Danny and the Deep Blue Sea with Aubrey Plaza hits some rough waters

NEW YORK — You might call it “The I’ve Got Needs Ballet.” Midway through “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” John Patrick Shanley’s 1983 pas de deux of raw Bronx love, Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott break free of the play’s naturalistic strictures and dance. Well, not so much dance as engage in synchronized wrestling — an expression of the rage and anxiety and desire erupting in a pair of wounded young souls.

It’s the most viscerally exciting interlude in director Jeff Ward’s choppy production, in which the other most intriguing aspect is the stage debut of Plaza, known for her roles in “Parks and Recreation,” “The White Lotus” and the indie gem “Emily the Criminal.” Big props to gutsy Plaza for choosing off-Broadway for a theatrical coming-out, when the habit of many of those who achieve TV celebrity is to appear in a play in London, far from the magnifying media lens of New York.

The bonus is that Plaza, playing a damaged woman who soaks a damaged man into her pores during a chance meeting in a shabby bar, is a good actress. She’s paired here with another good actor, Abbott, in the role of Danny, with whom her character, Roberta, develops a credibly besotted relationship over 80 minutes of scream-outs, tantrums, sex, slaps, recriminations and apologies. You sometimes wonder why a third character isn’t bursting in to say: “Hey, could you keep it to a low roar in here?”

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A lot of intensity has to be released in an hour and 20 minutes. (Thank heavens they get to let off steam in that choreographed cage match.) The boiling point is so regularly reached that subtler emotions are sometimes shortchanged, in a play about strangers who have done violence to others, or have had violence done to them, and about the loving potential they still manage to discover in each other. Shanley’s script offers some funny exchanges, but his skeletal framework is tricky, and the director doesn’t orchestrate a satisfying rhythm.

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The leaps from aggressiveness to tenderness to mistrust to shame and back again occur abruptly, as Roberta and Danny segue from the hyperventilating encounter in the bar, to that fever dance, to the bed in Roberta’s room in her parents’ house. The transitions in this early work by Shanley, who also wrote the popular play “Doubt” and the screenplay for the movie “Moonstruck,” would be challenging for any performers. Here, they feel at times as if they’re exercises in acting class. Which may be why the revival of “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” at the Lucille Lortel Theatre has absorbing moments but doesn’t strike a poignant chord. The pain never reaches down into the depths of that deep blue sea.

Danny, sporting black eye, tank top and Noo Yawk accent, behaves like a barely articulate refugee from “On the Waterfront”: He’s scarily wound up, seemingly ready to strike Roberta after she dares to make conversation from the next table. Roberta herself is a self-destructive wreck, drowning her sorrows and confiding childhood secrets. Ward conducts the opening scene at such a fever pitch that it’s hard to believe these people are able to hear each other.

Perhaps that’s the point, for things get more interesting in the wordless scrum that follows. Danny and Roberta have both done, or been subjected to, horrific things. With their bodies poised in furious, purposeful counterpoint, they find their connection: Callused Roberta is brutish Danny’s match. This makes the roughhouse ballet a satisfying bridge to the final scene in Roberta’s room, where their vulnerabilities are revealed. It’s just a little late in the proceedings for us to find our way into their story.

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The sinewy, wired Abbott embodies Danny’s necessary thuggishness. Plaza, too, has an affinity for a feral character desperate for a safe haven. Still, like Danny and Roberta’s bond, the production is unfinished business.

Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, by John Patrick Shanley. Directed by Jeff Ward. Sets, Scott Pask; costumes, Arianne Phillips; lighting, John Torres; sound, Kate Marvin; movement, Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber. About 80 minutes. Through Jan. 7 at Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher St., New York. dannyandthedeepbluesea.com.

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