STAGE REVIEW : Meet ‘Frankie & Johnny,’ an Artfully Simple Tribute to Love

Frankie is a waitress. Johnny is a short-order cook. They work in the same New York cafe. One night he takes her to dinner and she takes him home. Guess what happens.

No. Nobody gets shot. These are not the legendary Frankie and Johnny. They are the ordinary protagonists of “Frankie & Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” a fractious romantic exchange by Terrence McNally that opened Thursday at the Mark Taper Forum.

It’s also one of those plays you love to love. Line by funny line, it wears down your resistance--just as Johnny does Frankie’s, even if it does take him all night. And all the while you watch, incredulous, just the way Frankie watches Johnny. Like her, you sometimes want to say to this play: “Get real! “

How real it gets depends entirely on how much of a believer you are. Cynics may leave their baggage at the door. Or not show up. Because “Frankie & Johnny” is a love story, artfully crafted, ultimately simple.

It breaks no new ground, shakes no foundations, rattles no sabers. Fairy tale or true confession, who cares? If you’re able to accept that wonderful things can happen to people out of the blue, and overnight, see this play. It’s totally, foolishly, absurdly winning.

Just like Johnny.

You’ll notice the avoidance of the word seductive . Even though “Frankie & Johnny” gets to the sexual heart of things right off (there is some discreet nudity), sex and nakedness are not what this play is about. Companionship, neediness, the holding of another hand in the dark are its true focus. These one-night lovers are not kids. They’ve been through the proverbial mill. They have trouble divulging their ages because they’re at the point where it’s become important to conceal it.

But if they’re “ordinary” people sharing an “ordinary” New York walk-up, the actors who portray them are not ordinary. Neither is the vivid dialogue McNally has given them. He’s created a pair of opposites who have plenty to say, to us and to each other: a woman who is a total realist and can’t believe this guy--and a guy who is a dreamer and wants to believe she is real.

“Here’s my guts ,” he cries, in a moment of desperation.

“I’m not good at small talk,” she retorts.

He likes women who talk nice; she lets him know that she’ll use any (expletive deleted) words she pleases. She wonders if Bach was Jewish because he wrote “The Golberg Variations”; he spouts Shakespeare in clumsy paraphrases the way others dish out homilies--one for every occasion.

Kathy Bates’ Frankie is a cynic. She doesn’t believe in hearts and flowers and happiness ever after. “Get real” is her credo.

“You’re not a creep,” she screams in a moment of terminal frustration, “you’re sincere .”

Kenneth Welsh as the unstoppable Johnny is a wiry, personification of unflappable good will: Ebullient, garrulous, persistent. Nothing gets him down. Nothing will make him deviate from his idee fixe : connecting with this other human being. Nothing will get him out of Frankie’s apartment, either, any more than out of her life. He is the stray cat at the door who has been searching for a home--and knows he has found it.

“This is worse than ‘Looking for Mr. Goodbar’!” Frankie shouts. But it’s her first cry of surrender. After that, the play rolls pleasantly and quite movingly to its conclusion, even if Act II never quite tops Act I, but rather coasts on the situation.

Designer D Martyn Bookwalter’s set exactly captures that semi-dingy look of benign neglect that afflicts old New York brownstones. Martin Aronstein and David C. Woolard have provided appropriate lights and costumes, respectively. But it is director Paul Benedict who has created the real magic.

It would be easy to overplay this hand, but Benedict holds steady. He has taken a deep breath and a careful bead on the actors and the script, and exercised control. The result is an exquisitely balanced valentine to love and that lovely thing with feathers: hope.

Can anyone possibly object?