STAGE REVIEW : ‘Frankie and Johnny’: Making a One-Night Love Last Longer

That irresistible couple, Frankie and Johnny, are back in Southern California and what’s amazing is how durable these middle-aged klutzes are.

Playwright Terrence McNally may have written a relatively slight piece in “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune”--the retelling of a one-night encounter between a short-order cook and a waitress who work for the same New York City joint--but he has crafted it with uncommon skill and perception.

In the play’s current incarnation, which opened Saturday on South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage in Costa Mesa, Karen Hensel plays the pudgy, pragmatic realist Frankie, who’s happy for the roll in the hay but now wants her apartment to herself again, thank you--and Richard Doyle portrays Johnny, the incurable romantic from Brooklyn Heights who spouts Shakespeare, is sure he’s found his life’s mate, won’t stop talking and absolutely will not leave. A likely story? Love stories rarely are, but McNally--and South Coast veterans Hensel and Doyle--know how to make it work.

The play starts at the end of the beginning, with the sounds of love-making in the dark (audiences intimidated by nudity, explicit language and sex are fairly warned), but it’s all much tamer from there. It goes on to become a long night of sparring, wooing, snapping, reeling, ranting, cooking, confessing and ultimately connecting.

By the end of the first act, you feel that you’ve watched a satisfying one-acter that’s also a terrific workout for a pair of good performers. What could another act bring? The real goods.

If Act One is mostly fun and games, Act Two brings on fiber and sinew. That’s what lifts “Frankie and Johnny” out of the realm of the ordinary two-character knockabout and makes it a provocative, engaging play. Act Two is where we get to know these people, even as they get to know each other. The real Johnny: an ex-boozer, the product of foster homes, nursing the wounds of an earlier failed marriage and the shame and surrender of his two kids to life with his ex-wife’s wealthy new husband. Frankie: a would-be actress made cannily wary of love and happiness by some rotten experiences with a violent man.

There may be nothing all that exceptional about a past littered with such prevalent incidents, but it is in the quality of the confessions, the forthrightness of the writing, the careful skirting of sentimentality in favor of candor and true romance that the distinction lies. There is nothing in memory quite as unprepossessing and unforgettable as the final image of these two ordinary folks listening to Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” on the radio as the sun comes up, pensively brushing their teeth, and reaching across an eternity of kitchen countertop to touch fingers . . .

Director Warner Shook has seen to it that Hensel and Doyle play the energy (in his case) and the negativism (in hers) without lapsing into mawkishness. Hensel’s Frankie is pugnacious and untidy, with just enough vulnerability showing under the gruffness, like a slip below the hemline. Doyle, in the tougher job, has to bluster and battle his way through to winning her heart. “You’re so . . . sincere ,” she barks at him at one point. Who can withstand so much of that? But Doyle, like some dogged kitchen Quixote, never lets go of his impossible dream. And wins.

John Iacovelli designed the cluttered one-room walk-up, but it is Brian Gale’s lights--from the different drab areas in the room, to the silver-blue moonlight filtering in--that truly make it. Costume designer Ann Bruice’s job was easiest: boxer shorts and undistinguished (on purpose) robes.

At 655 Town Center Dr. in Costa Mesa, Tuesdays through Fridays, 8:30 p.m.; Saturdays, 3 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 8 p.m.; until Oct. 22. Tickets: $20-$27; (714) 957-4033.