Admirable performances, unsatisfying play

Over the past ten years or so, starting with his work on HBO’s lamentably short-lived Deadwood and continuing with memorable roles in indies such as Winter’s Bone, Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Sessions, John Hawkes has carved a significant reputation as a protean screen actor, as capable of conveying glinting menace as gentle humanity. It’s rewarding to observe that his lean physicality and haunted everyman expressiveness are no less compelling in his New York stage debut. Add in a flinty co-starring performance from Tracie Thoms and a dependable director like Daniel Sullivan, and you have the makings of a strong two-hander. What’s missing in Lost Lake is dramatic substance. Written by David Auburn, who won a 2001 Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize for Proof, this slender one-act play is a melancholy portrait of two strangers reaching for a tentative connection across the divide of their damaged lives. Auburn is too intelligent a playwright to go for expected banalities like an unlikely romance or an eruption of violence. But he hasn’t really come up with an engrossing alternative to flesh out his twin character studies into a play that feels complete. Perhaps it’s a side effect of Hawkes’ presence, but Lost Lake in many ways suggests it might have acquired more atmosphere and psychological weight as a small-scale movie.