The first time Bernie (Tim Elliot) shows up with blood on his face, David (Steven J. Satta) doesn’t think anything of it. Sure, it’s after last call and Bernie’s into his cups, but fights happen—especially to Bernie. He and David have history—and they both have history with David’s roommate Candy (Michele Minnick), who is none too happy to discover that Bernie spent the night the next morning. He makes her nervous—something about him is just a little off, and has been ever since—well, something about all of them has been off ever since . . . but that was so long ago. Wasn’t it?

Canadian playwright Brad Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, which deals out details in drips and drabs, has proven itself a malleable, prescient piece of narcissistic masochism. The 1989 original was set in Edmonton, Alberta, and suggested the city was as mired in feckless ennui and common desperation as any big, troubled, postindustrial urban wasteland. Against a backdrop of a serial killer mutilating the bodies of women, three vain thirtysomething friends bicker and brood over their love lives—make that their lack of love lives: Candy and David used to date until David came out, while Bernie and David have been best mates forever but you sense a little unresolved sexual tension there. Since that 1989 original, it’s been staged in New York, moved to Montreal for Denys Arcand’s 1992 movie adaptation, and was updated for a post-Sept. 11 world during a 2004 off-Broadway revival.

Now, Fraser has permitted Iron Crow Theatre and director Joseph Ritsch to set Love and Human Remains in contemporary Baltimore. It’s a decision that doesn’t add/subtract much from the experience itself—aside from local references to the Hippo, cruising Lake Montebello at night, etc. The play’s strengths reside in its characters—actually, make that in the damaged people struggling to become less so over the course of this play. David and Candy, while no longer romantically involved, maintain codependency by living together. They take turn feeding each other’s cynicism and hopes. A former TV actor now waiting tables, David possesses a world-weary wit to match how little he expects from human interaction. Candy isn’t much better: She knows she wants something, but is so unsure of what that something is. She’s willing to fancy a date with Jerri (Erin Gahan), a woman from the gym who asks her out, and Robert (Christopher H. Zargarbashi), the bartender at the watering hole she goes to after working out.

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