A blessing: Jeffrey Grover, Sarah Morton and Jason Markouc in Two Rooms.

Lee Blessing's Two Rooms, now on stage at Cleveland Public Theater in a cooperative production by Charenton and CPT, is a tribute to marriage and to a love so strong that it sustains an American couple across space and time. The story's first room is the white cell where Michael Wells, played by Jeffrey Grover, sits blindfolded, hands tied behind his back, recounting how he and a fellow professor were taken captive on the streets of Beirut.

The second room is his study back home, which his wife has stripped of furniture and painted white. When we first see Lainie Wells, played by Sarah Morton, she is trying out various corners of the room, trying to sense the spot where her husband's mat would be. The two rooms are one. They are inhabited by both husband and wife, sometimes alone, sometimes together, as they continue to share their lives.

Blessing's dialog is pure poetry, full of nature images that transform the barren cell into a beach or the marsh where Lainie is researching warblers. Together they inhabit a kind of paradise, more real to the stoic Michael than the beatings he endures at the hands of his guards.

But Lainie is tortured by her desire to do the right thing, to find the action that will ultimately lead to Michael's release. Reticent by nature, her desire to be alone with her husband is interrupted by outsiders - a brash young journalist, played by Jason Markouc, who urges her on a path of activism, and a representative of the State Department, played by Mary Alice Beck, who insists she must keep a low profile.

Time magazine called Two Rooms the Play of the Year in 1988, but it shows its age in the implicit belief that something - anything - can be done to counteract this form of terrorism. What endures and continues to engage is that breath-stopping moment in the first act when we understand that Lainie has the power to be with her husband in a way that no soldier, no terrorist can disrupt or take away. The real enemy of such intimacy is not journalists and politicos, but reality. The inability to sustain the link that keeps her husband alive is Lainie's true grief, not the impossibility of rising up like Joan of Arc to free him.

But Sarah Morton gives it her best shot. She burns like a pure white flame, an angel of integrity, while Grover adopts a Zen-like calm, his deep sonorous voice a contrast to her higher, more intense register. Under Jacqi Loewy's direction, they achieve a level of simplicity and restraint that is authentic and deeply moving. Markouc and Beck do a credible job of bringing their points of view to life but the script works against them. They seem to have been conceived as devices, part of a cautionary tale that distracts us from the main action. Perhaps they were meant to teach us what twenty years later we already know.

Two Rooms digresses into political themes that are no longer as compelling as they were in the '80s. As one of our most important American playwrights, Blessing himself must know this. It would be interesting to know what he thinks of this 20-year-old work and what changes he might make if he were writing it today in the shadow of 9/11.

Two Rooms: Through March 8 at Cleveland Public Theatre and Charenton Theater Company, CPT Bookstore Theatre, 6415 Detroit Ave., 216.631.2727.