Jonah is sweet, awkward, inquisitive, respectful and clearly smitten – the sort of boy you might want for a first love if you were Ana, a scholarship student at a boarding school. After he walks her to her dorm, she lifts her shirt over her head, flashing him.  

The next time they meet, he asks her why she did that.

“Did you have a problem with it?” she replies.
“I—. No. Yes? I don’t know!—I’m just trying to figure it out.”

About a quarter of the way through Rachel Bonds’ play “Jonah,” there is a strange blitz of light, Jonah disappears, and what seemed such a charming coming-of-age comedy turns into a drama that is dark and complicated — one that I spent the rest of its 100-minute running time just trying to figure out.

Despite the title, “Jonah” really revolves around Ana, portrayed by Gabby Beans. Ana never leaves the stage, but after each blitz of light one of three male characters appears on stage with her, then abruptly disappears, and reappears later.

In her scenes with Jonah (Hagan Oliveras) Beans captures the capriciousness and high spirits of adolescence.

But when she is with Danny (Samuel Henry Levine), she is patient, comfortable, defensive, while Danny is volatile, distrustful, needy.

In her later scenes with Steven (John Zdrojeski), Ana is guarded and reflective while Steven is attentive, respectful, in his own way clearly smitten.

Eventually we piece together the basic story.  Danny’s father married Ana’s mother when Ana was 11; Ana’s mother died three years later. Her stepfather was horribly abusive, more to Danny than to Ana, but Danny was protective of his stepsister, and helped both of them escape. Neither escaped unharmed.

I hesitate to elaborate further, since so much of the energy that the playwright puts into the play is on the gradual unfolding of the story, told theatrically. She and director Danya Taymor seem wedded to the play’s ambiguity.

Part of the ambiguity is the timeline. It seems largely in chronological order, traversing at least two decades, but there’s at least one scene that seems to be a flashback. There are no external cues that orient us to time and place – a change in the set; costume or makeup changes; a title card.

“Jonah” seems the kind of production in which the creative team doesn’t want to sacrifice an intriguing aura for the sake of clarity. Luckily, its cast goes a long way toward keeping the play grounded. Beans, who was nominated for a Tony in her Broadway debut performance as the cheeky maid Sabina in “Skin of Our Teeth,” is just as winning as Ana,but more psychologically complex. Samuel Henry. Levine, who made his own auspicious Broadway debut in the dual roles of Adam and Leo in “The Inheritance,” gives a full-charged credible performance. John Zdrojeski, who also recently made his Broadway debut, as George Gershwin in “Good Night, Oscar,” and is scheduled to co-star as Tom Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby,” is effective (and the opposite of the intensity of those other roles) as a more mature version of the boy Ana fell in love with.

Which brings us to Hagan Oliveras, the relative newcomer in the quartet of fine actors. If the character might seem a tad too naïve for a 17-year-old in this day and age, it’s possible that this is meant as a memory play from a previous era (it’s not clear); in any case, Oliveras’ performance is too adorable to find any fault.

When late in the play, Steven meets Ana at a writers’ retreat, we figure out she is now an adult. Steven is drawn to Ana, he says, because of how moved he was by her book. Do we learn what the book is about? No. But we figure out the book must not be about her childhood, because Ana eventually explains to Steven – and to us— much of the backstory that we kept guessing throughout “Jonah.”  

Much, but not all. That the play is given the title of Jonah is a clue to the importance of Jonah, or at least to the significance of the innocent, ideal love that Jonah represents.  At one point, Ana and Jonah exchange sexual fantasies. Ana’s are extensive – a man goes to her door in the pouring rain telling her he missed his flight because he’s loved her since they were children – but, as she admits, her fantasies “are not so much about all the body parts but about the feeling,” not sex but love. 

“Yours are so much better than mine,” Jonah reacts. “Mine’s just like, ‘Oh man, I’m touching a butt.’” 

It was at comic moments like these that I felt sorry that “Jonah” wasn’t the light romantic comedy that it initially promised to be – followed by guilt that I didn’t more fully appreciate the more sophisticated, if more challenging, drama it turned out to be.

Afterward, thinking about all the fantasies that Ana had spun for Jonah, I wondered: Might the Jonah in “Jonah” not just be the boy of Ana’s adolescent dreams, but entirely her fantasy, her escape from a life that has little love in it? Is that what the playwright intends? I’m still figuring it out.

Jonah
Laura Pels through March 10
Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission.
Tickets: $82-$138
Written by Rachel Bonds
Directed by Danya Taymor
Wilson Chin (Sets), Kaye Voyce (Costumes), Amith Chandrashaker
(Lighting), Kate Marvin (Sound), Tommy Kurzman (Hair and Wig), Gigi Buffington (Voice and Text Coach),Morgan Auld (Illusions), Tilly Evans-Krueger (Movement), and Ann James (Intimacy).
Cast: Gabby Beans as Ana, Samuel Henry Levine as Danny, Hagan Oliveras as Jonah, John Zdrojeski as Steven.