Jeffersonville – The setting was a neighborhood tavern in the Bronx, but it was really the bar at the Samba Café on Main Street in Jeffersonville.

For two nights in late August, 84 people enjoyed three-course pasta dinners and then dove into a dark, funny, touching one-act play by American playwright John Patrick Shanley – best known for his Oscar-winning screenplay for the movie “Moonstruck.”

And directing Shanley’s 80-minute play entitled “Savage in Limbo” was Samba owner Tim Corcoran.

“It’s a brilliant, timely piece that never gets old,” said Corcoran, “a play about five 32-year-olds who meet in a  bar and end up sharing their desires for change in their lives.”

Corcoran himself has served 20 years as artistic director of the 29th Street Repertory Theatre in Manhattan, producing over 75 off-Broadway shows. An actor and singer, he’s also worked in TV, commercials and theater nationwide.

A Bronx native, Shanley wrote ”Savage” in 1984 when he was in his early 30s. The play focuses on the characters’ need to come out of a waiting place, a kind of limbo, as they explore their stuck lives.

At Samba’s Friday and Saturday night shows, Aug. 26 and 27, two of the actors were local:  SUNY Sullivan’s theater department teacher and director Jessica Barkl-Lopez and her husband Nick Lopez, who also teaches acting. Jessica played main character Denise Savage, a single woman tormented by loneliness, her own virginity and her life with her mother. Nick Lopez played the solemn bartender Murk. 

From the New York City metropolitan area came actors Rina Dutta as Linda Rotunda, who has had too many lovers and too many children; and actor Blayne Shamarin as Tony Aronica, Linda’s boyfriend who is straying away for an “ugly woman” who can teach him intelligent things. Then there was Eleni Rosenboom as Alice White, who once wished to become a nun but never did and is now a confirmed drunk.

The characters achingly share their lives of unhappiness, boredom, and loneliness until the quiet ending when Linda and Tony do reunite and Murk decides to marry Alice. Only Denise remains in the web of loneliness she can’t escape: “What is my crime: that I got life? I am alone.”

The crowd was struck by the play. 

“There was a bit of each character that everybody could see themselves in,” said Regina Wagner of Jeffersonville, who came with her husband Steve. “It was very relatable. Tim (Corcoran) should be awarded for the first dinner theater ever in Jeffersonville.” 

Local business owner Linda Lee Babicz with partner Eddie Gilbert echoed those sentiments: “It was unbelievable – we can’t stop talking about it. We sat at Samba with friends from Livingston Manor and Long Island. They said ‘the Catskills are now back.’”