NEW YORK — Terrence McNally's "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune" begins with climactic sex between a middle-aged waitress and her short-order cook. In the script he wrote in the late 1980s, McNally admonished actors and directors that the lovemaking must be explicit. "Above all, they must be graphic," he wrote. "The real thing."
Thus, at the Broadhurst Theatre, where this prescient and moving play is in a limited-edition revival, audiences are treated to the naked bodies of Michael Shannon and Audra McDonald going at it, physically and vocally. It's the first clue that this is not a conventional romantic comedy — which would have the lovemaking at the end, the audience heading out into the street and the characters left to an unspecified future. Not here. Frankie and Johnny are people for whom casual sex is an easy way to fend off loneliness and insecurity; McNally wants the feral creaks and groans to be real not because he wants to emphasize what's there, but because he wants us to see what's missing.
Intimacy and trust. Hard to find when you’re middle-aged and looking. True in 1987. Even more true now.
You realize how well Shannon has been cast in this role when you hear McDonald, who dives deep from the start, talk about how she can't tell if this potential savior from a life composed entirely of taking orders and making rent — a life of Hell's Kitchen despair in this telling — is very intense or very crazy. Characters with that ambivalence have pretty much made up Shannon's entire body of work, from his early theater days in Chicago to "Boardwalk Empire" to "99 Homes" to "The Shape of Water." He always seems far gentler on a stage and, mercifully without recourse to the conventional, he elicits the sympathy that Johnny needs from the get-go, lest the audience side immediately with Frankie and advocate for kicking him out onto 10th Avenue, ruining the play.
But by the time you hit your late 40s, a woman with experience of men often comes to mistrust intensity. The question of this play, really, is whether the tired-of-looking Johnny, who has made up his mind that everything he wants is right here in this room, can win Frankie's trust. He's weird all right. But then so is Frankie. So are we all.
On the surface, "Frankie and Johnny" (now part of the 2019-20 Broadway season) is very much a creature of its own time; even the diner where this pair works, visible in the movie but not in the one-scene play, is part of a now-vanished New York. You hear the voice of a radio DJ — a classical FM version of the ubiquitous Delilah — playing beautiful music for the lovelorn and the lonely. Heck, even the presence of working-class characters residing in Midtown makes the play a period piece. And, for sure, the age of the work sometimes shows; its devices and its rhetoric are throwbacks.
But with a lot of help from McDonald and a deceptively expressionistic set from Riccardo Hernandez, the director Arin Arbus effectively operates on the levels of the then and the now. In the best moments of the piece, you think about the different terms of relationships in the 1980s and also how so much and yet so little has changed.
Both of these actors are vulnerable enough to allow their characters to reveal the hurts of the past. But Arbus has managed the power balance very shrewdly, making McDonald's Frankie the decision-maker and the leading protagonist. McDonald is a very different kind of actor from Shannon, but her force is such that she holds you in suspense.
That heavy sex at the start is accompanied by Bach's “Goldberg Variations,” part of the play's blatant advocacy for music as a part of any beautiful life. In this production, which feels right all the way through, it is as if Frankie and Johnny can't achieve intimacy on their own but need an external vocabulary. Actually, that's the part of the show that most feels so timely — no relationship exists in a vacuum and to make real love you have to both hear and shut out the Hell's Kitchen on the other side of the window.
This Frankie and Johnny — beautifully but honestly lit by Natasha Katz — learn hope from each other.
"Frankie and Johnny" plays at the Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th St.; www.frankieandjohnnybroadway.com
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
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