If you've ever wondered just how deeply a new script depends on its actors, you would do well to see Tryst, now at the Merrimack Rep, which offers a kind of object lesson in how far two skilled performers can drive a vehicle that, if not exactly ramshackle, is nevertheless hardly a Rolls.

This is actually a retooled model of Tryst - after attending its unsuccessful British premiere, director Joe Brancato collaborated with author Karoline Leach on a new, more focused version, which has enjoyed considerable regional success before its current run at Merrimack.  And indeed, there's no doubt the chassis of the show is in good shape - the play turns on several dimes, in fact; the question is, where precisely is this particular vehicle supposed to be going?  That's what we can never really figure out.

Leach (along with the Merrimack's marketing department) clearly had it in mind to conjure a grim little entry in the familiar genre of the goth-romantic thriller - and in her first scenes, she seems at home in the idiom, and appears to know the lay of the land.  "George Love" (Mark Shanahan) is a manipulative cad who makes his living off the romantic fantasies of vulnerable Plain Janes in Edwardian England. He spots his prey by keeping an eye out for "“the sort of face that belongs to a woman who teaches piano or serves tea or issues library books." Only he scans for something else, too: "You’re looking for the little inconsistency," he explains. "The little something too expensive, too new, too nice for that face. The something that tells you it’s got a nice little nest egg. A few quid stashed away.’’ (Note that "it;" yes, Mr. Love has objectified women that far.)

Enter Adelaide (Andrea Maulella), whose thin visage fits that profile to a T (she works in the back of a hat shop, where "everyone has something wrong with them") and to whom George is soon smoothly whispering, "I cannot tell you how much I ache to take you in my arms." Seemingly swept off her feet, Adelaide agrees to an elopement at a remote seaside resort, all while being told, "Be sure to bring your checkbook." George's plan, of course - which he has carried off numerous times, he assures us - is to abscond with the contents of same after a night of love as Mr. and Mrs. Love (he's quite proud that he "always fulfills his responsibilities" in that regard).

And so far, so good; Leach's set-up is almost elemental, but she carries us to this re-imagined wedding night between Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett in spare but clean style. Needless to say, during their shared nocturnal climax we discover there's more to the self-aware Adelaide than met George's confidently appraising eye. But while it would be unfair to reveal the various twists in Tryst, it's not unfair to complain, I think, that in the end they don't amount to much thematically - and so don't quite satisfy the appetites Ms. Leach has so competently aroused in her first act. The playwright seems to be aiming for a paired set of psychological portraits, in which revelations are made by two personalities all but devoted to never revealing anything. This juxtaposition is intriguing, and at conjuring her characters' respective pains Ms. Leach is fairly successful - it's the integration of this psychological material into a steadily-developing contest of wills that seems to elude her. We intuit that she hopes for a rising sense that Adelaide's schemes may be nudging George, inch by inch, toward Bluebeard territory. But Leach's own schemes turn a bit clumsy, and her climax is far too abrupt for us to respond with the enjoyable shudder we're in the mood for.

Still, Tryst always holds our attention, even if it doesn't quite grip us, thanks to the polished and committed performances of Shanahan and (particularly) Maulella. Both have played their roles before, and both have their characters in their bones by now. And director Brancato knows just how to keep things moving - and us guessing - without overplaying his hand. All in all, Tryst wouldn't be a bad evening out for the kind of folks who read gruesome thrillers on the subway. But I think it will take yet another revision to make it something more.

Family plot

Father and son go mano-a-mano in A View of the Harbor.

I'm confused. Why are local critics hating on A View of the Harbor at the Merrimack? Louise Kennedy in the Globe writes that "A View of the Harbor has found a new formula for depression . . . it feels more like a sitcom than a play, and a third-rate sitcom at that." Okay - having all but killed off the North Shore Music Theatre, Kennedy seems to now have the Merrimack in her sights - all the better, apparently, to close as many theatres as she can before she loses her job, too. But from her review you'd never guess how engaging the production is, or how much the audience I attended it with seemed to enjoy it.

