The fascinating thing about Scottish playwright David Harrower's Olivier Award-winning play Blackbird is its harsh realism and floating ambiguity. Two people, damaged by an illicit affair 15 years ago, meet and circle each other like a pair of magnets that are set to repulse each other's pull, but that will snap together given the briefest chance. Bitterness, fear and a tender awareness for what was underlies the tension between them, but the play offers no judgment, no answers and leaves its audience uncertain about the surprise ending and just what Ray is or is not.

Now 55, Ray served time for his passionate sexual relationship with then 12 year-old Una. Post-prison term, Ray has changed his name, moved to another part of the country and built himself a fragile new life. He works in a vaguely described dental firm in an unknown role. Blackbird opens when, unannounced, 15 years later, 27-year-old Una turns up at his place of work.

The action plays out under the harsh neon ceiling light of Joseph Stanley's bleak staff break room set. Its rubbish bins are overflowing; trash spills on the floor, a greasy pizza box and plates of half-eaten cold pizza litter the trestle table. The details of the setting speak of these two lives, littered by the cold remnants of a snatched meal and the trash that cannot be cleared from their lives.

Stephen DiMenna directs Blackbird with paced honesty and are fortunate in their two actors. Tracey Maloney plays attractive Una, who has driven seven hours to find Ray. Una's not dressed for a day of driving. Beneath her jacket, she wears an alluring black dress. From the moment she removes her jacket, I wondered if she had come to confront Ray, to seduce him and continue their earlier relationship, or to bring closure to the living wound of her life. Maloney embraces Una's troubled soul with fierce intensity and yet allows her character the room not to fully understand her own intentions. It's a fine and absorbing performance.

Stephen Yoakam is every bit as good. His Ray also wades deep in ambiguity. His fear at her unexpected eruption into his life makes him breathless. He leaves the door of the break room ajar, so he can be held harmless in this frightening confrontation. He orders her to leave. His job, new identity, his seven-year relationship with a woman—all are suddenly threatened. It's the end of the workday. Co-workers pass as shadows through the smoked glass windows of the break room. She closes the door, and his body language speaks of defense under bombardment.

They circle nervously, talk to at each other in broken fragments, accuse, fight physically, recall their stolen tryst in a remote seaside town that went so wrong and its ghastly aftermath. In a wild, cathartic dance, they stomp the rubbish that litters the room. When they settle and talk, they unravel the murky nature of pedophilia and furtive obsessional attraction and its dark magnetism.

Harrower fills the mouths of his characters with the spare language of natural speech that overlaps and interrupts, and Maloney and Yoakam nail its tricky timing. I appreciate that Pillsbury House does not try to set the play in its original British setting with forced English accents. These actors are American, their characters' predicament universal and timeless.

Blackbird pinned me to my seat in its intermissionless, one hour and 50 minutes-or-so length. It whips by fast, but it will leave you thinking about and discussing its two characters for days, their flawed and forgivable humanness and their post-encounter futures; they will live beside you much longer.

Blackbird November 6 - 30, 2008. Tickets $18 - $34. Wednesdays - Saturdays 7:30 p.m. Sundays 1:00 p.m. Call 612- 377-2224 for tickets, or go online at www.guthrietheater.org. Dowling Studio, Guthrie Theater, 818, 2nd Street, Minneapolis.

- Elizabeth Weir

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