Cops & Robbers’ exuberant production of Annie Baker’s prize-winning play belied its rubbish strewn set, its stinking bins, its broken-backed chairs and its back yard trespass. Set behind a coffee bar in small town Shirley, Windsor County, Vermont, it promises little but to be overlooked. Baker’s skill is her deft insistence on looking closer. What won sympathy and sustained interest in the audience on a cold night was the self-belief of its characters’ dreams.

Their reality was different, but as misfit oddballs, Baker makes us see them, for once. The coffee bar is less interesting than the characters cast out with the trash.

Jasper, an aspiring writer, played with charismatic cool by Jake Dann, is hanging out with KJ, a college drop out obsessed with propositional calculus (mesmerising Leo Kitay). They share a stolen guitar between them and a band: the Frogmen. Cued partly by psychedelic mushrooms, partly peppermint schnapps, they perform their music and lyrics to an awe-struck audience of one: shy, impressionable teenager Evan (likeable Caitlin O’Sullivan). Requested repeatedly by her coffee shop boss to move Jasper and KJ on, Evan is caught up in their conversation and flattered by their interest in her.

Names matter because people matter. Jasper’s roistering repetition of Evans’ surname Shelmerdine wins her admiration, at KJ’s sly expense. Joseph Josef was a previous band name, honouring both KJ’s and Jasper’s grandfathers. They know a lot about one another; their friendship loyal and robust.

Jasper is concerned lest KJ forgets to take his medication; KJ’s virtuoso recitation of the word ‘ladder’ demonstrates the power of his imagination and unique take on key moments of his life, adding to the sense of oddness and out of the ordinary perceptions. Evan is amazed and tolerant of both.

KJ’s confident physical clowning and Jasper’s eloquence are punctuated with long silences and shared reflection. Sometimes Evan speaks, sometimes waits, like KJ and Jasper, anticipating something happening. It does, but not in the way any of them could predict.

Touched by tragedy, the remaining pair preserve a delicate balance of trust and sympathy which remains long into the night, after the stage is empty of everything but trash, but filled with something much greater.