(Above) Kalala Kiwanuka-Woernle as Esther and Dereks Thomas as Astronaut, (Below) Lorraine Victoria Kanyike as Petrushka.

GLOUCESTER STAGE COMPANY PRODUCTION EXPLORES INHERITANCE, FAMILY

With humor and heart, the Gloucester Stage Company production of “Moon Man Walk,” a 2015 play by James Ijames, renders the journey of a man at midlife from painful isolation to a liberating encounter with tough truths.

With humor and heart, the Gloucester Stage Company production of “Moon Man Walk,” a 2015 play by James Ijames, renders the journey of a man at midlife from painful isolation to a liberating encounter with tough truths.

On stage through Sept. 26, this regional premiere of “Moon Man Walk” concludes the June-through-September mainstage season at Gloucester Stage, a company known for presenting new and adventurous plays in its 178-seat theater, housed in a century-old brick warehouse on the harbor of this North Shore town.

Nearly 20 years ago, when he was a young actor, Ijames performed at Gloucester Stage. His play “Fat Ham,” a reinvention of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a queer Black man at a family barbecue, received the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a 2023 Tony Award nominee for Best Play.

The intermission-free, 85- minute production of “Moon Man Walk” is directed by Lyndsay Allyn Cox, who won the 2022 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director as director of Gloucester Stage’s production of “Tiny Beautiful Things.”

As directed by Cox and performed by a first-rate cast, “Moon Man Walk” is equal parts comedy and poignant drama. Embodied with utter naturalness by Dom Carter (recipient of the 2026 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Lead Performance as Martin Luther King Jr. in “The Mountaintop”), the play’s protagonist, Spencer, introduces himself with an engaging monologue. Among other things he says about himself, he notes that he likes books and that he is a librarian, and good at it.

The scene shifts to an inner view of Spencer, as Carter drops to his knees and marvelously melts into a small boy. Anguished by the absence of his father since childhood, Spencer is no longer content to accept his mother’s far-fetched explanation that his father was an astronaut whose moonbound mission failed to return.

He needs to learn the truth about the father he never knew.

Conjuring Spencer’s journey through the past and present and both within and outside himself, the minimalist, poetic staging evokes a cosmos in the small theater, in which audience seating surrounds the stage on three sides. Scenic design is by Dahlia Al-Habieli with lighting by Lindsay Alayne Stevens.

A motif of circles suggesting the spheres of planets and the moon is echoed in white circles on the black floor and even in the furnishing — a round cushion, a circular lampshade and a curving divan and end table. Overhead round barn lamps cast white orbs of light and black circular hoops are suspended in front of a backdrop that turns from black to the deep blue of a night sky.

Kalala Kiwanuka-Woernle portrays Spencer’s mother, Esther, as well as a flight attendant and a nurse. Her Esther is a tender and brisk young woman who as a single parent is determined to protect her boy from the truth of his absent father by maintaining an elaborate fiction.

When Spencer receives a phone call informing him of his mother’s sudden death, he returns to his childhood home in Philadelphia to plan her funeral. On the flight home, Spencer’s seatmate is the exuberant and voluptuous Petrushka, performed with charisma by Lorraine Victoria Kanyike. Spencer is absorbed in a book; but Petrushka intervenes with questions and gets him to share cocktails. Before long, they perform a duet of sexual fantasies while remaining buckled into their seats and carrying on an ordinary getting-acquainted conversation.

Animating scenes that vary in tone from humor to gravitas, Dereks Thomas plays multiple roles, including the Astronaut, a funeral director and a flamboyantly dressed florist.

Costumes by Zoë Sundra lend a business look to Spencer, celebrate the sass and sexiness of Petrushka and outfit Esther in tidy homemaker and job attire. As the florist, Dereks Thomas wears a dandy blue ensemble and as an apparition occupies a full body astronaut suit.

Evocative props by Leah Marcil include a box of items from the past — a soft blue child’s blanket Spencer holds to his face, a small blue diary, and a vintage turntable with a stack of LPs — ’80s R&B hits that provide musical accompaniment for some scenes.

Kanyike’s Petrushka, an irresistible life force, invades Spencer’s isolation with her joy-inducing sexiness and curiosity. Warm and attentive, she is equally responsive to both his inner state and outer presence. With a glance or a witty comment as well as life-loving lust, she triggers Spencer’s rise from his staid solitude.

But Spencer’s pain does not yield with ease. Waking from a dream encounter with his dead mother, Spencer’s great losses — the absence of a father and now the death of his mother — drive him to make an existential howl at the moon and cry, “Don’t go! You always go away.”

Yet, humor invades even the play’s most solemn moments. Noting the resemblance between a father and son, a character comments that parents often pass on what they least like about themselves.

ON THE WEB

Learn more at gloucesterstage.com/moonmanwalk