At the beginning and end of this artfully naturalistic two-hander by John Belluso, Dostoyevsky is used as a bookend motif. Most appropriately, too, as the play could be subtitled "Notes From the Underbelly." It is that endangered American species: a play about class. The two characters are poor -- not the trailer trash ubiquitous on Off-Broadway stages, but the kind who haven't quite enough at the grocery checkout counter, the kind who wait in the rain for the bus. Belluso has the virtuosity to tell his polemic as an unsentimental love story of two disabled people playing a mating game of small kindnesses.
The disability for Harry (Christopher Thornton) is immediately visible -- he is wheelchair-bound from a youthful diving accident. For Louise (Deirdre O'Connell), the handicap is not so obvious: She's an unemployed single mother with three young children. Meeting her at a hospital emergency room, Harry makes his first offer of assistance. Indeed, if there is a third character in the play, it is the American health-care system, of whose bureaucracy Harry will later declare, "I'm crippled and I'm poor and I live in America, so I'm an expert on this!" Belluso paints his two lonely suitors warts and all, so that both emerge as detailed, disturbing characters. While the arc of the play has a certain predictability, the rough and tumble of the courtship does not. Amid the grittiness, Belluso is still able to imbue a touch of the poet in both Harry and Louise.
Carl Forsman's direction has a refreshing clarity and the performance has a not-a-false-note authenticity. Thornton's Harry is troubling and touching. O'Connell, who has impressed before in flashes, here has the role to demonstrate her remarkable spontaneity and poignancy. And Belluso is a playwright able to convince that the fires of hell may just be burning here on earth.