WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — Theater director and actor Jammie Patton confesses that she’s “always had an affinity for romance, especially the corny kind.” That preference is part of what drew her to “Maytag Virgin,” the romantic comedy that opened last Thursday under her direction at Shaker Bridge Theatre in White River Junction. 

I happen to share Patton’s predilection for rom-coms, which, at their core, broadcast the optimistic message that a person’s shortcomings don’t have to preclude their shot at love and happiness. “Maytag Virgin” is of that ilk. Audrey Cefaly’s play, which premiered in 2015 at the Women’s Voices Theater Festival in Washington, D.C., centers on two neighbors whose porch-side conversations and common struggles give way to an unexpected connection.

Unlike the most successful rom-coms, however, which strike the right combination of wit, structure and romantic chemistry required not only to convince but to entertain, “Maytag Virgin” fails to elevate the story above the realm of cliche. In the end, it delivers on the promises of its genre, but the path to getting there is at times too bumpy to ignore.

Set in a fictional Alabama town, the play opens as the soft-spoken Jack Key (Greg Alverez Reid) is moving into his new home, next door to Elizabeth “Lizzy” Nash, a school teacher with a lavender-colored house and a veranda busy with wind chimes and tulips. Wrapped in a bright apron, she greets Jack with a pie, and the two make light conversation, though a chatty Lizzy, played by fellow Howard University alum Napiera Groves Boykin, does most of the talking.

The interaction is polite enough, but both neighbors seem a little wary of each other. “You just say it all out loud, huh?” remarks Jack, observing Lizzy’s frenzied speech. Lizzy isn’t too keen about Jack leaving his Maytag dryer on his porch, either. Its lingering presence will continue to irk her to varying degrees throughout the show. Personally, she prefers a clothesline. “Trust issues,” is the explanation she gives Jack.

Despite their differences, the neighbors have more in common than first impressions would suggest. For one, they’re both teachers at the same school. As fate would have it, Jack is even using Lizzy’s room while she’s on a leave of absence, which leads to the second thing they have in common: they’ve both lost their spouses, one to cancer, the other to a nasty fall. That shared pain, though expressed in different ways, will form the foundation of their connection.

The rest of “Maytag Virgin” plays out like the opening scene, with Jack and Lizzy talking on their front lawns, sometimes over a glass bottle of Coke, or just in passing. At one point Jack shows Lizzy pictures of a woman he went on a date with. Another time, the two rifle through letters left behind by the deceased couple that used to live in Jack’s house. As the months pass, a neighborly friendship starts to form, as do the glimmers of romantic interest.

Jack and Lizzy are the play’s only characters, and without the aid of subplots or scenery changes, the play’s dialogue has a lot of heavy lifting to do to maintain the audience’s attention. It’s a pity, then, that much of the first act revolved around bouts of small talk that quickly grew dull.

Faithful to her character’s anxious disposition, Groves Boykin continued to deliver her lines in a frantic cascade that subsumed the meaning of her words as time went on. Jack’s simple, almost distracted, responses offered little in the way of a counterbalance.

The play’s jumps in time, of which there are several over the course of about a year, did not help to foster a sense of intimacy, either. In the first scene, Jack seemed lightly irritated by Lizzy, but in the next one — a couple months later — he made a flirty comment about her cooking for him. The connective tissue between those two sentiments remains a mystery, however.

Other overt expressions of attraction, like when Lizzy became hot and bothered watching Jack sand a plank of wood, or when Jack made a remark about helping Lizzy out of her clothes, felt cheap and disjointed, more like markers of desire than authentic expressions of it.

Thankfully, the second act introduced some much needed intrigue and emotional vulnerability that freed the play from the doldrums of the first half. Lizzy in particular gained new dimensions that Groves Boykin approached with empathy and heart.

Other gems were sprinkled throughout the play’s two hour run. Groves Boykin delivered several laugh-out-loud lines, including one involving a jar of fiery liquor. The country tracks that played at scene changes also added a nice sense of place, though I wonder how incorporating them into the body of the show would have helped alleviate some of its stiffness.

On some level, the awkwardness that Alverez Reid and Groves Boykin brought to Jack and Lizzy felt appropriate, as both their characters are grappling with the scary prospect of making themselves vulnerable again. With some more attention the story’s progression, on the part of Cefaly, or perhaps Patton, their jerky portrayals might have been more compelling. 

“Maytag Virgin” doesn’t just feel familiar because it’s a romantic comedy; it’s also become a frequent story at Shaker Bridge. Last year’s “Ripcord,” a play about a pair of ill-matched roommates who develop an unlikely friendship in a retirement home, and “The Effect,” a love story about two drug trial patients, one anxious, the other reckless, both centered on opposites who sparked an attraction.

It might be time to seek out new stories.

Shaker Bridge Theatre’s production of “Maytag Virgin” runs through May 25 in the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction. For tickets ($20-$45) go to shakerbridgetheatre.org or call 802-281-6848.

 Marion Umpleby can be reached at mumpleby@vnews.com or 603-727-3306.