Dating sucks. That’s the not exactly revelatory takeaway of Miriam Battye’s quirky two-hander Strategic Love Play, which opened Sunday at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre. Two veterans of popular streaming comedies, Heléne Yorke (The Other Two) and Michael Zegen (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), are perfectly cast as a pair of Manhattan singletons on a blind date that gets off to a very awkward start and continues in that vein for the show’s roughly 75-minute running time. It’s more like a meet acute.

“Should we just hold hands and start promising shit now so we don’t have to do this bit?” Yorke’s unnamed woman says in the opening seconds of the date, holding her palm out across a small café table in a bid to avoid the usual small talk and skip ahead to the physical signs of an actual relationship. Her dating app’s match replies with a half-hearted laugh, and the banter that follows has a palpable air of unease as they go through the usual conversational banalities about his job (she never divulges hers), their shared use of CitiBikes, and their suspicion of dogs in the workplace.

Yorke is a bit too loud, abrasive, and quick to laugh at her jokes — and she upsets the norms and rhythms of courtship that we’ve come to expect from decades of rom-coms. We can see it in Zegen’s stuttering responses, his self-conscious rubbing of his hands up and down his pant legs, and the way that she keeps throwing him off his game while still sparking his interest. Not that this guy has much rizz. He’s a self-described “nice normal person” who says he works at Mount Sinai, but immediately fesses up that he’s an auditor and not a doctor, who quickly admits he used a fake name on his profile, and who blurts out details about his most recent ex, a woman who dumped him after 16 months who remains a rent-free tenant in his brain.

Zegen brings an immediate likability to the role, particularly as he attempts to effect an early exit from the bar where they meet (a generically yuppie, brick-walled space designed by Arnulfo Maldonado). He repeatedly apologizes, insisting that he’s “not a dick.” But Yorke’s character is having none of it — she seems to thrive on total transparency to an unsettling degree, never more so than when he blurts out something impolitic. (“I think you’re a sociopath,” he tells her early on, to which she replies: “Sociopaths don’t like people. I really like you.”) While divulging very little about herself, even in the voicemails she leaves for an unseen female friend when Zegen’s Adam goes to fetch another round of bottled beers, she keeps pressing him to tear down the double-talking euphemisms of dating culture. When he tries to end the date by claiming that “it’s just not a great time,” she responds with a blunt rejoinder: “Why don’t you just say it. Say the actual thing. Not the thing in front of the thing.”

Like Zegen’s Adam, we find ourselves both put off by and intrigued by this agent of romantic chaos — and director Katie Posner paces the production to reinforce both our discomfort as well as our frustration. (Tei Blow’s sound design and Jen Schriever’s lighting underscore the sense of imbalance at key moments.) We can never quite get a handle on Yorke’s character or her motivations — what game is she playing exactly? — even up until a rushed ending that features a callback that’s just a little too pat. She remains an enigma who, like the play she hijacks with her many arresting qualities, ultimately overstays her welcome.

STRATEGIC LOVE PLAY
Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 75 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through December 7