The flickering light in the corridor outside Jackie’s apartment serves as a foreboding sign that her supper with her co-worker Michael might not unfold smoothly. Yet in Audible x Together’s immaculately performed and staged revival of Tom Noonan’s 1992 play, “What Happened Was …,” at Minetta Lane Theater, the duo’s moments of discord gather into a profound connection.
Directed by Ian Rickson, who maintains a supple grip on the play’s crucible of ambiguities, the action is part dinner date, part confessional and part comedy, with the New York City of the early ’90s as a significant unseen character.
We watch Jackie, played by Cecily Strong, throwing her tights into the freezer in a tidying-up frenzy before her guest arrives, then Michael (Corey Stoll) contemplating her apartment (the sparely evocative design is by Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones), then the tense unpeeling of their characters. Is this odd couple perfect for each other, or should their is-this-a-date dinner end ASAP?
In suit, tie and overcoat, and gripping a briefcase with protective ferocity as if it contains the nuclear codes, Stoll’s Michael looks more powerful than the paralegal he is. Jackie is an executive assistant (or “secretary” as he puts it, upsetting her) who relishes what she sees as his at-work subversiveness. Her crush is obvious, he seems clueless, and yet they have hidden lives and dreams — she who studied at a Bronx Community College, he at Harvard — that turn out to be strikingly similar.
Noonan, who died in February at 74, played Michael in the first stage production of “What Happened Was …” opposite Karen Sillas as Jackie, both reprising their roles for the 1994 movie adaptation that won the grand jury prize at that year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Outside the bounds of this revival thrum the backbeat of Manhattan books and movies of its original era, and their stories of obsession, ambition and love — “Fatal Attraction,” “Bright Lights, Big City” and “Working Girl” — with “What Happened Was …” revealing a lower-key, harsher truth of New York living. It’s a city that Jackie, like Michael, relishes viewing from her window, yet feels separate from.
Stoll and Strong spikily excel at playing Michael and Jackie’s nervy dinner roller coaster, joshing, misreading, then comprehending each other. Their alternating bafflement, suspicion and empathy reveal the rewarding yet perilous cost of honesty. As with Audible’s other repertory productions — including the return of “Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes,” starring Hugh Jackman and Ella Beatty (through April 30) — “What Happened Was …” offers the opportunity to see big-name actors perform in a compact theater.
Just as in his Tony-nominated role in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate,” Stoll subverts his charismatic physicality to play a fractured, adrift man. Strong, from “Saturday Night Live,” is both wittily goading and movingly soul-baring, inhaling wine and cognac while wielding a knife to cut a birthday cake in a moment that teeters between comically giddy and slightly unhinged.
Music provides a balm to both co-workers. The play begins with an excited Jackie playing Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move,” then later, post-confessionals, Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You.” Michael recalls, at age 13, listening to the Beatles’ “She Loves You,” imagining his own name being woven into the lyrics.
The truth of their characters blooms in two raw moments: a sardonic toast they make to “the sadness of life,” and then a kiss, which comes after confessing the loneliness they experience. That kiss segues from consoling to passionate and is soon over. They also share a delight in words, and are secret writers — in Jackie’s case, a dementedly lurid children’s short story she recites to Michael’s slack-jawed horror. He loved “The Iliad” as a kid (“I wanted a heroic life”) and hopes the book he is writing serves that purpose. He hides his notebooks in that tightly gripped briefcase; she hides her writing in a box.
Will there be a second date? When the lights finally dim on one character — pen and paper in hand, facing impassively out to the city — the lyrics of another Beatles song, “Eleanor Rigby,” spring to mind:
“All the lonely people / where do they all belong?”
What Happened Was … Through June 14 at Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; audiblexminetta.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.
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