Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road, up at TheaterWorks through Nov. 8, is about our inability to connect – a focus that both works for and against it.

Though the play has four characters, it centers on Ethan, who has reluctantly returned home to rural Idaho, and his aunt, Sarah. These two characters dominate the story even when they’re not on stage.

This centricity is reflected in Hunter’s script, where so often plot points happen offstage. For example, Ethan tells his boyfriend he has been keeping his aunt’s cancer diagnosis secret for months.

Sometimes this distance is clever. Ethan and Sarah both keep emotion at bay and erect walls between themselves and others, but the approach can ask a lot from the audience and isn’t always dramatic.

That said, the cast, led by Mishka Yarovoy as Ethan and Denise Cormier as Sarah, is excellent. Director Rob Ruggiero, also TW’s artistic director, stages the play in a way that takes advantage of the play’s intimacy, and makes the deeply physical performances by the two leads all the more powerful.

There are moments of humor, though it’s dark humor, since this play doesn’t traffic in lightness, like when Ethan exclaims “I hate this country” and his aunt replies, “It hates you more.” One of the standout scenes is Sarah’s monologue about cancer, in which she lays bare the emotional toll of her illness and the life that continues around it: the balance between discipline and cost, a tension many viewers will recognize.

The play sometimes keeps the characters at arm’s length, and it does so on purpose, yet the characters are magnetic, even when they recoil from one another, and themselves.