How DO Jake and Alice live? The answer is: lyrically. That, anyway, is how playwright Len Jenkin presents their lives in three extended scenes in his awkwardly titled play — as spikey adolescents meeting under the bridge in the rain; as reunited adults after 15 years of wandering and struggling; as a snuggling elderly couple who initially resist their deaths:

“I can’t die,”  Jake says to Alice.
“Who’s gonna shoe your pretty little foot, 
who’s gonna glove your hand,
who’s gonna kiss your red ruby lips when I’m in that promised land?”

Despite that particular passage, the overriding approach is not sentimental; the lyricism is largely surreal in “How Is It That We Live, or Shakey Jake + Alice,” a production by the Tent Theater Company that ends its run tonight at A.R.T./NY.

One can, with some effort, view Jake and Alice as credible characters, thanks to the first-rate performances by Fred Weller and Kate Arrington, as well as a number of realistic exchanges, and some anchoring details: Teenage Jake drives a “’58 Cadillac Coupe de Ville”; his father still smokes even though he has emphysema; his mother works at Sears. But much of the dialogue doesn’t sound the way people actually speak to one another, and the story of the two lovers doesn’t so much unfold as occasionally pop up.

It’s as often hindered as helped along by two supposed narrators. (When Alice and Jake dance, one of the narrator says: “The fat moon breaks loose, spins off down the sky.”) They also portray characters who frequently interrupt and disrupt whatever Alice and Jake are doing, sometimes as Clarence Nightingale (a fired doorman) or Sweet Lucy (a drunk Santa, who is apparently the same character as Clarence, years apart, vividly portrayed by Jason Bowen) and his companions Evangeline or Sweet Hips (portrayed by Delfin Gokhan Meehan, who also plays Alice’s hate-filled mother.) They tell anecdotes about death and destruction that can charitably be described as fitting in the theme of mortality, but otherwise have no evident connection to the story.

Indeed, there is so little attention to a plot that it feels almost misleading to try to recount one. 

“How Is It That We Live, or Shakey Jake + Alice” seems to merge what strike me as two recent trends in New York theater. One is plays (like Left on Tenth and Still) that tell love stories about older people.(Although Jake and Alice start off young, the most affecting and effective moments are at the end.) Another trend are productions that are admirably realized in terms of direction and performance and/or design (this is the second show this month that draws you in with a tree), but that I left wondering: Why? (if not WTF?)

Afterwards, I read the script, which was published in 2019, a year after the play was first produced, in a theater in Dallas, and I came to what may be a personal revelation about the play, one that I hope helps me appreciate plays to which I have a similar reaction in the future. It’s as if the play is in a different frequency – and one must tune into it the way one tunes into a radio station, not expecting a radio drama when the station is dedicated to midnight jazz.

“How Is It That We Live, or Shakey Jake + Alice” is the second full production of the three-year-old Tent Theater Company, founded by Tim Sanford, former long-time artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, and his wife Aimée Hayes, the former producing artistic director of Southern Rep Theater in New Orleans, specifically to promote the work of playwrights over the age of 60. Len Jenkin is 83. Its first full production last year, “Where Women Go,” was the final play written by Tina Howe, at the age of 85. That play was similarly surreal. My hope is that this was a coincidence; that the company will be a Big Tent.