Candice Kogut and Richard Lambert in Blackbird.

Scottish playwright David Harrower’s two-character play, Blackbird, now on stage at the New Phoenix Theatre, attracted a ton of attention in 2006-2007. The London production stole the Olivier award for that year, besting such high profile rivals as Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer, Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll, and Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon.

The play provocatively chronicles the uncomfortable reunion of Una and Ray, two people who had a sexual relationship 15 years previous—when she was 12-year-old girl and he was about 40.

Okay. Ewwww.

The play itself is an emotional striptease that provides rich opportunities for actors to strut their stuff, breaking down the material from moment to moment, and tearing into motivations and twists of storytelling. Ray has served his time in prison and has tried to get his life back in order. Una has lived 15 years of unhappiness, and is unable to forge meaningful relationships.

Odd to say, however, there’s not much play there. What we do get is a disturbing situation and two vivid characters who relate a story from their mutual past in excruciating detail.

The appeal of Blackbird—a title that comes, I’m told, from British slang for “jailbird,” but which seems as likely to come from the slang for abandoning a social situation without saying goodbye, if you ask me (as in, “he pretended to go out for a cigarette, blackbirded the party, and we never saw him again”)—comes precisely from the opportunity for textbook scene work that it provides for actors. Like Strindberg’s The Stronger, or William Mastrosimone’s The Woolgatherer, this play of abuse and abandonment is most likely to live on in the rehearsal halls of theater departments everywhere.

Even the New York production is remembered less for the script than for bringing Jeff Daniels back to the New York stage and for solidifying the status of Toronto native Alison Pill (who also starred in Mauritius and in The Lieutenant of Inishmore) as a major new star of the New York stage.

At the New Phoenix, under the direction of Kelli Bocock-Natale, Candice Kogut and Richard Lambert are entirely up to the task. They convincingly show us how abuse can grow from love and still be abusive, nonetheless. They are two characters eternally trapped in a bygone moment, unable to get past, or to heal from the wounds that have been inflicted.