Courage and Spirit in the Name of Love

“This is a waltz,” explains our narrator and protagonist, a compulsively wisecracking Lithuanian Jewish immigrant named Matt Friedman, as he prepares us and himself for the giddy, nerve-racking steps of courtship. With disarming, understated eloquence, Matt risks everything in “Talley’s Folly,” Lanford Wilson’s sweetly moving two-character romance set against a backdrop of post-World War II social upheaval.

Appropriately enough, this captivating revival from Free Association Theatre is a labor of love on several levels, not just thematic--the cast teams real-life spouses Alan Blumenfeld and Katherine James, and the entire run is a benefit for the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, where Blumenfeld is currently appearing as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” and as the president in “The Madwoman of Chaillot,” (on Saturdays, he performs all three shows) as well as assistant directing the upcoming “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

However, no signs of overload are apparent in Blumenfeld’s meticulously nuanced performance as the love-smitten Matt, a sharp-tongued ex-New Yorker very much out of his element in the rustic town of Lebanon, Mo., where he’s returned to seek the hand of Sally Talley, the nurse with whom he’d had a brief affair while vacationing there the previous year.

Matt’s opening monologue rivets his audience with the masterful timing of a Borscht Belt comic and never relinquishes our sympathy as he dances that age-old waltz around the formidable opposition of Sally’s prominent family (her father had thrown him out of the house on his previous visit), not to mention the cool reception he gets from Sally herself.

To call James’ Sally an unwilling dance partner would be a supreme understatement--aloof, unsmiling and pointedly refusing to let herself be drawn into an intimate conversation, Sally is well on her way to lonely, bitter spinsterhood. Yet her nobility of spirit and unusually tolerant attitudes are also apparent, and she’s at least agreed to slip away from Fourth of July festivities to meet Matt in the Talley family folly, a dilapidated boathouse built by her uncle in the days before the clan had fallen on hard times.

Back at the main house, Sally’s relations indulge in the dysfunctional sparring Wilson later chronicled in “Talley and Sons,” (the trilogy concludes with “The Fifth of July”) but here there’s at least a chance of happiness--of moving past their respective haunted pasts--for two people worth caring about.

It would be hard to imagine a more apropos setting for Wilson’s abandoned folly than the Theatricum’s newly opened S. Mark Taper Youth Pavilion. Like its larger-capacity adjacent space, the 100-seat outdoor amphitheater is set against a steep, scenic canyon wall--a perfect backdrop for the treacherous terrain Matt calls “a remote wood on a remote and capricious river.”

Under Stan Roth’s assured direction, the two performers employ unwavering emotional authenticity to establish the high stakes in this last-chance reunion. There are no missteps here--this dance is hilarious, heartbreaking, and ultimately heroic.

*

“Talley’s Folly,” Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum S. Mark Taper Youth Pavilion, 1419 Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga. Saturdays-Sundays, 1 p.m. Ends Aug. 18. $15. (310) 455-3723. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.