theater

This knockout production of Marriage Play, a rarely performed work by Edward Albee, gets a brief reprise before moving on to a theater festival in Maine. It stars its superb original cast, Charlotte Patton and Michael Horowitz (pictured), and Jane Stojak, Triangle Theater's founder, directs.

Marriage Play (1987) stands about equidistant in time between Albee's two more famous dramatic meditations on marriage, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (1962) and The Goat (2002). Like so many of Albee's plays, this is about, as one character says, "a marriage of some duration and persistence between two heretofore quick and rational people." Much later the wife tells her husband, "This is not our first marriage, friend; this is marriage," a line crucial to Albee's view of the socially sanctified relationship: The point is in enduring. In his plays, the issue is never divorce or breaking up, nor anything so sentimental as rediscovering love, but, simply, stamina, staying the course, being married.

Marriage Play is a realistic portrait of the absurdity of marriage. The first stage direction, "Looks up from her book; fairly friendly," gives us the opening bell: "fairly friendly" is the best it is going to be and it's downhill from the first line. Keep in mind, in contemplating this downhill metaphor, that their names are Jack and Gillian, i.e. Jack and Jill. The play's realism is amply supported by the set and costumes and props fully grounding the play in a "suburban home." The look may be Ibsen, the atmosphere may be Strindberg, but Marriage Play, despite its debt to the 19th-century masters, is completely contemporary.

Often hilarious in its illustrations of miscommunication, their conversation runs something like, "What do you mean?" "What do you mean, what do I mean?" Their frequent misunderstandings are, paradoxically, both inevitable and willful, and much depends on timing and style, as they have at each other ("Do you try to vex me?" "Only when you really want me to.") In the original Triangle production, the two actors delivered it all with the ease and venom of well-seasoned opponents.

If you're interested in Albee, in marriage, or in good theater, don't miss this one.

Marriage Play, Wed., Aug. 17, 8 p.m., through Aug. 20, $15-$20, The Triangle Theater, 1220 N. Lawrence St., 215-763-0110, www.triangletheater.com