BALTIMORE (Map, News) - The first things you notice are the gears.

Gears are incorporated into the stage furniture, sketched onto the back wall, pictured on the program cover and referenced in director Alex Willis’ notes, describing David Mamet’s play, “Boston Marriage,” now at the Mobtown Theater, as “two machines, one turning inside the other”… and what happens when fate tosses the proverbial monkey wrench into the works.

About.com defines “Boston marriage” as a 19th-century term describing two women living together in committed friendship. Whether the relationship may be sexual is open for debate. And there’s a lot of debate going on in this play, as the title characters, Anna (Windy Marshall) and Claire (Kerry Brady), spar with each over everything from chintz to pie to geopolitics to love.

The flowing costumes and references to the Crimean War set the play in the Victorian age, a time when women’s fortunes were inextricably tied to men. This world of men is the machine in which Anna and Claire must work within and perhaps it is the pressures of this confining reality that make these two women so peculiarly unlikable.

Unlikable, as neither seem capable of any empathy for anyone other than themselves. They speak in a language that might be called hyperbolic sarcasm, a cross between Oscar Wilde at his most cynical and Kevin Smith. They delight in verbally eviscerating the sole remaining character in the cast, “The Maid” (Holly Gibbs) a woman whose Irish-Scots accent was so thick, it took me the better part of the first act to divine what she was saying.

Ironically, it is the Maid who provides her two social “betters” with the best advice they could receive: “to show kindness in another’s troubles and courage in your own.”

Anna loves Claire, but Claire loves another, much to Anna’s distress. Can Anna win back Claire? Will Anna’s “male protector,” a man she’s fooled into thinking she is something she’s not, leave her? And then there’s the matter of an emerald necklace, the aforementioned monkey wrench, which may destroy their lives or resurrect their love.

Deception is a running theme in the play.

“Men live but to be deceived,” Anna says more than once. Anna plans to trick Claire into running away with her while Claire allows Anna to think just that. But as these wheels within wheels turn, will this odd couple find happiness?

By play’s end, one believes they might, though what passes for love between these two would seem a marriage machine-pressed in someplace less than heaven.

IF YOU GO

“Boston Marriage”

» Venue: Mobtown Theater, 3600 Clipper Mill Road, Suite 114, Baltimore

» When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, select Sundays at 4 p.m. through July 22

» Tickets: $12 general admission, $10 for students and seniors.

» Information: 410-467-3057, mobtownplayers.com