What to do, what to do? You can’t find a funeral worth attending, nothing’s bad on the evening news, and you can’t figure out how to bring yourself down. Oh, wait, then you remember! There’s another hot show at Hyde Park Theatre! That should be enough to foster those borderline suicidal feelings you’ve been desperately seeking.

Just kidding. Sort of. Thing is, Ken Webster has done it again. Black is this year’s black. David Harrower's Blackbird is this season’s latest thought provoking, stomach punching, try-all-you-like-you-won’t-be-able-to-shake-it offering from that little theatre on 43rd Street, in cahoots with Capital T Theatre. It's directed by Mark Pickell and stars Ken Webster and Xochitl Romero as a pair (let’s not call them couple) that meets up after a decade and a half of a highly advisable, partially law-enforced separation.

There is no way to offer a detailed review of this show and avoid spoilers, so you’ll have to settle for vagaries. Which is not only fine, but actually just perfect. Because the show itself is—oh glory of oxymoronicisms—filled with extremely precise, carefully chosen vagueness.

The setting? A vague place where a lot of people, including Webster’s Ray, work. The season? Who knows. The circumstances and conflict? This, too, takes a while to reveal itself and, even once we do figure out who these stuttering people are, so uncomfortable in each other’s presence, even still there are no clear-cut blacks or whites.

Back-blurred is more like it as the characters each reveal events from a distant path that each has chosen to remember vividly and, it turns out, wildly differently. In fact, it’s possible that each saw the same events unfold simultaneously, the two of them side-by-side, and even as they watched in tandem, both saw totally different occurrences. It’s like that old saying about asking several witnesses to describe the same car wreck—you’ll hear as many variations as there are people who saw the crash.

The crash at the center of Blackbird is a massive one, one no number of witnesses could ever unfracture enough to present a clear picture, let alone merely two who seemed to each have slammed their eyes shut upon impact. At times we want to believe one character or the other even as we think there’s no way that could be the truth we’re hearing.

Well acted (has Ken Webster ever been anything short of brilliant?) and more gripping than Polident, this play fast gets under the audience’s skin and pinches and pulls to make one shift literally in one’s seat, but also emotionally. Who in our lives has wronged us? And whom have we wronged? How would we do things differently if we could go back? And if you did have that chance to go back and find someone you probably would’ve been better off without having met in the first place—would you? Could you? Should you?

Probably not the best first-date play, but terrific fodder for post-theatre conversation nonetheless. A great cross between the Buzzcock’s Ever Fallen In Love With Someone (You Shouldn’t Have Fallen In Love With)? and that Beatles’ song by the same name as the play, with the most fitting lyrics that capture its theme perfectly:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.