Lovers is the umbrella title of two linked one-acts, "Winners" and "Losers." And if I tell you that the winners die young, and the losers live long and married, you'll catch the sorrowful tone of disappointment that runs through these plays by the great Irish playwright Brian Friel. Despite the often amusing dialogue, Sister Pascal's dictum: "For every five minutes you laugh, you cry for 10," just about sums it all up.

In "Winners," Mag Enright (Letitia Lange) and Joe Brennan (Ahren Potratz) are 17 years old and crazy about each other. They will be married in three weeks -- she's pregnant -- right after their final exams. They meet to study on a sunny morning, on a hill high over the town of Ballymore. Mag talks and talks, much to Joe's exasperation, since he is serious about his schoolwork. The pattern their lives will take -- with an apartment above the slaughterhouse, with his impossible dream of being a math teacher but working as a clerk in a local office instead, with her imaginative natterings and his focused silences -- becomes more obvious with each conversation. They are full of life and love, eager for and fearful of the future. Their romance is framed by two adult narrators (Jack Hoffman and J.J. Van Name) who read -- rather stiltedly and with very contrived accents -- the "facts" of their case.

This play should be full of sunshine and youth, but Michael Brophy has directed it at a lugubrious pace, and although both young actors are quite good, they lack charm and radiance; they seem to be already in a pattern of carping and irritation without any of the luscious sexuality of teenagers that should drench them -- and us -- even when they quarrel.

In "Losers," a middle-aged man (Hoffman) recounts the story of his courtship of his wife (Van Name) under the iron aegis of her invalid, religious mother (Potratz), who exploits her daughter shamelessly with the help of a wizened neighbor (Lange) who shows up for prayers every evening. Brophy directs this play as merely an extended joke: The old people played by young people are caricatures, without either pathos or terror or bitterness, while the middle-aged people are entirely parodied, as though sexuality belongs only to the young and disappointment and resignation are to be mocked rather than seen as heartbreaking inevitabilities.

It is additionally irksome that much of the action is staged on the floor -- impossible to see if you are not sitting in the first row.

Through March 2, Lantern Theater at St. Stephen's Theater, 10th and Ludlow sts., 215-829-9002

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