I'm not arguing, btw, that A View of the Harbor is flawless - indeed, far from it: it's flawed. Playwright Richard Dresser is confidently, but superficially, skilled, and as a result somewhat glib; he's in love with the tight, ironic reversals we expect from journalism, not drama, and he skates over transitions he should take time to develop. Still, his juxtapositions are amusing and suggestive, his skepticism toward everyone and everything provides for some genuine wit, as opposed to just "laughs," and the thrust-and-parry of his writing sometimes conjures a scary sense of moral dislocation. At its best, A View of the Harbor plays like a cross between Heartbreak House and Buried Child - not bad for a new play and a young playwright, I'd say.

Or, you could argue that it plays like a cross between Heartbreak House, Buried Child, and Everybody Loves Raymond. Certainly Dresser studs his play with one-liners that occasionally play like sitcom fodder. Still, his wisecracks send home pointed jokes about class in America, or how class feeling aligns with family feeling (taboo topics on sitcoms), so I was prone to forgive him this weakness. The trouble is, the background rhythm of sitcom "beats" forces his hand when it comes to the deeper issues he raises. He quickly shuffles his characters from one allegiance to another, and doesn't allow himself the freedom to really explore the darker shadows his writing casts. I have a feeling, though, that if he ever does dare to break this commercial template, he might just have a great play in him.

Certainly he's already written an amusing one. A View of the Harbor casts its jaundiced eye on the way the rich respond to the moral problem of being rich: privileged Paige has fallen hard for working class hero Nick, who slaves away in the local munitions factory she opposes; through him she gets the "authenticity" she craves, plus the cozy feeling she's rebelling against her own class. But when Paige follows Nick home after his father's medical collapse, she discovers that nothing about him is as it seems: not his class, not his money, not even his name. "Nick" is actually "Edward," and "a Townsend" - i.e., the scion of the family that once owned the munitions factory in which he toils, but now marinates in martinis, money, and emotional recrimination in its Addams-family-style redoubt on the shores of Maine. Most shocking of all, Nick is actually richer than Paige.

So what's an uppercrust liberal to do? The re-alignment of Paige's affections, and her return to the cold, but at least honestly self-interested, calculations of her class-bound core, become the spine of Presser's play - although he takes interesting little side-tours into the family's WASP-y dysfunction (of which their mean-spirited "poverty" is but one classic manifestation). Alas, these trips are generally too abbreviated - we want to learn more, for instance, about the actual Nick, Edward's dead brother, who fell (or jumped) off the cliff before the family home. Likewise Edward's emotionally paralyzed sister - who's so beaten-down Paige at first takes her for his mother - is intriguing but under-developed (her final illusions are a particular mystery, given her sharp perceptions early on). And how does Paige herself get around the supposed war-industry horrors behind the family fortune? Right now the play, like the Townsends, is held together by Dresser's conception of its central patriarch, on whose growling, cruelly capitalist stance the playwright has the best bead, perhaps because it doesn't change; it's the reconfiguration of the other characters around this central pillar that are currently giving him trouble.

Clearly delineating this, of course, would take time, which is what Dresser denies himself (the Merrimack does the play sans intermission). In a word, the playwright should revise and expand - and generally take a longer View of the Harbor. In the meantime, however, there are four strong performances to savor up at the Merrimack. Anderson Matthews makes a roaring caricature of his pickled patriarch - still, this is a caricature worthy of Daumier, and it's easy to see why Stephanie Fieger's self-serious Paige (at left) might find his flinty self-denial attractive (and after all, is his "poverty," with its hidden agenda of power, so very different from her own "self-denial"?). Meanwhile Kyle Fabel makes Nick both likable and slightly pathetic, and Andrea Cirie brings a waspish, sullen attack to the role of his downtrodden sister - although both, I'd argue, are left hanging in the final scene by the playwright. The gray ghost of a seaside Victorian which frames both their action and in-action is the work of the skillful Richard Wadsworth Chambers, while director Charles Towers, as is his wont, keeps things in crisp structural shape throughout. This director seems essentially drawn to rhetorical modes - his specialty is a kind of taut verbal thread strung over an abyss; in Albee, or even Hare, this approach works beautifully, because that deep darkness is central to the playwright's design. In Dresser, the abyss is there, too - only the playwright tries to distract us from it; hence the occasional sitcomminess of this production. But it occurs to me that Towers's skills might best be set off by Shaw, or even Ibsen - two playwrights rarely seen in Boston of late. Could they, perhaps, surface at the Merrimack sometime soon? If enough people ignore Louise Kennedy, maybe so.