Tough love The Nora makes the most of Moore’s sudsy Sea Horse BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
	The Sea Horse By Edward J. Moore. Directed by Normi Noel. Set by Eric Levenson. Lighting by Scott Pinkney. Costumes by Jacqueline Dalley. Sound by Dewey Dellay. With Barby Cardillo and Mark Peckham. Presented by the Nora Theatre Company at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through March 20.

There’s sex! There’s violence! There’s heartbreak and grudges and enough booze to make Eugene O’Neill’s characters look a tad dried up. But for all its boldfaced, sordid allure, Edward J. Moore’s The Sea Horse is really a flimsy noodle of a story about love’s awakening in a sleepy seacoast town. Still, even a flimsy noodle can make a cast-iron impression if it’s given the right structural support. In the Nora Theatre Company’s revival, the buttress comes in the form of two actors who inhabit their roles with crackling passion and paint their characters’ layers of insecurities with assurance. Under Normi Noel’s attentive direction, Barby Cardillo and Mark Peckham even find ways to use the script’s formulaic traps and pseudo-poetic riffs to illuminate the humanity of their characters.

The Sea Horse, which earned Moore the Vernon Rice Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Playwright in 1974, is set in a dead-end coastal saloon, stomping ground for grubby, vulgar types who find solace and an excuse for ill-mannered behavior in their drink. Waiting on soused seafarers her entire working life has made Gertrude (Cardillo) a hard-boiled, self-loathing woman. She has a fierce intolerance of "sentimental crud" that makes Carla from Cheers look like Carol Brady. Salty, scornful, unkempt, and buxom, Gertrude has been victimized in ways that have made her physically barren and emotionally infertile. And she projects the impression that she can put up only with relationships built on a foundation of sex and alcohol.

The play opens with her lover, Harry (Peckham, who has an honest if slightly tense demeanor and bears an uncanny resemblance to Willem Dafoe), returning from two months at sea. She’s not exactly "The Friendliest Place in Town" — the proclamation blaring from an electric sign behind the bar in Eric Levenson’s exquisitely realistic set. (The only thing missing is a stale-beer smell.) Instead of waxing giddy and affectionate at his delayed return, she grudgingly lets him out of the rain and into the closed bar, as if he were a nuisance.

The pair’s exchanges surge with the ebbing and flowing rhythm of the tide, oscillating between fits of passion and trepidation. Dramatic waves crash and foam until the second act, when the tide recedes and leaves fossilized clichés and soggy sentimentality in its wake. This is a play driven less by plot than by character development, all of it hinging on Harry’s transformation. Harry has had an epiphany of sorts on his latest nautical jaunt, and he’s returned with a business plan and a proposal. Part of it involves buying a boat and starting life elsewhere with Gertrude, a ploy she perceives as his wanting to keep her a secret because of her unglamorous appearance. In her distrust, she assails him with "I’m a blubber-ball so you wanna hide me! You got no balls! You belong in a dress!" You wonder whether Neil LaBute, who breaks taboos like a chef cracking eggs, didn’t create his 2004 Off Broadway play Fat Pig, which deals with an overweight woman and the man who’s in love with but ashamed of her, as a more sinister version of The Sea Horse.

Harry is prone to bouts of plastic poetry and a continual urge to talk about his feelings. He yearns for a son to "teach to be the best damn little salt." But as much as the 30-year-old play might aspire to be a study of gender roles in a relationship, it’s really a melodrama. Gertrude has been scorned and abused; she’s terrified of love and angry that she’s still susceptible to it. Cardillo gives an unsettling, gritty performance; you almost hear her pulse quicken with the anxiety rooted in her past as Harry lays out his scheme. For his part, Peckham uses his imposing physical presence, but behind the bluster he’s all tenderness and timidity, like a sea horse with its head down and tail coiled.