Available light [theatre]

Hard to believe, perhaps, but true - as true as the honest acting and poignant emotions in "then after water."

Canadian playwright Jennifer Fawcett's poetic drama receives an exemplary production at Available Light (theater), which developed the script with the playwright for more than a year but wasn't able to find a suitable space to present the intimate one-act until a benefactor offered the former bank space.

To be sure, the space doesn't sound promising. Yet, with the addition of a few curtains (mainly to hide and transform the space into a small thrust stage), just enough well-placed chairs for a small audience to enjoy a front-row view and a minimal scenic design that's just right for such a concise and understated play, the makeshift bank lobby becomes ideal for Available Light's haiku-like production.

The five-member ensemble cast is beautifully balanced under Artistic Director Matt Slaybaugh's sensitive direction. It would be easy to fall into bathos or melodrama, given the subject and theme of this work, but no one does.

Loosely based on a true story, Fawcett's memory piece moves back and forth in time from 1979 to 1980 and 1999. Yet, the play, the direction and the acting are so clear that the frequent shifts in time and place are never confusing, while gentle and compassionate light is shed on each character's interior journey of love and loss.

Michelle Schroeder and Slaybaugh play a young couple, Anna and Ben, whose lives are changed when their car breaks down and a truck driver picks them up, promising to take them to a gas station. They never get there. A year later, Ben is still haunted and confused by what happened that day, which he keeps reliving in his mind. Two decades later, their son (Ian Short) is haunted, too, as he and his girlfriend (Acacia Duncan) make another long drive to witness an execution.

What happened that night? And what might have happened, if only a different word had been spoken or a different step taken or...? Fawcett skillfully takes her time - and artfully interweaves times -- in answering those questions, but the truly absorbing theme she explores has more to do with the power of love and grief amid the unpredictable fragility of life.

Short and Duncan deliver naturalistic performances that underscore the difficulty and necessity of moving forward, however painful the past.

But the emotional center of the play and this production is shared by Schroeder and Slaybaugh. One's heart goes out to Schroeder's emotionally transparent Anna as she wrestles with fear and regret and flirts with comforting fantasies or memories to escape the grim reality of peril. Perhaps because Slaybaugh's Ben seems half-frozen in grief and guilt, it's a little harder to connect with his realistic portrayal. Despite strong empathy for this character's unmeasurable loss, the play invites us to measure the consequences of Ben's inability to fully process his grief and move on. Interestingly, there are no direct scenes between father and son, yet by the end of the play, we have grasped the core of their relationship. Fawcett trusts the audience enough to let us make the links and infer the damage and distance between them.

Although its memory structure and the use of three movable set pieces to suggest car drives seems less original after Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prizewinning How I Learned to Drive, Fawcett employs those tools well to tell her own powerful story. To her credit, this promising young playwright makes each character understandable and human - including the truck driver. Alex Beekman plays him with a pitiful woundedness that doesn't obscure or excuse his unforgivable acts of violence.

Serious theatergoers should make their own drive to Gahanna to see what may turn out to be the best new work staged in Columbus this year. Just don't accept a ride from a stranger if your car breaks down along the way.