Andy (Ted van Griethuysen) and Bel (Sybil Lines) in Harold Printer’s “Moonlight.”

The Studio Theatre made an ambitious move when choosing to open their season with Harold Pinter’s Moonlight. At the performance I attended, the house lights came up to hesitant, confused applause and the most common refrain among those leaving was a simple “I didn’t get it.” Pinter is not a playwright who readily lends himself to “getting”; his name is most closely associated with menace and the awkward, bizarre moments of humor that arise from such tension. (The Studio Theatre advertises the script’s ambiguity and occasional incoherence as “poetic.”)

Father Andy (Ted van Griethuysen) is facing his last days with only his wife, Bel (Sybil Lines), to indulge his deathbed fear and nostalgia. Although he longs to see his children again, his daughter never appears to him and his sons are incommunicado. The two boys share a bed in a separate flat, rarely leaving the house or answering the phone, prattling to one another in an incomprehensible sibling-speak that often devolves into the mere listing of names. Anatol Yusef is fierce as the aggressive Jake while Tom Story plays brother Fred as an addle-brained fool. Story might be forgiven for such a choice given the obtuse material, but Yusef manages to bring commitment and intelligence to Jake even while muttering similarly impenetrable lines.