He’s a cook in a cheap restaurant, divorced with two children. She’s a waitress in the same restaurant, never married. He asks her out to dinner, to a movie. They end the evening in bed, in her modest one-room apartment.

When the curtain rises on Frankie and Johnny, the audience hears the moans of pleasure in the darkness that end the couple’s first, and possibly last, lovemaking. Frankie has grown used to a solitary life, and the meeting with Johnny seems to her like any other: Two lonely people meet, form a short and superficial connection, and then go back to their normal lives. Nothing has changed. The end.

This play is unusual in that it expresses everyday reality rather than the American dream: Not the beautiful, glamorous, excellent, special or famous, but the ordinary, the mundane, the disappointing, the overweight, the grey. Two people exactly like millions of others who fill the streets of the world.

The play immediately creates the intimate, humorous atmosphere of a romantic comedy, with the accompanying suspense: Will there be a second night for this odd couple? Before that question is answered, the pair go through a series of sharp, witty and comic situations.