Continued: Taboo talk

If you don't think you can tolerate 75 minutes of intense, sometimes explicit, back-and-forth talk between a man and woman who had a sexual relationship 15 years ago, when she was 12 and he was 40, this is never going to be your play.

But those curious about the Scottish playwright David Harrower, who upset Tom Stoppard ("Rock 'n' Roll") and Peter Morgan ("Frost/Nixon") to win the 2007 Olivier Award for best new play, will not want to miss "Blackbird." It opened last weekend at the Guthrie's studio theater in a Pillsbury House production tautly directed by Stephen DiMenna and wonderfully, courageously acted by Tracey Maloney and Stephen Yoakam.

Despite the one-act's dark subject matter, there are dramatic pleasures aplenty, beginning and ending with Harrower's language. Sentences are fragmented, freighted with insight and frighteningly direct ("pull out your eyes, I wrote").

The opening is gorgeously pre-language, as we hear Una (Maloney) hyperventilating in a dark space. She's nervous, as she has driven some distance to confront for the first time the man who went to prison for several years after he was convicted of having had sex with her when she was a minor.

When the lights come up, we are in a cheerless, fluorescent-lit break room (Joseph Stanley's set) in "one of those low buildings you see, you pass on the highway, you have no clue what goes on inside." Ray works here, though it's unclear exactly what he does.

The black-and-white emotions you expect -- anger, recrimination, defensiveness, denial, regret, indignation -- are all here. Una claims Ray (Yoakam) ruined her life. Ray is sorry, and insists that since getting out of jail he has gotten his life back on track. In one speech he relates what he's learned about pedophiles, insisting that he "was never one of those sick bastards."

It's the gray shadings, however, that lend "Blackbird" its edgy originality. Una recalls wanting Ray to be her boyfriend. Ray's responses to Una show how his desire for her remains, despite his assurances that he has changed. The possibility that their "affair" had a basis in mutuality and consent is among the play's most incendiary propositions.

Maloney is spellbinding, especially in a 10-minute monologue recalling an out-of-town trip with Ray. Yoakam deftly recalibrates his Ray in real time, showing him to be sometimes the rehabbed and respectable prig, sometimes the ruined man, sometimes the clueless and reprobate pig.

A development near the end throws another complication into these two damaged lives, and leaves us gasping and wondering.

Claude Peck • 612-673-7977