Babak Tafti. Photo: Ahron R. Foster

Because the mind of the theater critic is a dimly lit basement crammed with boxes labeled after plays, actors and genres, the title of Abby Rosebrock’s Lowcountry made me think of Bruce Norris’s Downstate from three seasons ago. The earlier piece, like Rosebrock’s, is about registered sex offenders in abject spatial and spiritual limbo, waiting for deliverance by forgiveness or death. Both plays are less concerned with passing judgment than examining shame and social pathologies around sexuality. I bring up Norris not to imply dramaturgical copycatting. In fact, Rosebrock’s irreverent, even horny comedy goes places that Downstate doesn’t dare, though it’s oddly structured.

Produced by the Atlantic Theater Company and capably staged—up to a point—by Jo Bonney, Lowcountry is a sweaty two-person dance sandwiched between a draggy expository phone call and a quickie twist ending. If you arrived late and left five minutes early, you might say it crackles along in a prickly, noirish vein. Taken as a whole, the drama leaves you hanging.

A first date that goes right yet horribly wrong, the real-time action happens in the studio apartment of David (Babak Tafti), a recently divorced ex-high-school basketball coach in the sleepy lake town of Moncks Corner, South Carolina. There’s an unmade pull-out bed, sadly partitioned by a gray curtain that keeps falling down—depressing interiors courtesy of Arnulfo Maldonado. Through an overlong phone conversation with his gruff, casually abusive sponsor, Paul (Keith Kupferer, on speaker), we discover that David is close to gaining joint custody of his son. More sinisterly, we learn at some point he wore an ankle monitor and, at present, he’s lying to Paul about walking to a park for an outdoor date. In reality, he’s making spaghetti dinner for a woman he met on Tinder. There’s an edge of suspicion in Paul’s voice. David is broken goods. What’s the nature of the damage?

Babak Tafti and Jodi Balfour. Photo: Ahron R. Foster

That we learn in greater detail over an hour or so of flirting and banter once Tally (Jodi Balfour) arrives. Sheathed in a skimpy teal number and wearing two-inch chunky heels that give her height and a baby-doe strut, Balfour (Apple TV+’s For All Mankind) crafts a richly embodied, sensual performance. (Costume designer Sarah Laux captures the characters’ suburban-mall couture.) A former ballerina, the actor knows how to give weight to a partner or spin off on her own psychological pirouettes. If Tally had googled David (as other women have), she might have learned of his shady past with a girl he coached on a team. If David had a better memory, he’d realize he went to school with Tally (she was heavier then). Both characters have secrets, but Tally is on a mission, telegraphed with her throwaway remark, “Ovulating really hard right now.” A red flag to match the third glass of screw-top red she gulps down.

Jodi Balfour. Photo: Ahron R. Foster

Having seen Rosebrock’s Blue Ridge in 2019 (also at the Atlantic), I’m impressed all over again by her flair for writing women who are smart, funny, self-critical and pissed off. In the earlier play, Marin Ireland blazed as a scandalized English teacher trying to change her ways at a Christian halfway house in the North Carolina mountains. Here, Balfour gets to be flighty and witty and bitter and self-mocking as a Moncks Corner native who fled to Los Angeles for acting, failed at that, and now gigs in copyediting. When David asks Tally what her purpose is in life, she shoots back, “[A]void homelessness.” When David asks about her faith, she blithely cracks, “I’m into religions, in general—I loathe reason, so…” And when David finally admits to being a sex offender, Tally doesn’t recoil in horror; she goes on a sociological rant:

We’re all things we don’t wanna be, and it’s fucked-up we live in a world, where we can’t admit being disgusting, and mentally ill and a hypocrite’s kind of the human condition, and rent-seeking parasites fuck us, routinely and PROFIT FROM TERMINAL ILLNESS, and MAKE PEOPLE HOMELESS—

In the less showy role—the straight man to the chaos agent, if you will—Tafti does solid work building up his defenses, then letting this relentless lady tear them down. Rosebrock stacks the odds in terms of David’s sympathy quotient when we learn the details of his transgression, which suggest confusion rather than predatory villainy.

Where the piece zig-zags not so satisfyingly, as noted, is the opening sequence and an overly rushed denouement. Respecting spoilers, but the voice we hear on the phone, Paul, is attached to a burly dude who inevitably shows up after an intimate exchange between the leads. It was foreshadowed: David is crashing in Paul’s apartment, and the sponsor has the keys. David alludes to Paul’s past as a serial patron of sex workers. Played by Kupferer, a Chicago stage veteran recently seen in the movie Ghostlight, Paul operates as an anti-deus-ex-machina, dropping by to create problems, not solve them. David and Tally may have skeletons in their closets, but Paul is the monster under the bed. Bonney directs the gory twist a bit too hurriedly (keep your eye on those chonky heels), as if she didn’t trust the audience to process it, and Rosebrock opts to leave us breathless. It’s like you’re on a date that’s awkward yet arousing, then someone goes to the restroom and doesn’t come back.

Lowcountry | 1hr 35mins. No intermission. | Atlantic Theater Company | 336 West 20th Street | Buy Tickets Here