Parlour Song

SOFA, SO GOOD Neighbors Cake and Mortimer make small talk.

Photograph: Doug Hamilton

It may be time for Jonathan Cake to legally change his first name to Beef. The comely British actor’s worked-out body has played an integral role in his body of work: Earlier this season, Cake steamed up a Roman sauna in Cymbeline, draped only in a towel; two months ago, he returned to the stage in Almost an Evening—again in a sauna, again in a towel. And now, as Dale in Jez Butterworth’s absorbing Parlour Song, he spends a key scene in skimpy boxer briefs, flexing and preening in front of his neighbor’s covetous wife, Joy (Mortimer). This near-nudity is anything but gratuitous: Dale’s carefully taut 40-year-old frame—so different from that of her dumpy husband, Ned (Bauer)—incarnates Joy’s inchoate fantasies of escape. His body is a last-chance offer.

The symbolism is not especially subtle throughout Butterworth’s bittersweet drama, set amid the monotony of a stretch of identical English row houses. There is much talk of sleepwalking and dreaming, and of loss and fear of loss. (When Ned moans that “everything is disappearing,” he means it literally—objects large and small are vanishing from his house.) But in Neil Pepe’s excellent production for Atlantic Theater Company, the actors shine through the midlife-crisis murk. Cake and Bauer adeptly convey the nervous balance of male friendship, and Mortimer is magnetic as Joy: a quietly desperate housewife teetering at the apex of a romantic triangle, with downward slopes at both sides.

—Adam Feldman