If you’re in the mood to see two actors in top form portray three characters in a four star play, go see Dying City at the Bathhouse Theater. This seemingly simple play, which takes place in the early years of the Iraq War, has some of the most complex subtext I’ve seen on stage in quite a while.

It might seem like a sort of gimmick for an actor to play twins – a soldier and his brother – alternating characters from scene to scene. If Chris Maslen had had any doubts about the constant shifts of time and perspective this could have been a disaster. But he knows exactly what he’s doing, switching between distinctive personalities with such fluency and precision that it often seems like actual twins are entering and exiting the stage. It sort of breaks your heart that you’ll never get to see the brothers co-exist, and therein lies the tragedy.

However, it’s Shana Bestock who carries the true spine of the story, in my opinion. She has a kind of twin role as well, portraying the eternal archetype of the war widow, but also a widow of this particular war. She maintains the kind of psychological edge to her character that makes you wonder just how the hell actors do what they do. For most of the play she is a woman stuck between normal mental states, an incomplete persona hiding behind a photograph of herself. Whether she is with her brother-in-law in the present or her husband in the past, it’s only in rare moments that the hidden person flashes out, when suddenly we see a raw view of a damaged individual.

Dying City weaves several different landscapes together at once: personal, historical, a city skyline, a war zone. And it somehow does this without telegraphing a political point of view or preaching a sermon. There are only occasional passages that stand out as exposition, but this is a minor fault in a story that covers such complex terrain. This is the kind of production that makes you glad to live in a city with professional theatre.