The drum roll that opens "Some Unfortunate Hour," Kelly McAllister's promising new play, sounds as if it might be introducing a circus trapeze act. In a way, it is: The characters in McAllister's play are taking big real-life risks -- falling in love and trusting their instincts.
"Hour" unfolds over the course of an evening in a Denver bar, where Tom nurses his bruised ego with Manhattans on the day that he and his wife of five years have signed divorce papers. In an opening monologue, he decries the marriage's end, saying that what he's hoping to find in this world is a modicum of charity, hope, and faith.
As luck would have it in McAllister's heightened world, the beautiful blonde in the bar just happens to be named Charity. She's also coming off a bad relationship, although the playwright doesn't give many specifics here. He's more interested in this couple's verbal and emotional pas de deux as a seemingly standard pickup unfolds -- one that's observed and by turns facilitated and thwarted by a wise bartender, Janus (Jodi Dick).
The bartender's name is a perfect example of the strengths and weaknesses of the script. Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and endings, a fact to which Tom refers, and the symbolism is instantly apparent. Rather than making the point so blindingly clear from the outset, one wishes that McAllister had chosen to use the homonym "Janice" instead. Throughout the play, the dialogue tryingly overstates itself even as it tantalizes with its erudition.
While Tom Errickson's finely modulated production cannot overcome McAllister's tendency to overwrite, it beautifully supports Dan O'Neill's quixotically volatile and needy Tom and Ashley Wren Collins' equally mercurial but far more enigmatic Charity. Watching these two on the high wire of romance truly satisfies.