When a play titled Glam Night is performed at a theater named the Jewel Box, you are entitled to expect something sparkly, if not outright drag and rhinestones. What playwright Chip Wheat delivers is instead four brief, interlocking two-character plays; the only sparkle is the way the characters still flicker in your mind a few hours after you've gone home.

We begin with two middle-aged buddies trying and failing to enjoy a theme night in a tacky bar; we visit with the two women who live above the bar; we rejoin our guys at the gym; and then we clap and go home. Along the way we learn that one of the men has intense romantic hopes regarding one of the women, and that this object of his conflicted affections is not so much interested in him as she despises him as a lousy tipper (she tends the bar, or does until hurling a bottle ends this stage of her career); we learn, too, that she has a romantic conflict of her own, with an unseen, likely sexy, and inevitably worthless musician. Even this synopsis indicates a dramatic intensity that is not in fact there; these people are, in a word, nothin' special.

So the after-flicker in the mind is then all the more interesting. Wheat has a fine sense of the mundane content of friends sharing with friends; the natural rhythm of their exchanges is not easy to create, and create it he does. There is always something Waiting for Godot in the air when two characters spar with and dance around meaning; it is the unsaid that has impact, and this Wheat nicely conveys. Glam Night won't have you tossing and turning hours later, gripped by the tragedy you've seen; but you will have a lingering sense of sadness, having spent a little time with several people who, like us, struggle to go by the cues we think we have been given and which are not much help at all.

While the actors of Glam Night are more than capable, director Guillermo Suescum would do well to jazz up the pacing and dial down the intensity; that done, the play will be true to the reality Wheat has crafted.

Performances of Glam Night continue through July 27. It is presented as part of the Midtown International Theatre Festival, which continues through August 10.