Sorting Through the Wreckage of a Love Most Foul

By the end of David Harrower’s “Blackbird,” a drama that promises to be the most powerful of the season, Jeff Daniels and Alison Pill are about as naked as it’s possible for two people to be.

I didn’t say nude. “Blackbird,” which opened last night at the Manhattan Theater Club under the masterly direction of Joe Mantello, is about a sexual relationship that transforms, cripples and paralyzes. But no one removes much clothing during the production’s time-suspending 90 minutes — only an overcoat, a scarf and, briefly, a pair of shoes.

What is completely stripped away, in a process as unavoidable as it is painful, is a full armor of defenses that a man and woman have assembled with watchful care in the 15 years since they last saw each other. That was when Ray (Mr. Daniels) was around 40; Una (Ms. Pill) was 12. Those numbers alone suggest the degree of damage done.

During the bruising clash of perspectives that is “Blackbird,” embodied with uncanny strength and subtlety by Mr. Daniels and Ms. Pill, Ray and Una are peeled down to their barest souls. Shivering and unprotected, they are so utterly in the raw that you feel you should look away. On the other hand, how could you possibly?

Theatrical as well as emotional nakedness may explain why “Blackbird,” a bare-bones drama by a largely unheralded 40-year-old Scottish playwright, stole this year’s Laurence Olivier Award for best new play in London from flashy and deserving contenders by big-name writers, like Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ’n’ Roll” and Peter Morgan’s “Frost/Nixon.”

Unlike those plays, which deconstruct world events with bright intellectual showmanship, “Blackbird” is theater at its most elemental: one man, one woman, one set and a head-to-head confrontation, about events long past, that occurs in real time. Its characters are not well spoken or even particularly insightful. What emerges as truth — which is less a matter of facts than of feeling — occurs despite themselves.

I should make it clear that “Blackbird” is a recollection of what, by any legal definition, was sexual abuse. The word “abuse” comes up in the play, and it sticks in the throats of the characters. They have had it drilled into their heads by assorted medical and legal functionaries over the years. Like most of the words they use, “abuse” is woefully inadequate.

Mr. Harrower has said that “Blackbird” was inspired by the case of Toby Studebaker, an American ex-marine who, in 2003, ran off with a 12-year-old British schoolgirl whom he had met in an Internet chat room. But the play is in no way a literal dramatization of real events.

In “Blackbird” both characters come from the same town. (Location and even nationality are unspecified.) Ray lived alone, down the street from Una and her family. They first spoke at a barbecue in her parents’ backyard. What followed over the succeeding three months led to Ray’s serving several years in prison and starting his life over with a new name in a new town.

“Blackbird” is set in the office building where Ray (now Peter) works and where Una has found him after seeing his picture in a trade magazine. Scott Pask’s set — a litter-cluttered staff room in the midst of antiseptic corridors — is imbued with a sterile squalor, a sense of anonymous mess.

Through frosted windows you glimpse Ray’s colleagues moving, pausing, looking in. You can’t help being curious about these faceless creatures, who are no doubt curious about the young woman who has shown up late in the afternoon, demanding to see Peter Trevelyan.

Such curiosity, the basis of so much narrative art, is what shapes “Blackbird.” You can imagine Mr. Harrower reading about Mr. Studebaker and reaching beyond the initial shock and puzzlement to speculate on just what was going through his head. We all do that, to some extent. Most of us, though, don’t have Mr. Harrower’s gifts for placing ourselves in the minds of others.

Every detail in the staging of “Blackbird” must be exactly right for an audience to stay with it. Not only is its subject uncomfortable, but also its sustained intensity. The New York cast and creative team provide an unflinching immediacy and emotional commitment that suspends judgment and obviates prurient jokiness.

This is essential, since for “Blackbird” to work, you have to accept it as a love story — a tragic, horrible love story that destroys lives, but a love story all the same. Mr. Daniels and Ms. Pill are extraordinary in guaranteeing this acceptance.

Throughout the tangle of recriminations and accusations and explanations of Una and Ray’s dialogue, the balance of power shifts, warps and finally melts altogether. Mr. Daniels and Ms. Pill make it clear that the Ray and Una of the play’s first moments are provisional constructs of personalities, devised to allow maimed souls to function as if life didn’t hurt them every waking second.

Maybe it’s because he inhabits his characters so completely, so I remember them as people I know rather than as figures in a play or movie, but I keep forgetting just how good Mr. Daniels is. His performance here is on the high level he has brought to films from “Something Wild” to “The Squid and the Whale.” As Ray, he has the bureaucratic shell of the petty office power-wielder down pat. But he also makes it inevitable that the shell will crack.

Ms. Pill, who appeared on Broadway in “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” digs so deep into Una that you’re afraid she may lose herself there. The ravenous needs to wound and to be accepted inform every gesture. And even more than Mr. Daniels, she seems to exist in the past and the present simultaneously.

In Una’s big aria of reminiscence, staged with mesmerizing restraint by Mr. Mantello, Ms. Pill looks and sounds no more than 12, and this illusion of youth comes like a punch in the stomach. You realize that Una is hopelessly frozen in time. She will never, ever leave the moment she is describing.

Other works of fiction have, of course, centered on the relationship between an under-age girl and a grown man: Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Lolita” and, more recently, Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “How I Learned to Drive.” What makes “Blackbird” different is how little reflective distance it allows you.

With both Nabokov and Ms. Vogel, language becomes a sort of consolation, a means of giving shape to the chaos of pain and loss. For Mr. Harrower, whose characters speak in dissolving fragments and exploding words, there is no such relief.

Both Una and Ray have read deep in the psychological literature of sexual abuse, and it doesn’t begin to encompass what they experienced. The miracle of “Blackbird” is that it does.

BLACKBIRD

By David Harrower; directed by Joe Mantello; sets by Scott Pask; costumes by Laura Bauer; lighting by Paul Gallo; sound by Darron L West; fight director, J. David Brimmer; production stage manager, Jill Cordle; director of artistic operations, Mandy Greenfield; production manager, Ryan McMahon; general manager, Florie Seery; director of artistic development, Paige Evans. Presented by the Manhattan Theater Club, Lynne Meadow, artistic director; Barry Grove, executive producer; by special arrangement with Michael Edwards and Carole Winter. At City Center Stage One, 131 West 55th Street, Clinton; (212) 581-1212. Through June 3. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

WITH: Jeff Daniels (Ray) and Alison Pill (Una).