Review: ‘Fulfillment Center’ Finds the Poetry in Missed Connections

When they conduct what is commonly known as a conversation, they only half hear one another. But the director, Daniel Aukin, and his perfectly mismatched cast — Eboni Booth, Bobby Moreno, Deirdre O’Connell and Frederick Weller — find the resonant meaning in the battle between hope and cynicism that infuses these characters’ every word and gesture.

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I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that, people being people, this battle is never resolved, or that its best possible outcome would be a queasy state of resignation. Yet though you’re likely to feel the pressure of unshed tears when the play is over, “Fulfillment Center” is also an unexpectedly inspiriting work.

That’s because the writer, director and performers here understand their creations in a way that connects these disconnected characters in our minds. The production is steeped in a luminous and illuminating empathy that feels both uncommon and essential right now.

Mr. Koogler, whose earlier “Kill Floor” mined similar emotional ground, sets his dramatis personae on what would seem to be a bruising collision course. Alex (Mr. Moreno) is a recent arrival from New York, a company manager at the fulfillment center (he’s cool enough to wince at the implications of the name), where he’s overseeing the shipping crew during a busy holiday season.

His latest, and probably most ill-advised, hire is Suzan (Ms. O’Connell), 60-something former folk singer (she even had “a couple fans,” she says) who’s on the run from her latest failed relationship. Suzan has taken up residence at a campsite, where she meets John (Mr. Weller), a laconic man with a nebulous past who’s attractive in “an ugly-hot way.”

That description comes from Madeleine (Ms. Booth), who has followed Alex from New York City. She is not happy to find herself in the desert provinces of New Mexico, where she feels out of place as a black woman. Madeleine drinks too much, and she spends too much idle time surfing the Web. That’s how she meets John. (And by the way, I only once heard a character address someone else by name.)

“Fulfillment Center” unfolds in a series of two-character vignettes, in which you’re always aware of the potential for disaster. This is true from the very first scene when a physically unfit Suzan auditions for a strenuous job.

The same unease permeates all successive encounters, including those that would seem to promise romantic coziness. Others are pregnant with more sinister possibilities, especially the ones in which John appears. But the script flirts only with eventfulness. And each new scene stealthily begins with a phrase that deflates the expectations conjured at the end of the last one.

Give all the more credit to Mr. Aukin and his cast, then, for sustaining an absorbing air of suspense, and for guaranteeing that you fully invest yourself in characters who are clearly born to lose, no matter what they accomplish. As an aging hippie who can’t quite figure out why or when the Age of Aquarius ended, the always fabulous Ms. O’Connell (“Circle Mirror Transformation”) provides a master class in angrily cheerful passive-aggression.

The rest of the cast performs at the same high level of psychic contradiction. Mr. Moreno makes us feel the thwarting tug of Alex’s inconvenient conscience and unsteady love for Madeleine, while Mr. Weller reminds us how of good he is at mixing likability with subliminal menace. Ms. Booth, as the most articulate and self-aware of the four, beautifully demonstrates the harsh limits of such intelligence.

Mr. Aukin showed a genius for eliciting the revelatory poetry of bodies in motion in his sensational Broadway revival of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love.” And in “Fulfillment Center” the body language — defensive, coiled, curled and gnarled — is heartbreakingly eloquent, and it is sustained by every member of the cast, even offstage.

That’s right. The two performers who aren’t appearing in a given scene visibly occupy the shadows, hunched and depleted, on the edges of Andrew Lieberman’s stark set, lighted by Pat Collins.

It’s a long runway of a stage, which slices through the audience, on which the characters appear, often at opposite ends. The distance that stretches between them never seems to shrink, even when they’re standing shoulder to shoulder.

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