Ben
Brantley

November 9, 2015

So you’re driving along through what you think is a drearily familiar landscape, when suddenly there’s a bend in the road. All at once, in a single click of perception, everything looks slightly but revealingly different, and not just where you are now, but also where you’ve been. The view in the rearview mirror has changed. That’s the route taken by John Pollono in “Lost Girls,” the ambling and ultimately quite moving comic drama that opened on Monday night at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Mr. Pollono, an actor and writer whose previous plays include the dark teaser “Small Engine Repair,” is a deft practitioner of the sort of twist-in-the-tale narratives that are mostly associated with short-story writers of earlier eras, like O. Henry and W. Somerset Maugham. Such compact fictions tend to work better on the page than on the stage, since theatergoers can become impatient with expositional setups for reveals they may not know are coming. And the long opening scene of “Lost Girls,” an MCC production directed by Jo Bonney and starring a tough-as-beef-jerky Piper Perabo, is entertaining enough but hardly grips the attention.