Theatre in Review: Lost Lake (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)

	Tracie Thomas, John Hawkes. Photo: Joan Marcus

There are more sensational entertainments in town right now, but if you want to experience the sheer pleasure of professionals at work, you could do a lot worse than Lost Lake. David Auburn's new play is just a slip of a thing, but it offers a convincing, and quietly moving, portrait of middle-aged characters facing life mistakes that cannot be fixed. It also affords two fine actors the opportunity to show what they can do, given the right roles. In this season of tinseled holiday treats, here is a counterintuitive entertainment aimed squarely at the adults in the audience.

What is especially impressive about Lost Lake is the way that Auburn manages to avoid the mechanical, predictable nature of so many two-handers. Like many such plays, it is founded on a classic odd-couple pairing, but he complicates the formula with characters whose comic quirks hide much sadder realities. Veronica is a nurse practitioner from New York City who, planning a vacation for herself and her two children, books a cottage somewhere upstate. Her landlord is Hogan, a local, and watching them cagily negotiate the details of the rental provides a clear preview of what is to come. As Veronica, Tracie Thoms is pleasant but all business, more interested in clarifying the list of improvements to be made to the cottage than in revealing anything about herself. The way she responds to a question about her husband -- a smile, a tiny pause, and the words, "It's just me" -- reveals plenty about her hands-off attitude toward the world.

In contrast, John Hawkes' Hogan practically dances into the room, striking poses that suggest a marionette whose strings are being cut, one by one, delivering his lines in a whiskey rasp that suggests, unsuccessfully, that everything is fine, just fine. The unpleasant surprises begin when Veronica, upon arrival, discovers that the hot water heater doesn't work, Hogan hasn't removed his clothes, and the swimming dock has not been repaired. At first, he deflects her complaints -- after all, he notes, cold showers are good for one's character, and, anyway, Veronica is a nurse -- but soon the truth comes out: Hogan is jobless, is being sued by the local homeowner's association, and has been thrown out of the house by his brother, thanks to their ongoing dispute over the cottage. He is now living in his truck, on the edge of the cottage's property line.

This is way too much information for Veronica, who merely wanted a single carefree week -- but, as it happens, her life is only barely in better order, having made a grave professional error, not to be revealed here, that will most likely have a devastating effect on her career prospects. As the week progresses, Veronica and Hogan reluctantly, haltingly grow closer. No romance is in the offing -- a single well-placed remark from Veronica puts the kibosh on that -- but these two near-strangers find in each other the one person they can be honest with.

Throughout Lost Lake, Thoms underplays with skill, even when throwing her hands up and muttering in frustration to no one in particular about Hogan's invasive questions and eccentric behavior. She charms, whether complaining about the noisy local fauna that keeps her up nights, stalking around the cottage looking for cell-phone reception, or dealing, on the phone, with the overprotective father of her daughter's friend, who has come along on the trip. ("Yes, I brought the tofu dogs," she snaps, with rising impatience, adding to Hogan that the poor kid goes everywhere with a helmet on her head: "She's on the swing in the playground looking like she's skydiving.") But when the occasion calls for it, Thoms slips seamlessly into a prickly, defensive attitude -- all but disappearing into a lumpy upholstered chair --to explain her career-imperiling decision. And, later, carefully confronting Hogan after what may have been a suicide attempt, we get a hint of her bedside manner in her gentle, yet attentive, stance.

In contrast to Thoms' buttoned-up manner, Hawkes' Hogan is an expert oversharer, each remark revealing far more than he intends. He beams so brightly when discussing the academic successes of his daughter that you immediately sense that something is wrong. (There is.) He also fluently handles Hogan's long, rambling answers that bear little relevance to the questions to which they are attached. And, when revealing the details of his adversarial relationships with the homeowner's association (each syllable of which he pronounces precisely and with increasing disdain) and his lawyer sister-in-law -- whom, he is convinced, wants the cottage -- -or when he finally loses control, laying waste to his own living room in a fury over losses that don't stop coming, the unleashing of his carefully controlled rage is remarkably powerful.

Auburn orchestrates this quirky not-quite-a-friendship in meticulous fashion; for example, he carefully plants a piece of business about why Veronica hasn't paid the last third of her rental fee, a detail which will lead to a much bigger revelation. The playwright doesn't sentimentalize either character, nor does he propose any life-changing remedies. He simply brings them to the point where each recognizes in the other a kindred soul. Daniel Sullivan's subtle, transparent direction helps each actor build a credible character out of dozens of tiny details.

Lost Lake, which was originally produced at the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign, introduces a new (to New York) set designer, J. Michael Griggs, a name we should be seeing more often. Especially as lit by Robert Perry with an infinite degree of sensitivity to different times of day and night, the cottage interior creates an attractive impression, even as you begin to notice the many signs of dilapidation, including cracked paint and a shutter falling out of place. There are other telling details squirreled away, including a poster commemorating the USA Olympic hockey team of 1980, a direct reference to a plot point that causes friction between Hogan and Veronica. (There's also a nifty cue when all sorts of debris rains down on the set, to establish that Hogan has taken repossession of the place.) Fitz Patton contributes a broad variety of sound effects -- crickets, owls, barking dogs, arriving cars -- that add much to the sense of place; his original music, featuring bluesy guitars, sets the right rueful mood. Jess Goldstein's costumes are well-suited to each character.

Two convincingly rendered characters, some amusing dialogue, a couple of revelations that deepen the dramatic situation, and an authentic mood of regret: These are the small, but very real, pleasures that Lost Lake has to offer. The play ends in a kind of coda, long after summer is over, when Hogan and Veronica get together for one last candid conversation. Nothing has worked out for either of them: She is improvising a future, and he is running out of hope. For a moment, each appreciates their mutual sadness. Watching them, you realize that Lost Lake is a most appropriate title.--David Barbour