A man and his younger girlfriend drive to a beach town and have sex. He craves a smoke afterward; she craves candy. He climbs into his car and disappears. Abandoned in the remote town, she searches for him on foot until it becomes late, much later than she is accustomed to. “Late” for her is 10 p.m. That is because she is 12 years old.

Mercifully, these events take place 15 years before the confrontation that comprises David Harrower’s bruising new drama “Blackbird,” a surprise hit in London. But those intervening years have done little to quash the agonies residing within the two broken figures on display.

Mr. Harrower nudges his story toward any number of familiar paths — the revenge drama, the big-moment apologia, the cathartic reconciliation. But “Blackbird” invariably veers away from these resolutions in favor of far more complicated emotions, as director Joe Mantello uses Mr. Harrower’s staccato, abashed rhythms to convey the psychological strangulation that still shadows the lives of Una (Alison Pill), who is now in her late 20s, and a seemingly reformed Ray Trevelyan (Jeff Daniels).

Ray, who served more than three years in prison for his crime and who subsequently changed his name, has settled into a vaguely defined managerial job — dentistry and processing are involved — in a nondescript office park. (Scott Pask’s aggressively drab office set perfectly represents the sterile anonymity that Ray craves, and Mr. Mantello has populated it with a ominous coterie of silent co-workers milling around in the background.) He is there, working late, when Una surfaces and demands an audience.

Once they’ve repaired to a dingy, trash-filled break room, Ray at first maintains that any demons have long since been put to rest. “I have every right,” he demands, and he repeatedly differentiates himself from the Internet pedophiles to whom Una compares him. The new life he has constructed — one that Mr. Harrower unveils to the audience with chilling patience, complete with a genuine shock near the end — has absolutely no room for the unassuageable pain of a damaged woman who in many ways remains a damaged girl.

The print on Una’s red dress resembles a shattered pane of glass, and the image is apt. She admits to having “suspiciously adult yearnings” at the time, but the crush that Una describes is clearly, devastatingly, not that of an adult. She kissed a Polaroid of him. She left notes on his windshield. She asked him to sponsor her in a walk-athon. And then she climbed into his car and rode with him to the beach town that would demolish them both.

Even if the play’s setup didn’t call to mind Mamet’s “Oleanna,” another fraught duel between an older man and a younger woman, Mr. Harrower’s terse, hesitant dialogue could justifiably be called Mametian. Here, however, Ray and Una interrupt themselves more often than each other, constantly doubling back to amplify a previous remark. Here’s Una on the unmailed correspondence she wrote Ray:

They told me, the people who helped me.

The
who
afterwards
to write you a letter
letters
telling you what I thought of you.
What I felt.
Wanted to say to you.
To not let it
let you have
win.
Authority.

Mr. Mantello’s razor-sharp direction largely honors this fragmentary style without overindulging its writerly tendencies. In fact, Mr. Mantello — whose recent dalliances with big Hollywood names (Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane in “The Odd Couple,” Julia Roberts in “Three Days of Rain”) have betrayed an unwise level of deference — has finally returned to the sharply calibrated attention he gave works like “Take Me Out” and “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

This attention pays off in the deeply felt performances. Mr. Daniels and Ms. Pill both capture the shame and defensiveness but also the inherent awkwardness of their meeting. While Mr. Daniels keeps his feet planted, he subtly pitches the upper half of his body toward his co-star, betraying a lingering attraction to Una; Ms. Pill, for her part, more than holds her own against her seasoned co-star, as she summons the wildly contradictory emotions that have tainted more than half her life.

Neither actor crests too early nor holds at any emotional level too long. Mr. Daniels and Ms. Pill advance and retreat with the cadences of two people battling physical as well as psychological exhaustion.

Messrs. Harrower and Mantello’s keen sense of pacing flags only once, in a late scene in which the two characters bond over a childlike burst of civil disobedience. Before that come a pair of outstanding monologues in which the two offer diverging accounts of the fateful evening at that beach town. There is little dispute over the actual coupling; Messrs. Harrower and Mantello bravely hold off on raising the intensity until the characters’ post-coital actions come into question. Paul Gallo’s heretofore benign lighting suddenly turns stark and interrogatory, and as first Una and then Ray describe the panicked aftermath, it becomes clear that each has spent the last 15 years clinging to any number of self-serving assumptions.

Desperate to make moral sense of the man who both attracts and repulses her, Una finally demands to know how Ray allowed this inexcusable crime to happen:

What could I have possibly given you
given you that wasn’t my twelve year old body?
What else could you have wanted?
There was nothing else.

Ray has no answer. He finally responds with an aching vagueness that runs afoul of so many basic playwriting tenets and yet is absolutely, unforgettably right:

There was.
For me there was.

Until June 3 (131 W. 55th St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 212-581-1212).