This week's play at Brillobox in Bloomfield feels like theater-going in London -- pub theater-going, that is. Many a London pub has its black box theater upstairs, as at this cheery bar at 4104 Penn Ave., where the theater space even has a bar of its own.

	Diana Ifft, left, and Gayle Pazerski in "Laundry and Bourbon." Click photo for larger image. More information "Laundry and Bourgon" runs at 8 p.m. through Sunday at Brillobox, 4104 Penn Ave.; $10; 412-612-9000.

The play, staged by Thank You, Felix Productions, is definitely worth finding. James McLure's "Lone Star" and "Laundry and Bourbon" are halves of a whole, or perhaps not quite, the offstage characters in the first showing up drunk and kicking in the second. They're robustly acted, especially "Lone Star," with a stem-winding performance by Brad Carlin.

I'm not sure how I've missed seeing McLure's well-known 1970s duo for so long, but I was able to go to Tuesday's opening without even knowing which play came first. It's immediately apparent, as Elizabeth somewhat reluctantly greets her best friend, Hattie, with a bourbon and coke, while the laundry waits to be folded.

Theirs is the 60-minute female play. Elizabeth is melancholy, with two secrets to divulge, and Hattie is noisy and nosy -- but not so nosy as Amy Lee, who arrives bursting to share her gossip.

The male play is the 70-minute "Lone Star," named for the Texas beer being guzzled by Elizabeth's husband, Roy, and his brother, Ray. It's set later that same night, I think, although that's not clear. They, too, are interrupted by a third party, the nerdy Skeeter, who is, not surprisingly, Amy Lee's husband, another outsider.

The "Lone Star" title also suggests the blanket of stars topping the set, reference point for characters pondering their solitary place in the universe. That's at least aspiration, whereas "Laundry and Bourbon" shows the women settling for less, restive under the restraints of housewifery and alcohol.

Both plays are full of the texture of mundane small-town Texas life -- gossip, the dolor of laundry, bridge clubs, casual prejudice, social one-upmanship, games and eventually self-conscious poetic reminiscence about teenage cars and first sex.

Looming large in both plays as symbol of freedom and loss is Roy's 1959 pink Thunderbird convertible, almost a character itself. In "Lone Star," McLure toys with a Sam Shepard-like violence but settles back into a lament for bygone renegade youth. I'd say he gets further inside the men, while he observes (and caricatures) the women more from outside.

Because of that, while both plays benefit from bold comic acting, it feels more intrinsic in "Lone Star."

In "Laundry and Bourbon," directed by Adam Kukic, Gayle Pazerski's Elizabeth is a feeling wan slate on which McLure writes about loss and hope, while Diana Ifft's Hattie and Joanna Lowe's deliciously awful Amy Lee provide broad comic contrast.

In "Lone Star," directed by John E. Lane Jr., Carlin gives the self-dramatizing Roy ("the last wild thing left in this town," Elizabeth calls him) a consistent high comedy of mock heroic swagger. It's full-blooded and at a feverish pace, occasionally repetitive but mesmerizing. Roy has a matching straight man in the ingenuous, slightly slow Ray, played with pitch-perfect comic restraint and naturalism by Brad Stephenson.

Their scene is played out back of Angels bar. Get it? While the women fight about status and worry about the kids and who's true to whom, the men deal with transcendence. The play ends with us wishing for a coda, a scene between the Roy and Elizabeth we have come to know.

Thank You, Felix has a well-acted winner. You have only through Sunday to find your way to it at the new pub theater in Bloomfield.