By ROB KENDT

Few couples on the verge of cohabitation can avoid the fraught moving-van negotiation: how much, and precisely whose, stuff will fill it, and by extension, how the disparate possessions of two households will fit into one. “I’ve collected a few books over the years,” one partner might say, while the other winces and wonders, “How many is a few?”

Kathleen Clark’s unshowy, affectingly plain-spoken new play, “Southern Comforts,” includes that generic romantic-comedy exchange but soon goes on to consider a thornier impasse, pondering not whether two retirement-age newlyweds, Gus Klingman (Larry Keith) and Amanda Cross (Penny Fuller), can live together in peace, but whether they’ll rest that way for eternity.

I think it’s safe to say that few besotted young lovers, in fact or in fiction, have uttered the hurt, plaintive line, “I thought we were gettin’ a stone together,” as does Amanda when she learns that Gus plans instead to take the grave beside his first wife, Helen. Even a plot that’s paid for can thicken.

As Amanda’s dropped “g” indicates, she’s a Southerner, a few rings past a belle but still as pert and cheering as a Tennessee wildflower when she breezes into Gus’s sparsely furnished New Jersey home at the top of the show. (Thomas Lynch designed the cozy single set, washed with seasonal scene changes by Brian Nason’s lights.)

For his part, Gus is a standard-issue coot, albeit with complications: a tidy, taciturn retired stonemason, he relishes the undisturbed quiet since his first wife died five years ago. It was a tight-lipped slog of a marriage, he reports, not a noisy battle; but grim silence is easier to bear when it’s not shared.