If you’ve seen Dean Linnard perform atCal Shakes,San Francisco Playhouseor elsewhere, you can probably still picture his wildly eloquent eyes. They flicker, flash and blaze. Whatever they’re conveying on the surface, there’s always something more roiling underneath — often some guise of rage.

In “Born With Teeth,” Liz Duffy Adams’ firecracker of a two-hander about William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe writing the “Henry VI” trilogy together, Linnard has a show that gives full expression to his artistic prowess. As the imperious and mercurial Kit Marlowe, Linnard whirls like a dervish, lets whole weather systems pass across his face and swaggers like a rock star — a vibe cleverly underlined by Ulises Alcala’s costume design, which finds persuasive crossover between emo-punk straps and Elizabethan puffed sleeves and flared doublets.

At the beginning of the play, which got its Bay Area premiere Thursday, Sept. 7, at Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley, his Kit is the far more famous writer, while Will (Brady Morales-Woolery) is a mere “upstart crow” who should be grateful for the partnership and had better show it. As Kit peacocks his way into their writers’ den, he’s not just laying down the law about who’s in charge here, he’s testing Will along every possible axis: political, artistic, sexual, temperamental. Each line in Adams’ taut, tart dialogue is like a Russian nesting doll, where a poke is housed in a caress that is actually a great big “Gotcha!”

Our history books might romanticize Elizabethan England as a hotbed of artistic discovery, but Adams reminds us that it was also a totalitarian “police state” swarming with spies and that plays we now revere had to dodge censors and snoops, their writers cranking out sequels for patrons akin to our own era’s TV hacks chained to studios. Adams layers in all this context with breathtaking craftsmanship, never in need of a “Hello, I’m the exposition” monologue; it’s all just part of the air the players, and you, breathe.

Josh Costello’s direction is a marvel of fine-tuning, as if he’s sat down for a freewheeling coffee date with each individual line. In one pregnant pause, when Kit assesses whether Will’s worth more to him as collaborator or hunted bounty, it’s almost as if silently, without moving a muscle, Linnard morphs from bad-boy writer to inquisitor, torturer and executioner, then back again and passes it all off with a shrug. When Kit starts seducing Will, and the pair feast on each other like wolves seeing who can eat the other first, Costello makes clear that physical contact is secondary; what matters is whether either has exposed something genuine and vulnerable, or whether each has something more up his sleeve. The genius of the play is that it’s always both at the same time.

“天生牙”捕捉闪电的堵塞le of artistic creation — what it feels like to wrest words from the ether and get turbocharged by it, to sublimate what you really long for into metaphor. When Linnard delivers actual “Henry VI” lines, he’s like a sorcerer who’s at last gotten his magic staff.

The play also conjures the joy of finding an equal partner, someone who can make you feel safe enough to discover things about yourself out loud, in real time, even as they ruthlessly dissect the result.

Kit’s ridiculing of Will’s pliability, inscrutability and work ethic almost never makes Will explode. In that way, Adams’ Will is like the real Will: a mystery. Who was he, that font of doublespeak and intimation, who gives only to withhold and in so doing gives all the more? Teasing that out is one of the play’s engines, and its ending offers one tantalizing possibility.

But even then, the Will that Morales-Woolery proffers still seems to conceal more pools of wonder just ahead. He’s ever out of our reach, and perhaps the one thing we can say for certain about Will is that he shares our ardor in the zigzagging, never-ending search for a person’s true nature.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com