Stars more than 'Get By' in LaBute play

NEW YORK -- In the opening scene of Neil LaBute's The Way We Get By (*** out of four stars), a young man, Doug, wanders tentatively around a living room that's clearly not his own. A woman, Beth, enters from the bedroom, and we know right away that she and Doug have just spent the night together, and quite unexpectedly.

It emerges that the two were at a party the evening before, where they arrived separately but drifted together after consuming a good deal of alcohol. That's not to say they're strangers, or friends who hooked up on a drunken whim. Doug and Beth go back a long ways, though the precise details of their association won't be revealed until about halfway through this 85-minute play, which opened off-Broadway Tuesday at Second Stage Theatre.

Before that revelation, Get By can be slow going. Doug, played by stage vet and The Newsroom alum Thomas Sadoski, and Beth, portrayed by film star Amanda Seyfried, dance clumsily around each other. Doug seems most intent on not making an awkward situation worse. Beth, more naturally defensive, is rattled nonetheless. Their inability to communicate, while funny in spurts, threatens to grow tiresome.

This being a LaBute play, the characters inevitably become more blunt and biting as they struggle to connect. And, as usual, the playwright has something bigger in mind than the ways in which men and women hurt each other. When the truth of Doug and Beth's situation, why they have known one another for years, is finally stated, a panicked Beth begs him, "Let's let the sun come up first before we worry about what our Facebook statuses are gonna be!"

Doug urges her to be less worried about what other people think. "Everyone's got to have an opinion about this stuff," he says, adding, "Look at us, worrying about this…with so much else going on in the world! Like actual real problems!"

In his desperation, Doug rambles a bit, but the point is clear. For all the advantages we've acquired in the age of information and social media, we've also developed ever more outlets for our pettier impulses. It's hardly surprising that LaBute, whose sometimes brutal wit has long been accompanied by an equally fierce moral curiosity, would suggest such concerns.

But if we see Doug and Beth's struggle in the context of a world where everyone can seem to be in everyone else's business -- especially when it's trivial -- the focus is on two individuals trying to assess their own capacity for courage. In her New York stage debut, Seyfried delivers a forthright, vanity-free performance, not shrinking from Beth's flashes of selfishness and irritability.

The wonderful Sadoski allows us to see how Doug, something of an overgrown boy at first, adores her nonetheless, and is inspired by her. As LaBute shows us in a predictably unsentimental fashion, that's what love can do -- and why it's worth fighting for.