Face-off Coupling and uncoupling in Warfare BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Two people — that’s all we need for compelling drama. Sitting around talking, strutting, and fretting, codgers on a park bench, or Rosencrantz and Gildenstern. In Paul Grellong’s Warfare, two cheating lovers are arguing in a hotel room, pounding out yet another variation on the eternal fugue of dysfunctional romance gone horribly wrong.

This Brown/Trinity Playwrights Repertory Theatre production (July 29 and 30) certainly keeps us interested. That’s more of a challenge than it sounds like, considering that we’d eat fast and flee any dinner party where we were within earshot of such a squabble.

When we meet them, Kim Crane (Miriam Silverman) is a 20-something up-and-coming reporter excited at a big career break, about to leave her Providence daily for the more prestigious Boston one. Jeff Cerisier (Lars Hanson), 10 years her senior, is her editor/mentor as well as, for the past four years, her lover. The wild cards: from the time they met he has been married, and in recent months his best friend has been her official boyfriend.

The play is a bit ambling in the directions it leads us, so it lives or dies on the actors seducing us into fascination. They do. Silverman has the easier task, getting us to root for a spunky, ambitious young woman who resists being manipulated. Hanson holds his own quite well, conveying how her boss has charmed the pants off her, but he’s at a considerable disadvantage in being given little characterizational wiggle room. Jeff is a transparent snake, and we wonder why she can’t see through him. Love is blind but not brain-dead.

The title makes sense because the play begins in March 1999, at the beginning of the bombing of Serbia to make them comply with UN resolutions; and, of course, the couple is warring in their own way. The parallel is not very clear, although Jeff certainly could be accused of human rights violations, on the scale of one-to-one relationships.

At the opening hotel room scene, they are trysting after having broken off for several months. He thinks they have gotten together because he is so irresistible, but she’s had them meet to announce that her boyfriend proposed the night before and she wants his blessing. The skirmishing begins, with her maintaining a holding action and him convinced he can get her to admit she loves him if he just keeps barraging her with the demand.

That rendezvous frames the play. In a nearly slapstick scene, we jump back eight years to when Kim, a freshly minted college graduate, impressed him with copy editing diligence that set the newsroom abuzz — a five-page note backgrounding the Kosovo situation. He offers her a reporting job in an interview set-piece that would work as a one-act play by itself: aspiring young journalist spews her guts out, both verbally and physically, in the mutually described worst interview imaginable; reassuring, smooth-talking boss sets the groundwork for what he transparently hopes will become more than a workplace relationship.

We also get to listen in on their conversation four years later, when they decide to begin their affair. Playwright Grellong wisely has them separated by telephone rather than able to fling themselves into each other’s arms, providing a less conventional and far sexier tension. Here Jeff is humanized much more effectively than elsewhere, showing the actual vulnerability beneath his desire, not just the sensitivity he feigns when he threatens suicide or pretends to place her interests ahead of his.

There are loose ends, however. Did she have that abortion he suggested or a miscarriage, and how did either event affect her? At one point he sabotages a career-advancing phone interview she’s scheduled to have. Wouldn’t her suspicion that he did so devastate her by the betrayal rather than be a passing annoyance? Nevertheless, while Warfare needs much work to shape it into a convincing and coherent narrative, this production, directed by Heath Cullens, deserves — and gets — applause for not letting its shortcomings slow down its propulsive and engaging drive.