The Cook, the Waitress, Her Bed and Her Toothbrush

THE CONCEPT OF "CONNECTING" GETS A lot of lip service in Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. The title characters use speech, sex, food and music in their sometimes earnest, sometimes weary efforts to make that connection. The sex is fun, but it's not the point. Frankie and Johnny want someone to brush their teeth with in the morning.

Of course, their bond with one another doesn't matter all that much if they don't also connect with their audience. McNally wrote Frankie and Johnny early in his career, before Master Class and Love! Valour! Compassion! made him a latter-day B-way comic bard. Here, he plays the beginner's trick of substituting theme or plot with sparkling layers of verbal gift wrap.

To its infinite advantage, Frankie and Johnny has always attracted superior actors--Kathy Bates and F. Murray Abraham in New York, Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino in Movieland. That tradition continues in the Loeb Ex production, where Sarah Burt-Kinderman "97 and Peter Friedland "98 are providing some enchanted evenings.

Frankie is a waitress, and Johnny a cook, in a dive of a diner somewhere in the Big Apple. She comes home every day to a small apartment with meat loaf and beer in the fridge, a stuffed E.T. doll on the nightstand. "I had a parakeet once," she admits. "I hated it, I was glad when it died." Frankie is a pro at cloaking loneliness in irony. She probably was glad when Tweety bought the bird-farm, but then again, she'd never tell us otherwise.

Johnny doesn't know any better than to say exactly what he's feeling at the moment. He assumes that a statement like "most Koreans don't speak English" is an incisive social commentary and that if you want a woman to open her bathrobe, the best idea is to say point-blank, "Open your robe." All the same, the impish sincerity that drives all of this makes him impossible to ignore...even for Frankie, who seems to find very few things impossible to ignore.

She is unprepared, though, when Johnny decides after one night of bliss that he and Frankie should marry and further the race. "You're too needy," she tells him. "You want too much." Johnny refuses to leave her apartment until she shares his vision. Unlikely, considering that when the two see a full moon, he thinks instantly of love, she of werewolves.

Friedland appears to have a great time swaggering through his role, a not-always-convincing blend of male bravado and hangdog romanticism. As Frankie stares at him over her kitchen counter, Johnny surmises, "I bet I know what you're thinking now: he's too good to be true!" Friedland nails the wink-wink self-assurance of the line, but is almost equally convincing in an impulsive phone call to a radio station, admitting that he and Frankie are "great beauties neither one," but asking regardless for "the most beautiful music in the world."

Burt-Kinderman has a harder job. McNally gives Johnny the snappiest lines and the sweetest ones, leaving Frankie to fill all the emotional space between. Also, because Johnny is smitten from Scene One, the will-they-or-won't-they momentum of the piece rests entirely on her changes of mood. In other words, whoever plays Frankie has to keep the play moving and slow everything down.

Burt-Kinderman performs the balancing act well. She moves with a casual grace that really transforms the Loeb from a theatre space into a real woman's apartment. She also has the rare comic gift of winning laughs without seeming to have any punch lines. Her jokes fall humbly out of her mouth as if she had just made them up.

The beginnings of both acts of Frankie and Johnny feel a little strained, as if each actor is still warming up and searching for a rhythm. Both performances also warranted a fine-tuning here and there. Friedland, for example, on Johnny's first visit to Frankie's apartment, walks toward every utensil, appliance and food product he needs. Burt-Kinderman, for her part, tends to forecast future jokes by speeding through her lines so Johnny can zing one off. Both of these tendencies felt a little overrehearsed, a problem in a play that already feels a little canned.

All the same, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune is a delightful production of a work that makes no pretense toward Art. At one point, Johnny asks Frankie to recite a monologue from a high-school performance. She balks: "You think actors just go around acting for people like that?" Sometimes, it seems, they do. Frankie and Johnny is fast-food for the theatrical set, but Burt-Kinderman and Friedland serve it up scrumptious.