The Lover and Ashes to Ashes are, on the surface, very different works — though both encompass marital power struggles. And Lombardo treats them accordingly, putting an acutely stylized 1960s gloss on The Lover while allowing Ashes to Ashes its less specific mix of personal loss and crimes of the century. Both pieces occupy the same claustrophobic domestic space, a narrow runway of suburban parlor with the audience seated on both sides. Given the small venue, it’s a mercilessly intimate arrangement. The actors for the most part eschew pause-riddled “Pinteresque” delivery for emotional truth, and the mix of style and depth is affecting.

The Lover begins as husband Richard, brandishing briefcase and bowler, prepares to leave for the office. Wife Sarah, clad in Jackie-O sheath and dainty flats, flits about in a veritable ballet of feather dusting and ashtray emptying. The conversation, however, has to do with the anticipated arrival of Sarah’s lover, Richard’s knowledge and tolerance of whom makes their trysts, she acknowledges, “all the more piquant.” It is giving little away to reveal that the husband turns out to be the lover, the couple’s bloodlessly polite union spiced up by afternoon games of quaintly sadomasochistic role play. It is when the lines between the relations start to blur — Sarah greets Richard still clad in the red high heels that are the provenance of trysts with the more menacing Max of their fantasy afternoons — that the game becomes disorienting and dangerous. The Lover is a piece that requires taking the gloves off while keeping them on, and Russell and Harker manage that trick, conveying the passive aggression, genuine hurt, and ultimate entrapment beneath all the tea-time titillation.

Ashes to Ashes has not garnered the same respect that’s accorded The Lover — and to my knowledge the pieces, both melting pots of brutality and tenderness, have not been paired before. Lombardo places the more oblique later work in roughly the same skeletal parlor, its chaise longue replaced by a few scraps of furniture covered with drop cloths, as if the inhabitants had decamped. Indeed, the haunted mistress of the house maintains that, whereas one cannot begin again, one can “end again.”

In a corner, huddled in an armchair, is the pained Rebecca, who’s being solicitously interrogated by her professorial spouse, Devlin. Mostly, he wants details of a past liaison that involved Rebecca’s kissing the fist of a lover, who she insists adored her — though his devotion manifested itself in near-strangulation. As in The Lover, the abusive admirer may also be the husband. Rebecca, disconcerted and sorrowful, drifts from frayed anecdote to visions of babies being snatched from their mothers on railway platforms and crowds of people being herded into the sea. Pinter seems to intend her as a sponge for the atrocities of the 20th century — ultimately grown so sodden she’s sunk into a slough of disconnection. Possibly she has lost a child; possibly she has lost her mind. As usual, Pinter’s scenario, bristling with odd digressions, is elusive. But the despairingly luminous Harker gets to the heart of things, even given a murky map.