A few years before he crafted the awkward but adorable meet-cute between Nicolas Cage and Cher in his Oscar-winning script for Moonstruck, John Patrick Shanley created its almost polar opposite in his slow-burn two-hander Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. The show has been a magnet for actors for 40 years now, full of both shouty exchanges and tricky monologues that allow performers to demonstrate vulnerability and flashes of rage in lightning-quick succession. You can explode with over-the-top volatility one moment, and then retreat the next with unguarded fragility.

Navigating those swings is a tricky business, especially over the course of a full 80-minute production, as opposed to a showy monologue. The latest to attempt the feat are Christopher Abbott and Aubrey Plaza, who lead an already-sold-out run at Off Broadway’s tiny Lucille Lortel Theatre that demonstrates both the appeal of Shanley’s 1983 drama as well as some of its shortcomings. Abbott, a theater veteran who first gained mainstream attention as Allison Williams’s on-again-off-again doormat of a boyfriend in Girls, goes more primal here as a 29-year-old working-class tough guy with a hair-trigger temper, bruises on his wrists from recent fights and a gruff demeanor meant to hold everyone at a distance. First seen at the jukebox of a Bronx bar in loose jeans and a wife-beater (the spot-on set is by Scott Pask), he soon strikes up a hesitant conversation with another taciturn loner — a divorced mom living at home with folks at age 31, who projects a similar desire to be left alone AND to make a connection.

In her first stage role, Aubrey Plaza dives into this challenging woman with abandon — but her inexperience shines through both in her shaky grip on a Noo Yawk accent and in her not-quite-natural semi-courtship with Abbott’s Danny over pretzels and beer in the long first scene. On film and TV shows like Parks and Recreation and the most recent season of The White Lotus, Plaza has proved a master at portraying shrewd intelligence and a hooded-eyed guardedness, capped by a brutally deadpan delivery of punchlines. She’s strongest at Roberta’s from-left-field comments (“You have cute ears”) but her sudden bursts of emotion don’t feel as natural.

Abbott, with his square jaw, brillo-pad hair and hunched posture, seems entirely more grounded — even as his insecurities and feelings of guilt about a recent beat-down keep him on edge. You can see him wrestling to tamp down his first instinct to lash out physically, and both the violent impulse and the struggle seem plausible.

Actor-turned-director Jeff Ward mostly maintains the balancing act between these two guilt-racked, yearning lost souls — and his main innovation is the transition between the wood-paneled pub and Roberta’s bedroom in her parents’ home. What we get is a red- and blue-lit bit of choreography, designed by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, that seems like a cross between a balletic pas de deux and a WWE routine. By turns tentative and menacing, flirtatious and raw, the scene offers an erotically charged passage between the show’s two main scenes.

In the show’s second scene, Plaza is on more secure ground, as she attempts to chip away at Danny’s gruff exterior and offer the possibility of an alternative life for both of them — one that seems both tantalizingly appealing and impossibly scary. The two cover a lot of emotional ground here, with narrative turns in Shanley’s script that don’t always feel natural, but Abbott and Plaza manage the shifts and feints with considerable skill. You can see each of these damaged souls letting down their guard, just a little, and then thinking the better of that worrying reveal of openness. Thankfully, Abbott and Plaza show no such hesitation.