When you hear ‘Stockholm,’ the two immediate reference points are the city in Sweden and Stockholm syndrome, the process by which a hostage becomes allied with his or her captor– and Bryony Lavery’s tense domestic drama nods to both from its opening moments. On the geographical front, Todd announces that he and his partner, Kali, are eagerly anticipating a visit to Stockholm: watching Swedish films, even pretending to speak Swedish (using very bad gibberish inspired mainly by IKEA product names and the Muppets’ Swedish Chef). But even in these proclamations of love and excitement, deeper psychological currents roil: undue anxiety, something more than a little off-kilter, under the surface of their inseparability. Both of their enthusiastic appraisals of each other and their relationship–primarily told directly to the audience in third person–seem overly calculated, a practiced performance of gaiety as much as genuine affection or enthusiasm. Are they reassuring themselves even as they tell us? How much of a fiction is the “us” they’ve created–or even the personas they’ve created for themselves?

Todd (Richard Saudek) and Kali (Christina Bennett Lind) are at great pains to describe how deliriously happy they are: they live in a home they’ve painstakingly renovated from a dilapidated state to be a showplace that reflects their personal and collective style (cleverly designed by James Dardenne in a style that evokes both Dr. Seuss and Dr. Caligari); they’re out on a perfect day to celebrate Todd’s birthday, one that will include a Bergman film and a bit of shopping and a romantic homemade dinner, plus a little surprise Kali has planned; their answering machine message is a rehearsed skit of domestic bliss in which they cocoon themselves away from the intrusions of the outside world and reject all callers. Yet there’s a constant drumbeat of codependence and dysfunction, too: losing sight of each other for a few moments while grocery shopping sends them both into a spiral of panic; a birthday card from Todd’s mother fills him with dread and Kali with rage; Kali’s surprise (a large bottle of vodka) is met with trepidation. Kali gets nasty when describing Todd’s former girlfriend; Todd nearly has a panic attack over a moth in the hallway.

There are moments when the fantasy world of their relationship does seem to snap into focus, when they seem to be physically inhabiting it rather than merely describing it: moments limned by Lavery and choreographer Natalie Lomonte in pure movement sequences–putting away groceries in balletic sync, dancing an acrobatic tango that draws them away from the day-to-day. These movement segments have the idealized perfection of the relationship they present to the world, but also a stronger sense of genuine connection that’s rarely seen in the dialogue, which seems to leave each trapped inside his or her own head: Todd, while in the midst of a sexual act, can’t stop focusing on the decor; Kali launches into an obscenity-laced rant about Todd’s parents. Both Lind and Saudek, too, feel more grounded in the physical segments, whereas each can be a little overwrought or overheated in dialogue.

Because the physicality of the relationship has been so emphasized, eruptions of both passion and violence fit right in and feel like precisely choreographed moves they’ve enacted a million times before; the audience may be surprised at how the conflict plays out, but it’s clearly intimately familiar to Todd and Kali. Only in the aftermath of confrontation does the piece’s heightened stylization crack open a little, allowing insight into what drew these two together other than the shell of perfection they’re presenting to the world. The affection feels most genuine when they’re both almost too exhausted to move–the only point in which they can simply inhabit their relationship rather than giving a sales pitch for it.

There is something oddly compelling about the place in which they end the evening: with passion and pain, sincerity and rage, twinned into something dangerous but mutually fulfilling. Yet that isn’t quite the end of the play; there are two almost epilogues, one that looks into the future of the relationship and its still darker possibilities, and one that puts back on the sunny facade of the happy couple, giggling over misunderstandings and planning their vacation. The two “extra” endings felt a little too neat, working a little too hard to hammer home the ultimately dangerous and dysfunctional nature of the relationship rather than the way it functions with its own twisted internal logic.