Despite brilliant casting, ‘Lost Lake’ lacks urgency

Put two hard-up characters in one play, add tension, and chances are they’ll overcome their differences to share a valuable lesson of some kind. It’s the law of dramatic catharsis. Lost Lake, by Proof playwright David Auburn, spares us the teaching-moment rigmarole. But despite well-acted, sympathetic characters, it’s also less than the sum of their problems. John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone) couldn’t be better cast as Hogan, the grizzled co-owner of a lakeside house he’s renting to Veronica (Tracie Thoms, Rent) for a week one summer. She accuses Hogan of “skulking around the property like some weird freak,” and few people would look more natural doing that than the hollow-cheeked, lived-in Hawkes. His Hogan looks beaten up by both circumstances and his own doing, the kind of guy who nurses a cup of coffee for hours alone in a diner. He doesn’t even walk — he shuffles, hunched over.