The Unexpected Man is a sort of literary Brief Encounter in which a man and a woman meet taking a train. But here the man and woman, who share a compartment on a train between Paris and Frankfurt, are a waspish famous author and a worldly fan who happens to have his latest tome, also called The Unexpected Man, sequestered in her handbag. Most of the play takes the form of interior monologues, uttered à la Strange Interlude, as the two notice but do not address each other. Precise, concise, arch, and urbane, the 90-minute work is an exploration of the unacknowledged intimacy that exists between writer and reader, who come out of their mental closets to live up to expectation only at the end.

The French-born Reza is best known as the author of the Molière-, Olivier-, and Tony-winning Art, which is about three ostensibly sophisticated chaps who come to blows over an all-white painting. That play was followed by The Unexpected Man, which was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company (with Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins) in 1998 and played Off Broadway (with Atkins and Alan Bates) in 2000. The Nora production, with Steve McConnell and Nancy E. Carroll filling big shoes, marks the play’s Boston premiere. And if The Unexpected Man lacks the interactive complexity and perfect arc of Art, it is a similarly sophisticated, deceptively airy work.

Paul Parsky, the author, is a man for whom the key word — the first he utters, and to which he keeps circling back — is " bitter. " A carefully self-invented curmudgeon, he has a bone to pick with everything from fleeting time to the literary establishment to his daughter’s hoary fiancé. In Daniel Gidron’s crisp if occasionally too bristling Nora production, he is, for some reason, British, whereas his reader, played without an accent by an uncharacteristically (and refreshingly) chic Carroll, is French. As it happens, McConnell is adept at an English accent, and its use punches up the character’s acerb fussiness. But there’s no indication in the script that writer and reader have met in translation.

The woman, Martha, is aware that she’s sitting opposite her favorite author, a man she has never met but with whom she feels on intimate as well as idolatrous terms. He speaks, it would seem, to a compassionate melancholy in her; she doesn’t buy his representation of himself, on the surface of his fiction, as cynical and disengaged. She speaks to him " secretly, " willing him to open the door of possibility between them, as, opposite her, he hunches in on himself, lost in silent pique — until, that is, she takes out his book. Both characters are, as she puts it, " in the twilight " of their lives, nearing 60 and acutely self-contained.

Art was actually inspired by an incident in the playwright’s life, when a friend bought an all-white painting she thought a joke. You wonder whether some anonymous encounter with a fan may have inspired The Unexpected Man, though the 40ish Reza ages the artist and his potential muse, triggering a meditation on loneliness, time, and possibility as well as on the almost embarrassing closeness that exists between author and audience. As in the case of Art, Reza, at least as rendered by British playwright Christopher Hampton (who also translated Art), proves an elegant, minimalist writer, layering her characters’ monologues and wringing humor from the sometimes jarring disconnects. (As the woman trails off an amused yet painful memory, the man jumps in with " I don’t see why I shouldn’t go back on Ex-Lax. " )

At Nora, in Brynna Bloomfield’s design, the train compartment consists of two chairs and a metal-framed window panel floating in space before a looming, irregular grid. Under Gidron’s direction, the characters do not stick to their seats. And Dewey Dellay’s subtle sound design supplies just a suggestion of the white noise of a train journey, in addition to snatches of the classical music that wafts in and out of the duo’s heads. McConnell, though he sometimes overdoes the petulance, paints an intelligent, entertaining portrait of the articulate, fuming Parsky, who’s torn between egotism and intense disappointment. And Carroll, last seen as the bonneted, prattling crone of Súgán Theatre Company’s Bailegangaire, looks much better groomed in the traveling woman’s well-tailored pink suit. Moreover, she captures Martha’s sly, seasoned perceptiveness as well as her calculated flirtation — right down to the studied display of legs the character knows are still an asset. It is her opened book, however, that snags the unexpected man.