Surge Forth!

I don’t know if it’s a city-wide resolution or if there’s just a change in the air, but 2010 is looking pretty good from an audience member’s perspective. Safe Home, the excellent Korean War drama, has just been extended through Feb. 3. 59E59 Theaters has the witty and moving Rough Sketch; Classic Stage Company has given us a late holiday gift in the form of David Ives’ Venus in Fur; and even the solid but unremarkable revival of Rebecca Gilman’s Blue Surge at The Wild Project is light years beyond the usual Off-Off-Broadway dreck, thanks to a marvelous performance from Pete Caslavka.

A 38-year-old cop whose poverty-stricken childhood has left him permanently uneasy in his fiancée’s upper middle class world, Curt (Caslavka) finds a fellow lost soul in “masseur” Sandy (Lauren M. Nordvig) when he and his partner Doug (Justin Gallo) raid a massage parlor. Bonding over their shared shitty pasts, Curt and Sandy forge a fragile connection that seems as impossible as it does imperative, especially as Gilman gradually reveals that Sandy’s heart may not even be gold-plated.

Under Kat Vecchio’s skilled and smooth direction, both Caslavka and Nordvig manage to effortlessly inhabit the nuances and layers of Gilman’s complicated characters, as if we were really spying on the two as they bare their souls to one another. Now, that may sound like the whole point of acting, but it’s an ideal that is very rarely found, and even less frequently at such a sustained level. Where the production falters is in its prolonged set changes (unavoidable, given the theater’s small stage) and in the miscasting of the supporting actors. Caslavka convincingly plays a 38-year-old, but Gallo is too slight and baby-faced (even with a beard) to pass as Curt’s partner and high school classmate. And as Curt’s fiancée, Bridget R. Durkin tries to sound adult and bohemian but instead ends up with the over-emphatic delivery of a high school senior playing a matron. Louise Flory, as Heather, Sandy’s co-worker and Doug’s new girlfriend, gives a competent performance but seems somewhat at a loss in the play’s most underwritten role.

Still, no one in the cast is excruciatingly bad, which would be enough of a rarity to recommend Blue Surge. But it’s Caslavka’s heartbreaking performance, and Nordvig’s remarkably unsentimental one, that transform this production into something deeper and more memorable than most Off-Off-Broadway shows.

>Blue Surge

Through Feb. 7, The Wild Project, 195 E. 3rd St. (betw. Aves. A & B), 212-868-4444; $25.