GOTTA HAVE FAITH

"Danny and the Deep Blue Sea," "Scene Partners," and "Waiting for Godot."

- VINSON CUNNINGHAM

Even the weakest attempt at love takes a strange kind of faith. Most of us have enough problems, after all. We grow up and nurse new hurts as they write themselves, inevitably, across our lives. That much can’t be helped. But romance—which always ends in tears— requires our knowing consent. Who needs to put himself in the way of voluntary pain?

Danny (Christopher Abbott), half of the sudden couple at the heart of the two-hander “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” by John Patrick Shanley, from 1984—revived at the Lucille Lortel, under Jeff Ward’s direction—doesn’t want to court that kind of suffering. He’s the most explosive version of a guy you’d probably recognize if you’ve been broke and sad in New York. He’s raw and feral and itching to come to blows with anybody who so much as looks at him wrong or asks a seemingly disrespectful question. Early in the play, sitting at the bar where the first act is set, he gets heated at some guy across the room who’s supposedly staring at him. The poor sap’s just drunk and asleep.