Julia Stiles and James Wirt star as a pair dealing with the end results of a one-night stand in Scott Organ’s will-they-or-won’t-they rom-com

What happens when a one-night stand leads to something more? That question seems to be floating around the mind of playwright Scott Organ, who tries to figure out the answer in a 70-minute one-act titled Phoenix. Premiering in 2010 at the Humana Festival and making its off-Broadway debut the same year at Barrow Group Theatre, the two-character romantic comedy-drama is currently receiving a somewhat-higher-profile revival at the Cherry Lane Theatre, starring established stage and screen vet Julia Stiles and up-and-comer James Wirt. While it’s no doubt that they have chemistry, neither is able to mask the lackadaisical quality of the script and Jennifer DeLia’s amateurish direction. Stiles and Wirt play Sue and Bruce, a pair of rather aimless New York 30somethings who hooked up one night, three months prior to the play’s start, after a particularly intense game of bar trivia. Sue promptly skipped town — she’s a traveling nurse — only to show up on Bruce’s doorstep (well, at a mutually-decided-upon bar) with an unexpected plus-one growing inside her. When she declares that she’s planning to “take care of it” alone — in Phoenix, Arizona — Bruce insists on crossing the country to accompany her. In Organ’s hands, Sue and Bruce are little more than sketches of characters who aren’t colored in with pasts — it’s almost as though the play was intended to be an acting-school exercise. At least Sue, a cipher of a character who undergoes an extremely jarring eleventh-hour shift in personality, reveals what little biographical details she has: two cats that live with her mother. Bruce, on the other hand, has no job to speak of, no family, nor anything else. The dialogue — short, clipped sentences — comes off as stilted, theatrical representations of the way people speak in real life, as opposed to actually sounding human.