In the world of Chelsea Marcantel’s Everything is Wonderful, nothing really is. Life is hard, and it’s made harder by the people in it. Faith is a gift and an excuse, depending on who you ask. Set in Amish Country, in a community often written off for its otherness or idealized for perhaps the wrong reasons, the play uses the unfamiliar to explore radical forgiveness, a concept that may be just as foreign to most as the Pennsylvania Dutch accent.

The new Everyman Theatre production, up through February 24, is not glitzy or extravagant. Its costumes and sets are well done but simple, as befits its setting, and the light and sound design evokes the softness and stillness of the community at its surface. For most the Everything is Wonderful and the lifestyle it depicts will be wholly unknown, but that works entirely in its favor.

Between the joy of Ruth (Hannah Kelly), the wisdom of Jacob (Bruce Randolph Nelson), the rage of Miriam (Alex Spieth), and the steadfastness of Esther (Deborah Hazlett), I felt torn in two directions, not unlike the the family itself. I couldn’t quite tell you if I wanted to run to the comfort of a church or far from its flawed congregation by the end, but that’s the trouble with faith. It’s supposed to be blind, but it’s hard not to peek and see flaws in it when things go badly. This is a story without a clear moral. Should we forgive and forget? Should we do it always? Never? Sometimes? Everything is Wonderful doesn’t leave you with an answer, but a question, and sometimes that’s more useful.

As for the performance itself, company members Hazlett and Nelson prove again why they are stalwarts of the Baltimore stage. Paired for the eighth time as fictional husband and wife, they inhabit their characters and feel so completely tied to one another. They hold together this family coming apart, if only barely.

The men whose choices necessitate such incredible forgiveness, Tony Nam as the repentant “English” among the Amish, Eric, and Steve Polites as Abram, whose status as the “LeBron James of being Amish” isn’t close to his whole story, conjure some of the most complicated feelings in the play and shine in their moments of vulnerability. Kelly exudes sweetness as Ruth, who makes the best case for faith itself. She is all love and forgiveness and light, even as darkness creeps in around her. Spieth, meanwhile, is probably the most relatable of the bunch. Wronged and angry but unable to fully leave those who wronged her behind, her personal journey feels the most real, making its final destination all the more wrenching.

The play’s format takes a few scenes to get used to, flashing from past to present and sometimes pairing the two together to construct the details we need to move forward, but it fits the narrative so well that the early moments of confusion are worth it. After all, “what’s past is past” never seems to be true. What’s past always creeps its way into the present. It sticks to you and changes you.

As we watch scenes five years apart unfold concurrently, that seems more true than ever. Forgiveness is a choice, but some things—love, loss, hurt—are impossible to forget, whether we want to or not. Days later, I’m still unsure if I could forgive all of the characters in Everything is Wonderful. But I know I won’t forget them for a long while.

Some might think that visiting the same playwright four times in as many years would get repetitive. Not so with Everyman Theatre’s return to Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work with this month’s Sweat. The play tells the story of a group of friends, family, and coworkers, most ticking multiple boxes on that list, as they deal with the closing of the local mill and the personal and professional consequences that come with it.

A wrenching, compassionate look at people caught in the wake of the financial collapse of the early- and mid-2000s, Sweat looks to the past but feels firmly locked into the present. We all know these people. Some of us are or were these people. While the story plays out in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 2000 and 2008, the conversations and problems could unfold in any working-class bar in any blue-collar town.

In a time when we feel so divided and so at odds with one another, Sweat does not come bearing a message of hope, or unity, or some other seemingly unattainable thing. What it offers instead is a reminder of how we got here in the first place—a chance to understand the frustrations and situations that, allowed to fester and escalate, gave rise to the problems plaguing us today. Maybe, in order to move forward, we first have to look back. Lynn Nottage’s work gives us time to do that.

It’s done through relatable people (in this case, a talented mix of both the resident company and several actors in their Everyman debuts) in the most relatable of places, a local bar. At the end of each day, it plays host to celebrations and screaming matches, moments both triumphant and unspeakable. It’s an extension of these characters’ homes, and in fact is more real and tangible to us than any other location. Its illusion of familiarity can be credited in part to resident set designer Daniel Ettinger, who transformed the Everyman stage into a working pub, complete with taps pouring actual (non-alcoholic, there are lines to be remembered after all) beer, faded local ephemera on the walls, and a jukebox dispensing ’70s and ’80s hits as the stage literally revolves to move from scene to scene.

“I was lucky that the crew at Everyman has been developing their skills in motor control and moving scenery quite a bit lately, which let us pull off a lot of the things that would’ve been very difficult for us the three, four seasons ago,” Ettinger says. “The technical growth of the company has really been exciting lately. It looks simple from out front, but there was a lot of technology going on.”

We caught up with Ettinger to discuss his process, how he created a Reading bar on a Baltimore stage, and what the new setup offers future performances.

Where do you start when preparing to design pieces for a new show?
I absolutely begin with texts and the story that the director and the company is trying to tell and how the visuals of that story can impact an audience and help them understand the events we’re trying to describe to them. I’ve got to go through the script multiple times and look at the intention and requirements and that sort of thing to know what’s going to need to happen in a space. I kind of need that in my head as I began to then look for the inspiration of how to start.

How did you choose what sort of spaces to create for Sweat?
I looked at a lot of research about Reading, Pennsylvania. I was lucky that Deb Hazlett drove up to Reading and she had taken some local photographs as well, but there’s a lot of visuals available. The play deals with serious economic issues and the collapse of the financial infrastructure of the town, but the place where this group of friends is accustomed to going to for years and years, even before the play takes place, was once something that was actually quite nice. It’s very much still a neighborhood bar. It’s not that the financial collapse happened and suddenly the walls fell down.

