Breaking up is hard to do. It gets even harder if, as in The Ghosts of Us — Rebecca Gorman O’Neill’s new play at Falls Church’s NOVA Nightsky Theater — the about-to-split spouses must spend 36 hours in each other’s company in a remote cabin in the mountains before signing the divorce papers.

Why? Because a quirky provision of their prenup says so. This unlikely artifice fuels the interaction among the play’s four characters: Jackson and Emma, the couple in question (Joshua Nettinga and Fosse Thornton); Emma’s sister Sophie (Maura Suilebhan); and Jackson’s best friend, Aiden (Justin Von Stein).

Jackson and Emma have been married for five years. Their relationship is troubled by factors that any good couples therapist would recognize: they communicate poorly if at all and have difficulty surmounting the small resentments of cohabitation. They have come to live largely separate lives. Jackson no longer loves Emma, for reasons unclear even to himself. A line from a Gordon Lightfoot song applies: “I don’t know where we went wrong, but the feeling’s gone, and I just can’t get it back.”

Emma may still have feelings for Jackson — Sophie thinks so — but not hopes that the relationship can be salvaged. She recalls a student paper she reviewed about Chekhov’s Three Sisters: the characters long to get to Moscow, symbolically representing love and happiness and fulfillment, but never will. (We’ll Never Get to Moscow was the play’s original title.) Her road to reconciliation with her future runs through wood chopping and dividing up the couple’s personal property

Sophie, a lawyer, brings the divorce documents, acts as the timekeeper for the 36-hour rule, leads yoga sessions, and makes lists to keep everyone’s lives in order. An important subplot concerns the unresolved sibling conflict — sometimes verging on hostility — between her and Emma.

There are likewise long-simmering tensions between Jackson and Aiden, culminating in a rolling-on-the-floor fight between the two. Kudos to fight choreographer Jessie Holder Tourtellote for staging the tussle convincingly in the tight confines of NOVA Nightsky’s playing space.

The main engine of the tension between the two is Aiden’s longing for Emma, not only unrequited but unspoken over the years of their friendship. In the most problematic moment of O’Neill’s otherwise successful script, Aiden’s long-suppressed desire sends him hurtling headlong off the rails, when a more restrained, though still emotionally powerful, expression of heartbreak would have been more convincing.

All four actors do a sterling job of making their characters real. In NOVA Nightsky’s space — the theatrical analog of a tiny house — the audience gets to be in the room with the actors, up close and personal (Nettinga landed literally at my feet during a yoga scene, for example). This tends to favor subtlety and realism in acting style. As audience members, we are seeing close-ups of the actors, who in turn can communicate through fine details of gesture and facial expression reminiscent of good film acting. This cast does it well, with clarity.

Another advantage of the small space for the play turns out to be what lighting designer Noelani Stevenson can do with low light. There are a number of scenes in which one or two of the actors are appropriately in shadow while action proceeds elsewhere. But with the audience so close to the actors, we can clearly see the reactions or interactions of the actors in the dimmer light.

Rob Gorman’s direction of the play is spot-on, with its pace just right in every scene, and the actors’ ensemble work being seamless throughout. To his and the cast’s credit, the comic timing of the show’s many very funny lines is impeccable.

Make no mistake, this is a comedy, like Chekhov’s “comedies” a matter of laughter amid the ruins. There is a somewhat ridiculous love, or at least desire, quadrangle among the characters. There are Chekhovian echoes sprinkled through the script. Aiden does not shoot a gull, for example, but he at least tries to shoot ducks.

Perhaps unlike the Chekhov canon, there is a glimmer of if not exactly hope, at least release from hopelessness, for Jackson and Emma. In a moment of insight, Jackson comments that remaining in a loveless relationship for a lifetime, living disconnected lives under the same roof, a couple could see “the ghosts of us” — their former selves — in the living room. Better off avoiding that.

In The Ghosts of Us, NOVA Nightsky brings to vivid life the confusion, sadness, conflicts, and humor of relationships that will never be the same but that will unmistakably mark the lives of the characters in the future, whatever that unknown future may be.

Running Time: Approximately two hours, including an intermission.

The Ghosts of Us plays through November 23, 2024, presented by NOVA Nightsky Theater performing at 1057 West Broad Street, Suite 216, Falls Church, VA. Tickets, priced at $28, are available for purchase online or at the door.

See the digital program here.