In this early John Patrick Shanley work, the playwright bravely strips bare the soul of a man and woman.
In a rundown bar in the Bronx, two of society's rejects, Danny and Roberta, strike up a halting conversation over their beer. He is a brooding, self-loathing young man who resorts more to violence than reason; she is a divorced, guilt-ridden young woman whose troubled teenage son is now being cared for by her parents.
Danny, whose fellow truck drivers call him "the animal," seems incapable of tender emotion, while Roberta, who is still haunted by the memory of an ugly sexual incident involving her father, is distrustful of men in general.
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The simple beauty of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is that we get to watch rapt at the mad sexual apache rhythms of these two incendiary, self-destructive natures, banging up against one another. Will it be fusion or fission? Will the night end in love or death?
