Most of the sentences that lovers Guy (Peter Stray) and Sam (Adam Jonas Segaller) exchange in Caryl Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? get abandoned somewhere in the middle, their direct, indirect, and prepositional objects left hanging the air, implied but unvoiced. Instead, the British playwright slaps a trailing verbal ellipsis to the end of each line, and John Vreeke’s staging ensures that we hear every one. Stray and Segaller really lean into those pauses, so the effect isn’t one of crisp, whip-smart, Mamet-esque banter but of a sustained, reflective, overtly theatrical conversation. We realize that the two men aren’t interrupting each other, or finishing each other’s sentences, they’re riffing on each other’s ideas. Churchill being Churchill, those ideas invariably run to some of the more nakedly self-serving rationalizations behind Anglo-American foreign policy. The twist: Guy and Sam aren’t just a couple of randy Council on Foreign Relations wonks, they’re, respectively, Britain and the United States, or anyway anthropomorphized gay incarnations thereof. True, their pillow talk has all the charged sexual ferocity of a Brookings panel discussion. And, true, Churchill’s point here (Sam is belligerent and self-involved; Guy is infatuated and passive) ain’t subtle—or even convincingly argued. What it is, however, is awfully well-written and generally well-captured. Churchill threads the personal through the political like the pro she is; whenever the evening’s pitched agitprop threatens to bubble over into drunk-Poli-Sci-major-at-a-party territory, an abrupt change in tone deflates the rhetoric, exposing the all-too-human needs that drive geopolitical events. At one point, Segaller’s Sam recites a long list of interrogation procedures, each one boasting a more florid, outlandishly grotesque description than the last, until he gets to: “Beating, obviously. Rape, of course.” That sudden infusion of matter-of-factness is expertly timed, perfectly delivered, and chilling. Stray imbues Guy with a satisfying emotional range; in the show’s brief running time, he finds occasion to invest the word OK (Guy’s favorite) with every possible spin—assent (“OK!”), comprehension (“Ah, OK”), and, ultimately, doubt (“OK…”) The show’s design, by Michael Dove and Mark W.C. Wright, lacks the material’s precision edge, alas. When a series of projected photographic images helped place Guy and Sam’s discussions in specific, albeit metaphorical, time periods, I was grateful for them. But as the evening progressed they seemed to lose their organizing principle, devolving into so much star-spangled window dressing. And unlike Churchill’s dialogue, the ham-fisted selection of interstitial music doesn’t trust the audience’s ability to negotiate subtext. Case in point: the scene in which Guy and Sam get into a tiff over carbon emissions, preceded by—wait for it—Skeeter Davis warbling “The End of the World.”