep, “Reverberation” is not a perfect play. Some of the dialogue can be overwritten or overexplicit, as when Wes analyzes Jonathan’s anomie: “The longing for connection. But not finding it, even though there’s millions of people in this city,” underscoring the point with a cliché when he confesses that he feels “lost in a sea of strangers.”
But so much of the play is marked by a perceptiveness about the echoing loneliness that many young (or not so young) urban dwellers live with that I wish Mr. Lopez could find a more satisfying — not to mention credible — way to illuminate Jonathan’s predicament. The abrupt shocker of an ending left me feeling a little bereft, and not in a satisfyingly sad way.
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