In Waiting for Godot, Pozzo the slave-owner offers the grim yet illuminating commentary, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”  This idea is a reflection of mortality—life as a flicker—and it hovers above Sam Shepard’s Ages of the Moon, opening this week at the Atlantic Theater.  Although there is no Pozzo, and no Lucky, one could think of Shepard’s tragicomic duo, Ames and Byron, as a new Vladimir and Estragon.  Instead of waiting for a being who may not exist, they’re keeping awake for the moon and its total eclipse, a once-in-a-lifetime moment that, damn it, always seems to occur while the world is sleeping.  Ames and Byron can’t, and won’t, miss it.  For unlike the waxing and waning of the heart, lunar patterns, at least, are predictable.

Ages of the Moon is a story of twinning lives–two regular guys who have been friends for half a century.  The play rises and sets on the front porch of Ames’s home, a creaky cabin shrouded in invisible wilderness.  There is a stark honesty about the stage: two upholstered chairs, mismatched and obviously dragged out from inside, a bottle of bourbon holding fort between them.  We are in man’s country, and this pocket in particular is a meager sanctuary for the broken and abandoned.  The suicidal Ames, played by Stephen Rea (Academy Award nominee for The Crying Game), has called upon the only person whom he’s certain can talk him away from the muzzle of his rifle.  Upon his chum’s plea, Byron, portrayed by Seán McGinley (On a Clear Day), boards a cross-country bus toting nothing more than a duffel bag and a sad secret.

The beauty of the production lies in the rapport between Rea and McGinley, who are reprising roles first embodied at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.  Their affinity is no surprise as the actors have appeared in some of the same films, and Shepard wrote Ames and Byron with them in mind.  Undoubtedly, there is an art to their banter, the tangential skipping from one subject to another: first the sexiness of women on bicycles versus women on horseback (considering the measurable space and friction between one’s thighs in both modes of mounted exercise), then graver, purging vocalizations about sins and the silent suffering of penance.  But there is also a naturalness about the characters’ camaraderie, a feeling that this doesn’t have to be theater.  There is an ease to their comforting, their counsel, the way they call each other out.  In a one-act play, with no switch of scenery and no peripheral characters, it is no minor feat to charm an audience for ninety dark minutes.  But Rea and McGinley do just that; they never cease to entertain because they never stop being believable.

Shepard, who was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979 for Buried Child, is in his backyard here, sinking his heels into veteran themes of social and mental isolation, desperation and the realization of a crumbling life.  Both men have been stripped hopeless by the women they have loved, by desertion and by death.  They survive through memories, and as the hairs on their heads gray, so do their minds.  At what point does one stop believing his own recollections?  Or sleeping through the night, accepting what is and forgiving what could have been?

In his own Pozzo moment, Byron remarks, “Isn’t that us up there—throwing shadows on the moon?”  Since we cannot read about our own total eclipse—that ultimate once-in-a-lifetime moment—in The Old Farmer’s Almanac, best to forge peace with what’s left of the gleaming light.

Ages of the Moon officially opens on Wednesday, January 27^th and will run through March 7^th, 2010. www.atlantictheater.org.

Photo: Seán McGinley and Stephen Rea