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Sarah Sokolovic and Zach Appelman in Yale Cabaret's production of Skin Tight.

Yale Cabaret's next production is The Surrender Tree.

8 p.m., Nov. 5; 8 & 11 p.m., Nov. 6-7. 217 Park St. $10-$15. 203-432-1566, yalecabaret.org.

Last weekend's production by Yale Cabaret of an excerpted version of New Zealand playwright Gary Henderson's Skin Tight was both entertaining and gripping.

The two-person play depicts the relationship of a rural couple, Elizabeth (Sarah Sokolovic) and Tom (Zach Appelman), over a period of many years from childhood on a playground to Elizabeth's death when the two are grandparents.

The play is amazingly vivid despite that the only "setting" for what occurs between the two actors is delivered by their words, their body language and gestures, and a few props. We are always in medias res in every dialogue, understanding their lives by the new details about their relationship revealed piecemeal. The play keeps us on edge, moving through the different eras of the relationship in quick bursts of dialogue and movement.

We see them tease each other as children, and we see them discuss their grown daughter; we see Tom go off to war, and we see Elizabeth tell Tom of an affair she had in his absence; we see them make love, first as awkward teens, then with more ability, then with more passion; we see them argue about the trivial matters couples argue over; and we see them movingly sing a song that evokes the deep harmony underlying their life together.

But we also see them fight, or rather wrestle, in swooping, twisting, jumping and punching acrobatics while a drum kit, played by director Michael McQuilken, punches out staccato rhythms. An earthy pas de deux of aggressive movement is our first introduction to the couple and sets the tone before a word has been spoken.

What Skin Tight tellingly conveys in these moments is the power of physical exchange that keeps the necessary tension alive between any couple. We may see the violence as "real," but more to the point, we see it as emblematic of the shocks and slaps and shoves that people who live together a long time give to one another's egos.

The emblematic aspect of these well-staged interludes of movement came most to the fore when Tom brandished a knife, which Elizabeth then grasped in her mouth as he tried to withdraw it or feint with it, while she seemed both to command it and be led by it. We might see a symbol of phallic aggression, but also read a silent but eloquent reminder of how power is both asserted and denied, or surrendered to and mastered, by both members of a relationship.

Both actors were quite enjoyable at rendering different ages and periods in the couple's life; Sokolovic, as the more emotional character, presented a strong but at times vulnerable woman. Particularly effective was her delivery of Elizabeth's confession of infidelity, pitched as a moment when a wife, with her man away at war, has to determine if there can be a life without him. Tom, as played by Appelman, had an earnest, dogged quality that suggested a man always struggling to stay with his wife no matter the vicissitudes they faced — which included an estranged daughter and Elizabeth's illness.

The dialogue occasionally manifested a certain overwrought poetry, as for instance Elizabeth's desire to stand naked in the rain, or a minimalist sentimentality, as when Tom recalls a woman who "smelled of cinnamon" as does Elizabeth, that could cloy. But what made this production work so well was the expressive physical and vocal interplay between the actors. In the end, lit by a serene blue light with only the slightest highlights, the two climbed nude into a tub of water where Elizabeth expired. The nudity at that point let us register fully how their nakedness to one another was at the basis of this long-enduring couple.