Photo by Joan Marcus

We first meet Jamie (Jeremy Strong) with Frank (Keith Nobbs), two Jersey kids who were friends as young children but who haven’t seen each other in over two decades, having treaded different paths. Jamie, at 32, has become a well-respected journo, living with a beautiful girlfriend, Paige (Sarah Goldberg, in fine form) in Brooklyn. Frank has headed to upstate New York, pursuing a gay lifestyle and having rebounded from skirmishes with the law.

Their divergent lives dovetail in playwright Amy Herzog’s The Great God Pan, making its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons. Frank is bringing up sexual abuse charges against his father (never seen) and suggests that Jamie might have a reason to be a part of said lawsuit. Jamie politely demurs; he has no such connection to Frank’s father. He can barely remember what the man looked like.

But then he starts learning things. Like the fact that as a four-year-old, he spent a week living with Frank’s family while his parents, Cathy and Doug (Becky Ann Baker and a particularly elliptical Peter Friedman), worked through some early troubles. Jamie is aghast. How could he, a reporter, not have known this information? Or remembered it?

Then details come back to him – a scratchy couch, a quote from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “A Musical Instrument,” which lends itself to Herzog’s important title. These oblique fragments aren’t enough to reveal the full tapestry of Jamie’s, but make him aware that there are more holes than he ever imagined. Suddenly, Jamie wonders if this can excuse some of the chapters in his life of which he is less proud – estrangement from his parents, sexual difficulties with Sarah.  Such an awful discovery could hurt him, but it would also, in a morbid way, be a gift.  And these details matter to the playwright as well. Pan is a woodland god-goat who invented music by attacking plants to invent a reed pipe; it’s a metaphor for a violent sex act that ultimately gave birth to beauty. In this way, Herzog uses deft imagery to make her layered work that much richer, and also illustrate the horrific act on which Frank opens the proverbial Pandora’s Box without having to be explicit in doing so. The nimble, almost subversive way in which Herzog entwines subject, theme, and imagery, makes Pan register dramatically and emotionally.

It’s possible that not all of Jamie’s circumstances can be pinpointed to a repressed early childhood trauma, but like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once advised, Herzog lives in the questions.  And director Carolyn Cantor, who also helmed Herzog’s last PH production, 2010’s After the Revolution, knows how to mine even the seemingly lightest of moments for both maximum ambiguity and specificity. (Similarly, Mark Wendland’s landscape-patterned set makes scenes feel both personally localized and as though they could be taking place anywhere.)  This includes what initially seem like tangential scenes between Paige, a dancer-turned-social work student, and Joelle (Erin Wilhelmi), the anorexic teenager she has been assigned to help. Both young women have been damaged, hurt in ways that Herzog never spells out, but that Cantor’s cast intuits to the audience. And their scenes reflect upon Jamie’s plight in a dual way. It makes us want to shake him and say “Grow up! Find out the truth so you can move on!” It also reminds us to be patient; everyone reaches personal breakthroughs in their own time.

Strong embodies Jamie’s man-child solipsism with the typical polish audiences have come to expect from him, one of his generation’s great actors, peeling back layers of protection to reveal desperation and fear. Nobbs, too, is similarly moving, and handles the restraint with which Herzog has drawn Frank – why can’t he just come out and say everything at once?! – with great care. One wishes for more scenes with the two of these actors, not to mention the rest of the cast that fills up the two- and three-handers that comprise each scene (Joyce Van Patten is also magnificent in the small role of a babysitter who once cared for Frank and Jamie), but each characters’ appearances have been carefully apportioned. This is a polished work as deep as it is rich. In Pan, a play about the betrayal of memory, Herzog has crafted a work to remember.

The Great God Pan

At Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street. Through Jan. 13. http://www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/plays/great-god-pan/.

With 4000 Miles, Amy Herzog graduates to the head of the class

By Doug Strassler

I wasn’t a very big fan of Amy Herzog’s last play, 2010’s After the Revolution; despite a starry and experienced cast, I found the thoughtful work heavy-handed and dramatically clunky. I am happy to report, then, that I am exceedingly impressed, with Herzog’s latest, 4000 Miles, which is currently running at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater after a summer run as part of its LCT3 series. In its own measured, sometimes anti-theatrical way, this new work suggests the deft hand of an emerging playwright I plan to keep watching.

4000 Miles isn’t just an impressive play, however. It’s also a handsome production, smartly staged by director Daniel Aukin and starring a pair of superb actors. Veteran Mary Louise Wilson is Vera, a widowed grandmother living in an impressive Greenwich Village apartment and Gabriel Ebert is Leo, the grandson who surprises her by showing up late one summer night after cross-country cycling trip. Though Leo has an estranged relationship with his family (he asks Vera, a bit too cryptically, not to tell his mother where he is), it is implied that in his younger years Leo and Vera enjoyed a fairly close bond.

Ostensibly, the show’s title refers to the amount of real estate Leo intended to cover on his sojourn, but “miles” also refer to the emotional distance Herzog charts between Vera and Leo. Or perhaps between either of them and anyone else. Conversations between them are clipped and adversarial, and Leo drops enough f-bombs to make anyone blanch, let alone an octogenarian, even one that was once married to a famous radical. Both of them are stunted, albeit for different reasons, and the weeks that Leo spends in Vera’s apartment demonstrate the way in which each of them regards the world. Vera means well, but puts up plenty of armor against anyone she thinks might attempt to take advantage of her (often, with good reason). Leo, meanwhile, may lead a fairly green lifestyle (he doesn’t even own a cell phone), but he’s not above such hedonistic twenty-something pleasures as wanton one-night stands and pot smoking (Greta Lee aces one scene as the current object of Leo’s bloodshot roving eye).

Aukin’s penchant for verisimilitude might be initially off-putting for audiences. Awkward pauses and extended mid-scene trips characters take offstage make moments, especially early in the play, feel accidental or under-rehearsed.  Herzog creates almost an inverted structure in Miles. Scenes don’t necessarily build in the traditional narrative sense but stand as individual episodes that heighten perspective on Leo and Vera, and the climax is actually the stuff most playwrights would use in the opening scenes of a play. This makes sense, since Herzog is an emotional archeologist digging deep into the center of what makes people tic and connect.

If I’ve made Miles sound like work, let me assure you that the rewards greatly outweigh the challenges afoot. If there is any problem with the play, it’s that there isn’t enough of it. I would have liked to see a bit more of how Leo and Vera bridge the gap between them. Nonetheless, the marvelously intuitive performances of both Ebert and Wilson compensate for that breach, suggesting reservoirs of unspoken sorrow, shame, and fear. Ebert also demonstrates a terrific chemistry with all three of his female counterparts, which includes a spot-on Zoë Winters as the girlfriend Leo left behind.

Miles, meanwhile, shares none of Leo’s growing pains. It’s a mature play. The distance that Herzog has scaled from Revolution to Miles give me reason to believe that the arc of her career may prove to be one of the most instructional modern theater has yet to see.

4000 Miles

Runs at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center, 150 West 65th Street, thru June 17. www.lincolncenter.org $75.