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August 9, 2002, 9:00 a.m. Modern “Love” Frankie and Johnny on Broadway.

t's never much fun to watch a movie or see a play and find it dated. But the experience can be instructive about the nature of social change. On Thursday night, the celebrated actors Stanley Tucci and Edie Falco opened in a Broadway revival of a play that's only 15 years old. It's a good play — well written and consistently involving — which is a very rare accomplishment when you're talking about a piece written for only two characters that lasts more than two hours.

But Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune doesn't really make dramatic sense these days, and that's because cultural attitudes toward casual sex and intimate relationships have changed over the past 15 years.

The play begins with Frankie and Johnny having sex in her cramped studio apartment in Manhattan. They've known each other for six weeks. He's a 48-year-old short-order cook who did a stretch in prison for forgery. She's a 41-year-old waitress who once had dreams of being an actress. He has two kids he's too ashamed to see. A previous boyfriend left a scar on the back of her head with a belt buckle and beat her so badly that she can't have kids at all.

The sex is good. Afterward, Frankie assumes Johnny will get out and let her go to bed by herself, as she wishes. Instead, he begins issuing passionate encomiums to her beauty. He tells her that he loves her. He's in love with her. He wants to marry her, have kids with her.

And here's where the play no longer makes sense. Frankie responds with anger, confusion, and distaste to Johnny's declaration of love. But for the play to work as Terrence McNally wants it to work, we have to be looking at Johnny through Frankie's eyes. He's the weirdo, she's the straight man. He's the wild man, she's the voice of reason. In an off-Broadway theater in 1987, that would have been no problem for the audience. So Frankie and Johnny had just enjoyed sex with each other. What's the big deal? Only a lunatic would come to the conclusion that they should be together forever — right?

Indeed, Terrence McNally doesn't even give Frankie much to say in response to Johnny, because McNally clearly took it as a given that his audience would see Johnny as a lunatic. That was the tenor of the times during which he wrote the play. Remember, it was still doctrine — especially in the gay community in which McNally, America's foremost gay playwright, resides — that sex was just sex, a good thing in and of itself and almost unrelated to love and intimacy.

But the times were changing. The play itself is prime evidence of that. In fact, McNally was presenting Johnny as the precise alternative to the billiard-ball erotic life of New York in the 1970s and early 1980s.

"We have to connect," Johnny tells Frankie. "We've got to."

In 2002, nobody would disagree with him. A real-life Frankie in 2002 would more likely react with delight and excitement when someone professed his intention to be undyingly faithful to her — and upon hearing of her barrenness, would say only, "We'll adopt."

But Stanley Tucci is so unbelievably charming and convincing in the role of Johnny that he doesn't even seem all that obnoxious. So he talks too much. Even after a bout of impotence in the second act, he still wants her. He's practically perfect, plus he can cook.

"You don't decide to fall in love with people out of the blue," she tells him. Johnny's response — that love is as much a choice as it is a matter of chemistry — is heartfelt and even profound. There are moments of great beauty in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, but they all come when Johnny is talking. Frankie's got nothing of interest to say because she comes from a time and place that have already thankfully receded into the mists.

— Mr. Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.