What generates such crackling tension in a high-voltage New Repertory Theatre production of “Frankie and Johnny’’ is the fact that only Johnny wants to move beyond that damage so they can build the life-changing relationship he envisions for them. Frankie, however, has an angry, self-protective determination to hide — and hide behind — her scars.
Given that “Frankie and Johnny’’ was Pacino-ed almost beyond recognition in a 1991 movie version that costarred Michelle Pfeiffer, it’s awfully gratifying to watch Anne Gottlieb and Robert Pemberton, two of Boston’s most accomplished stage actors, take a crack at the roles in the New Rep production.
Playing middle-aged characters whose ambitions, relationships, and horizons have been circumscribed by bad luck and bad choices, Gottlieb and Pemberton give a master class (to borrow a title from another McNally play) in how to use faces, bodies, and voices to communicate a world of feeling.
They make Frankie and Johnny feel fresh and original and real; Pemberton and Gottlieb are as plausible (and as wrenchingly human) in playing this combustible working-class duo as they were last year in the very different roles of an architect and his wife in Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?’’ at Gloucester Stage Company. (Gottlieb’s wounded Frankie also contains, albeit in radically different form, some of the quality of yearning the actress brought to her recent portrayal of a repressed 19th-century doctor’s wife in Sarah Ruhl’s “In the Next Room [or the Vibrator Play]’’ at SpeakEasy Stage Company.)
The performance takes place in the New Rep’s small Black Box Theater rather than the much larger Charles Mosesian Theater, and director Antonio Ocampo-Guzman stages “Frankie and Johnny’’ with a shrewd understanding of how to use the confined environment of Frankie’s apartment (meticulously rendered by set designer Erik D. Diaz) to maximize the impact of the convulsive verbal (and sometimes physical) fireworks of the play.
