Couch Penny Ensemble’s “An Oak Tree,” with Riles August Holiday/Photo: Greta Mae Geiser

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What sounds like an actor’s worst nightmare—a two-character play in which one of the performers has never seen the script before appearing on stage—turns out to be something of a dream show for theatergoers, at least those willing to wrestle with a knotty, multi-level storyline. Presented by the just-launched Couch Penny Ensemble (in association with the equally new Theatre Arcana), and adeptly directed by Bryce Lederer, Tim Crouch’s “An Oak Tree” challenges the audience both intellectually and emotionally, posing provocative questions about the nature of theater and its role in promoting healing and self-acceptance. The one-act drama—which made its debut twenty years ago but seems fresh as a daisy—is also a sterling example of how, given the right material, an unhyped, low-budget, no-nonsense theater company can punch way above its weight.

Riles August Holiday gives a suitably mesmerizing performance as a nameless, smarmy, down-at-heel stage hypnotist who complains of having “lost [his] mojo.” The actual audience becomes the spectators to the Hypnotist’s play-within-a-play, with one viewer called up to take part in his act–a “volun-superstar,” as the boozy, over-the-top showman declares. The volunteer is a plant, in this case Renzo Vicente, one of a dozen actors (a new face each night, naturally) who go in blind to the play and encounter the larger plot and their own part in it at the same time the audience does. Coached by Holiday and occasionally reading from the same passed-around script, Vicente acquits himself well, evolving from an initial blankness to a full, fleshed-out presence by the time the play reaches its searing climax.

What binds the two roles together is the central, unseen figure of Claire, a young child who has died tragically before the play begins, struck by a car driven by the Hypnotist. She is also the daughter of Andy, the “volunteer” who, it turns out, has sought out the Hypnotist for reasons of his own, which come clear over the course of the play. After a rocky start, the two men join forces on a journey from the morass of guilt and despair in which they’re trapped toward some kind of closure and relief.

Along the way, there are several Pirandellian detours into different levels of reality, from the show we’re watching, where the Hypnotist explains the ground rules and introduces his co-star, to various layers of performance, in at least one of which “Andy” himself seems to be a construct invented by the Hypnotist for some inscrutable reason. The show’s metatheatrical zigs and zags, combined with its complex, shifting chronology, can be a bit much, with some scenes morphing from teasing ambiguity into genuine head-scratching bafflement. At one point, the Hypnotist asks Andy whether the whole thing “doesn’t seem a bit contrived.” Counters Andy: “Hard to tell from here.” From the seats, however, some of the plot twists do seem gratuitous, and the hour-and-a-quarter-long production would benefit from shortening and simplification.

What steadies the show is Holiday’s bravura performance in the many-sided role of the Hypnotist, who is both a figure in the play and its narrator and stage manager. A gifted comic actor, Holiday manages to pull us into the Hypnotist’s burned-out, maladroit stage persona, while at the same time making it abundantly clear that underneath the seedy facade is a vulnerable human being with a wounded soul. It’s a performance of great delicacy and control, in a part that Holiday has very much made his own.

Couch Penny Ensemble’s “An Oak Tree,” with Riles August Holiday and Nathaniel Thomas/Photo: Greta Mae Geiser

All aspects of this intimate production bespeak a high level of theatrical intelligence and understanding of the material, from Zay Alexander’s bare-bones staging, suggesting the action’s inward setting; to RobbyMoe Reeves’ lighting design, with its generous use of shadow; to Evren Page’s classically oriented musical background, which early on almost blasts us out of our seats with Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” and then, as the play’s mood softens, downshifts to gentler keyboard pieces by Mozart and Bach, evoking the memory of the dead girl Claire, a budding pianist who was killed while walking to her piano teacher.

The fundamental question raised by “An Oak Tree” is whether the unrehearsed secondary role lends dramatic impact to the show or is just a bit of stage gimmickry. My own sense is that it does work, conveying the unscripted nature of life and how unprepared we all are for the sort of tragic loss depicted in the play. The anxious awkwardness and uncertainty we see early on in the shell-shocked Andy isn’t some sort of acting technique. It’s real, as the actor’s mind tries to take in the flood of information coming his way and his characterization only gradually coalesces around the grief and confusion that define his role. The play suggests that extreme suffering, like hypnosis, is a kind of altered, self-enclosed reality, a trance state that can be broken only by art and theater, which allow us to step outside of our immediate situation and rejoin the larger world.

Despite its sometimes overwrought plotting, “An Oak Tree” is a thoughtful, moving play, reminding us once again that so much of the real magic of the Chicago theater scene takes place in tiny, black-box spaces. Running for only two more weekends, with tickets modestly priced, this is a show to take in and to savor.

Couch Penny Ensemble’s (in association with Theatre Arcana) “An Oak Tree” runs through July 5 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln. Tickets range from $18 to $27 and are available by visiting couchpennyensemble.com.