By Carolyn Hayes

There are even more facets to love than there are cliches about it. Love is blind, love is strange, love hurts, love stinks, love is patient, love conquers all. In reality, from moment to moment, love can be fleeting, or unreliable, or cruel. But in the aggregate, regardless of the form it takes, love is lovely – and so is Williamston Theatre’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.”

In this production of Terrence McNally’s candid and naturalistic comedy, director John Manfredi gives the viewer a front-row seat to the unlikely germination of love – halting, mismatched, uncertain, backsliding, hard-won, real-life love – between two forlorn souls over the course of one intoxicating night.

That this is a tale about two consenting adults, intended for a mature audience, is abundantly clear from the play’s first moments, which catch the title couple in flagrante under a bed sheet. Apparently, this escapade marks the capstone of a successful first date between Frankie (Suzi Regan) and Johnny (John Lepard), both employed at a New York City diner, both of evasive ages and backgrounds.

The scripted nudity is tastefully handled and comparatively brief, followed by costumer Amber Marisa Cook’s various stages of comfortable undress, as the two continue getting to know each other through post-coital discussion and rituals. In the waning wee hours of Saturday night, the air is electric with the sleepless thrill of first attraction, the kind of marathon all-night talk that most viewers can recognize and remember. Consequently, Frankie and Johnny’s discourse bears no resemblance to exposition or plot, but rather feels like mere conversation, as each variously works to enthusiastically connect or forcefully disconnect with the other.

The world of the play fits into Frankie’s studio apartment, a shabby few hundred square feet that set designer Bartley H. Bauer wedges expertly into the cozy Williamston playing space and properties designer Michelle Raymond crams full of half-functional lifehacks. There is a real semblance of the outside world here, the New York of 1987, where everything is closed on Sunday and massive kickstand door stops are de rigueur safety precautions and a $7 movie ticket is highway robbery and the only way to identify a song on the radio is to call information and ask for the station’s phone number.

Yet even with the street sounds that mingle with the low background music (by sound designer Quintessa Gallinat) and the invading moonlight through the blinds (part of a fine haphazard lighting scheme by Genesis Garza), all that feels like an abstraction compared with the all-consuming relationship at stake within these water-stained walls.

Despite Lepard’s cavalier insistence and Regan’s apprehensive brake-tapping, Manfredi and company are careful not to take sides between the characters, as they debate whether to end or extend the evening, reveal the details of their pasts and expectations for the future, and argue the ramifications of bearing the same names as the subjects of a song in which one lover jealously guns the other down. The viewer can see and appreciate each perspective without vilifying the other, as the show’s anti-plot weaves an indefinite journey in real time through meandering, authentic conversation and the simmering conflict of failing to see eye to eye.

Yet even when things seem directionless, the actors are constantly delivering thoughtful responses to the script in the form of mirror-image moods and refrains, a clear progression that give the play’s two acts a light, swift feel of constant newness and burgeoning hope. Indeed, in a comedy socked with odd, curveball punchlines, it’s telling that the funniest moments often come from the duo’s silent moments of sizing each other up.

Whether Frankie and Johnny succeed as a couple is a matter of tenuous interpretation. Nonetheless, this production of “Frankie and Johnny” succeeds handily. The show crafts an intimate (in many senses of the word) portrait of two people, features a gifted cast whose undeniable chemistry makes it easy to root for them through disparity, and cultivates an underlying sense of safety and convivial spirit that lets this sweet, unlikely romance so tenderly tug at the heart.