Where do they all belong? Mad Horse studies the lonely BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	What Happened Was... By Tom Noonan. With Lisa Muller-Jones and Paul Drinan. Directed by Andrew Sokoloff. Produced by Mad Horse Theatre Company at the Portland Stage Studio Theatre on Forest Ave., through February 27. Call (207) 730-2389.
	Backstage • The play that shan’t be named will be the spring show of the relatively young Lucid Stage Productions, who debuted last summer with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Auditions for Shakespeare’s Scottish play (all right, it’s Macbeth) will take place March 3 through 5 and 12 at the Bakery Studios, by appointment only. Call (207) 415-3074.

"I can’t really explain it," Jackie is always saying, about things like why this Friday doesn’t feel like a Friday, or how she feels as she watches the city people from her window. Her co-worker Michael, on the other hand, can explain plenty of important things — how a microwave works, the corruption of the legal industry — but has a harder time with the finer points of his own psyche. And so when the two lonely New Yorkers have a first date over dinner in Jackie’s one-room apartment, actual, meaningful expression is a hard-won feat. Their struggle to communicate and commune is the action of What Happened Was..., Tom Noonan’s award-winning and none-too-cheery 1994 movie-turned-play, a dark comedy directed by Andrew Sokoloff at Mad Horse.

Executive assistant Jackie (Lisa Muller-Jones) and paralegal Michael (Paul Drinan) make up odd but equally insecure halves of a first date. To prepare for his arrival, Jackie guiltily hides unread New Yorker magazines under the cushions and self-sedates with gulps of white wine; when Michael arrives (unstylishly early), he keeps his briefcase in hand for what seems like eons while he stiffly circles the apartment. As Jackie puts their pre-made scallop dinner in the microwave (a fully functioning unit of Pamela DiPasquale’s uber-realistic set), Michael blurts that "seafood" is one of those "embarrassing" words, in the same category as "spigot" and "ritzy."

The hour and a half or so of their fraught, awkward, and sometimes ghastly date takes place in real-time on the stage, with neither exits nor scene changes to break up the action. That’s a very exposing challenge for the actors, since the entire arc of each character’s evolution is always on view. But as the play’s evening and drinking progress, Drinan and Muller-Jones are exceptionally deft in their negotiation of a harrowing span of emotions. The duo crafts with surprising grace what are singularly graceless — and sometimes absurd, and sometimes even spooky — characters and conversations. They make an art of making Jackie and Michael just miss connecting with each other again and again, and notice it, and — most torturous — notice that the other has noticed.

We suffer, too, on their accounts, through the agonizing silences and pathetic stabs at communion; What Happened Was... makes a point of sharing its characters’ discomfort. The script has Jackie repeat her helpless platitudes ("Manhattan is great, you know?"; "That’s so cool;" "It’s good to see someone so excited about something") with intentionally painful frequency, and also comes out with some killer non sequiturs (in the middle of dinner, Michael explains how he heard the Beatles singing his name throughout "Love Is All You Need"). Under Sokoloff’s unsparing direction, Drinan and Muller-Jones don’t flinch from holding the lulls so long and cringing from gaffes so visibly that we can’t but fidget ourselves.

What at first appears to be merely intense shyness on Jackie and Michael’s part is gradually taken to the nth and even the oth degree, revelation by revelation (which I will sidestep, dear theatergoer, in the interest of safeguarding your surprise). The two take turns upping the hyperbolic ante of their own insularity, letting each other peer into the deep waters of distress below their sadly banal surfaces. As for us in the audience, the more we see of their unedited lives, the farther they stretch the bounds of our empathy, until they’ve entered the realm of our sympathy, and, before long, that of less comfortable sentiments: pity, and even stunned aversion. Noonan’s script punctuates the revelation of their distress, unfolding in the otherwise hyper-realistic format of real-time, with elements of the absurdly strange, and as a result Jackie and Michael become more hyperbolic and case study-like than human.

Once our observation of these disturbed people has shifted from empathetic to clinical, it’s fair to ask what, if anything, we have learned in the course of the scrutiny.

And it’s in light of that question that What Happened Was..., as literature, disappoints. Mad Horse’s production is consummate, Sokoloff’s direction is spot-on in pacing and tenor, and Drinan and Muller-Jones inhabit this difficult study of anguish with sensitivity and art. Murkier, however, is the achievement of the study itself. Even after Jackie and Michael have explained themselves, not only is there no relent to their loneliness, no circuit completed of the charges they’ve struggled to emit, but no gleam of redemption or of anything, finally, gleaned at all. Another Beatles song asked us where all the people like Jackie and Michael come from; What Happened Was... asks us to wallow watching them a while, then brings up the lights and sends us home again.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com