Get a room, you two,” one is tempted to shout during a performance of Blackbird, except the two principals already have a suitable chamber: It’s a garbage-strewn, fluorescently lit, color-cidal employee break area in an anodyne industrial building located squarely in Anyburb, u.s.a. This clinically unattractive setting—nowhere but everywhere—is meant to harmonize with the polluted nature of the relationship between the play’s two lead characters, a woman and the man with whom she had a sexual encounter fifteen years ago when she was twelve and he was about forty. But I found the room a more appropriate analogue for the sordid impulses of playwrights who are forever clambering to exploit some fresh sexual frontier.

Blackbird is one of those “shattering,” “gripping” plays that can be taken seriously only with strenuous effort. The middle-aged man who had an affair with a pre-pubescent girl is not a pedophile, you see. Not him. He tells us so and, amazingly, the author of the play is at pains to agree. He posits that the girl was the author of her own statutory rape. Believing that this can be so is the chief source of the dramatic tension in the play, but a fatuous central conceit creates a null set of a play.
 

The 2005 piece, by the Scot David Harrower, has been bouncing languidly around New York and London for years but is only now receiving its Broadway debut (at the Belasco Theatre through June