Skillful actors are the pull of 'Attraction'

Few moments in the theater can make our stomachs twist as tightly as when failed attorney Ray, amid the rubble of his collapsed second marriage, asks his wife, Denise, for her life savings to pay off a $20,000 gambling debt that's urgently due thugs.

As Ray, Brandon Whitehead simpers through thin lips while he clutches to every limp reed of argument that might sway her and save his precious body parts. As Denise, Kate Czajkowski's strained silence rips through the pretense, as we await the inevitable, crushing end.

With stunning execution by Whitehead and Czajkowski, the scene tingles with failure and loss. It's the pinnacle moment, but only one among many in which extraordinary acting redeems a floundering story that questions why men are worth bothering with at all.

Playwright Marlane Meyer, a television veteran, can certainly write a great scene, but her play (which premiered at the 2002 Humana Festival in Louisville, Ky.) is a flailing heap of bizarre plot points. Ray's financial crisis is, in fact, a diversion from the key device, in which his younger brother, Warren (Connor Toms), suffers from a sibling rivalry that spurred him to run off with Ray's wife years ago. Warren's own career as a police detective has since slid due to a drug addiction, and he appears on Ray's patio rambling strangely about the virtues of hitting the wife he stole.

Onto this outlandish foundation Meyer throws a murdering schoolgirl sociopath in need of a crooked lawyer, and even a dash of child pornography.

Most of the play is taken up by Ray and Warren arguing over the past, and the pitfalls of love and marriage. Toms is youthful id to Whitehead's pasty superego, with the younger man oblivious to consequences that the older scolds over. Meyer has saddled them with too many shifts in focus, but these nimble performers (with insightful guidance from director MJ Sieber) bring truth to each sudden veer.

James Wheeler also offers chilling turns, first as Roger, the silk-suited lowlife who offers Ray an escape from his financial troubles at the expense of the few principles he has left, then as the loan enforcer "Bone Daddy," a sotto voce collector of either dollars or clavicles.

Watching "The Mystery of Attraction" is like witnessing a freeway pileup, certain that each wreck will be the last as the mishaps refuse to stop. But why we're attracted to these outstanding performances is no mystery at all.