Strangers on a train add up to an acute meditation on fate, time, and loneliness in The Unexpected Man. This 1995 play, by French author Yasmina Reza, whose Tony-winning Art is as ubiquitous as black-velvet Elvis, also explores the disarming, unspoken intimacy that exists between author and reader, artist and fan. An unacquainted man and woman share a train compartment as they journey from Paris to Frankfurt. He is a famous novelist, she an admirer in whose handbag is sequestered a copy of his latest, which gives its name to Reza’s play. Recognizing the writer, the reader hesitates to take out her book.

Most of The Unexpected Man consists, Strange Interlude style, of interior monologues as the self-contained travelers, fiercely cogitating for our benefit, make their shared journey — arriving, as it were, at mutual acknowledgment only toward the end. This is a lovely if welterweight work, graceful, pithy, and less broadly comic than the lavishly honored Art, Reza’s study of a three-way male friendship that unravels over a monochromatic painting. And Gloucester Stage Company puts the piece (which was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1998, and then in New York in 2000 with Eileen Atkins and Alan Bates) in the hands of two accomplished actors, Ronald Hunter and Donna Sorbello. Yet it seems to me that, in contrast to the Nora Theatre Company staging last spring, Isabel Ramos’s production misses the meditative tone of the work, punching up the comic agitation at the expense of the sadness.

Hunter’s Paul Parsky is an aging, alienated man whose first word, which keeps turning up on his tongue, is " Bitter. " The passage of time, impersonal sex, soured friendship, a daughter soon to wed an older man, the impossibility of writing what you truly mean — all are bitter to the bereft if egotistical novelist. " An old boy with a rancorous expression, " he wonders, with regard to The Unexpected Man, " Is there today one single person in the whole world, in the whole world, who might know how to read that book? " And there she is, with the volume in her pocketbook, her every thought informed by the presence of its author.

Martha, the unexpected fan, is an attractive woman in the " twilight " of her life (though not in the Gloucester Stage Company production), a careful reader of Parsky who perceives a vigorous if curmudgeonly kindred spirit. Rebounding from the death of a friend, she finds herself viewing life as a series of losses. Bemoaning her inability to control time or loneliness, she longs to take a chance on the writer, to offer herself as a chance to the writer, to take out the damn book and wave it like a flag of connection. But for most of the play’s 80 minutes, these two silently articulate souls move on separate tracks.

Reza, whose work is elegantly translated by the English writer Christopher Hampton (who also did the honors for Art), is a very precise playwright who creates a distinctive tone, whether the characters are contemplating life, literature, or the benefits of Ex-Lax. Yet this is not a particularly precise production, with Hunter a more befuddled than waspish Parsky who occasionally fumbles his lines. Reza offers no stage directions, specifying only " Nothing realistic. " Set designer Jeremy Barnett, however, places the man and woman on one long bench on a platform above a suggestion of railroad track (and overhung by the same set of trees, which hardly suggests movement, though Jeff Benish’s lighting does). Haddon S. Kime augments an effective musical design with some jarring, literal effects, among them a clacking typewriter and an alarm clock.

Under American Repertory Theatre Institute for Advanced Theatre Training/Moscow Art Theatre grad Ramos’s direction, the man and woman leave the platform, advancing and retreating and seeming to address each other, in their thoughts, with more urgency, now comic, now melodramatic, than the characters’ reserve would allow. Sorbello, though young for her role, conveys the right, slightly mournful sexiness and sophistication, but she tends to exaggerate. Parsky describes the woman’s face as " disturbingly indifferent, " yet Sorbello’s acts a mile a minute. The bearish Hunter is an actor I have admired, but he seems miscast here, replacing Parsky’s acerb fussiness with oft-outright hangdog desperation. (He is endearing, though, in his delight once the book comes out.) The Unexpected Man is an almost musical piece, and to my ear, this production doesn’t so much hit the wrong notes as hit the right ones either fuzzily or too hard.