So we wanted to make sure that there was a real sense of home and almost safety and comfort and familiarity in how the bar feels today. Then I wanted to set it all in some sort of gray void that told you nothing about what was going on outside, but that would just exist in a state of unease so that really the only way to find a place was to come inside the bar. The outside, it was kind of nothing but steel smoke, if you will. I didn’t want to describe the town of Reading or what’s outside the windows. I wanted it to be this mass of gray that all of their lives had been thrust into. And so I wanted to put the set in the middle of that sort of gray box.

What challenges came with designing the different spaces you needed to tell this story?
It all goes back into extreme practical. We were given such a beautiful text, and when you’re given a theater space and you’re given time and money and this really talented staff, choices begin to emerge that would not emerge without all of those elements in place. Coming up with the conceit of the splitting of the other side of the revolve in half for the parole offices and the two apartments for example. And thinking about the revolving terms of the way that it moves time forward and backward, which was really helpful as well. We’ve done some smaller turning pieces on stage before, but this is the first time we’ve done what is nearly as large a turntable as we could fit into the space. We were squeezed in in a way that we’ve not really done before. Just technically speaking, we couldn’t have done this before. Fortunately the revolve has been built to where it comes apart and it can be stored for future seasons. So it’s a real asset.

On top of the regular visuals, you also had to create a working bar for this show. How was that experience?
Yep! It’s tight back there. There’s not a lot of depth. They’re pouring non-alcoholic beers on tap, so there’s a keg and the ice chest, it’s all back there. There’s quite a bit happening behind the bar and a very narrow space when you go through. There’s a little swinging door in the back area of the bar that, when you go in that room, we really feel like we’re in the back storage section of a bar. There are also all those images that are covering the wall, which were done with the help of Jillian Matthews, who’s the prop master there. Except for the few images like the Yuengling labels or the whiskey labels, all of the pictures of the sports teams and the celebrities are people from Reading, Pennsylvania.

You’re working on a couple other shows this season. What upcoming projects are you excited about?
I’ll tell you the approach we’re taking with the holiday show, The Importance of Being Earnest, is just really going to be fun. Capital letters all the way across.The director, Joseph Ritsch, has got a really great visual idea. It’s a great cast and it’s going to be a lot of fun. It’s coming up way too quickly. The other piece I’m doing is called Everything is Wonderful. It’s a story set on an Amish farm. The playwright has been very careful to not be too specific as to where, but we have our thoughts about that. It’s a beautiful, beautiful play. I couldn’t put it down, and I really was moved when I finished the piece.

I feel so lucky that I love telling a wide variety of stories. I’ve been at this for quite a while, and sometimes people ask me, “Well, what else would you like to do?” And I’m like, “Well, no, sorry, this is kind of it.” Every time you sit down with a new play, even a play such as The Importance of Being Earnest, which might not be new, but it’s with a new creative team and the new director, there are new things happening out in the world that change what a play has to offer to an audience.

Is it surprising to be in your 20th season with Everyman Theatre?
I sometimes feel like Vinny [Lancisi, founding artistic director of Everyman] and I grew up together. In that 20 years, I always came back once a year—always—to do one show. When my husband, James, and I decided to stop moving, we bought a house in Baltimore [in 2016]. I’d been living in D.C., New York, Baltimore, and L.A. since 1988. I’ve lived in all these cities, but my artistic home for all these years has been, well, Vinny, really, and wherever he is. He’s committed to artists and all the people he works with. He has this phrase he always says—“people matter”—and he doesn’t just say it; he lives it. 

Maybe in another theater, you’re afraid to try something. Here, you just go for it. And if it’s a big failure, he says, ‘Thank you for trying!’ He has a strong voice and a strong vision, but he also really lets the actor discover and try and make mistakes. When it comes from the top down, it [becomes] the aesthetic of the workplace. And that’s why I keep coming back.

Is it also important to you that you be part of a resident company?
As a child, I knew what I wanted to do. I was in the third grade and I saw Godspell at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on a family trip from Sumter, South Carolina. I said to my mom, ‘That’s what I’m doing; I want to do that.’ And she got me involved in Sumter Little Theater, which happened to have these extraordinary teachers, Katie Dameron and Jan Taylor. I tried to do some other things—I worked for Congress, for a while; I tried law school—but this was always where my heart was. 

In this business, we’re all independent contractors, but here [at Everyman], we are members of a family that has a work ethic that is similar, that has an artistic voice that has some history, that has the purpose of looking for truth—which is, I think, Vinny’s goal: to tell the truth when you’re onstage. We all trust and love each other and work together to create that, so you don’t have to start at the beginning every time you show up on the first day of rehearsal. I mean, we’re a family—we squabble, we love each other. The gift of the resident company is a common purpose.

It also seems that having an established sense of closeness and an understanding of the dynamics between actors.
Yes, and I’m not afraid! I love these people. So when Bruce Nelson and I play a married couple, we already love each other. He’s married, I’m married—it’s not like that—but the love is there. Beth and I, Megan and I, Dawn and I. So if the love needs to come across, it can; if the hate needs to come across, we trust each other enough to move into that. It’s a huge gift, and one that I really, really value because it can be a brutal business.

How have you evolved as an actor alongside the evolution of Everyman?
The through-line for me is that I have to be after telling the truth, and I’m not much interested in artifice. Even if you’re playing broad style, which I love, you still gotta tell the truth, and that’s what sort of lifts the play. Rather than commenting on what you’re doing, you’re actually doing it, no matter what the character is—how awful they are, how lovely they are. 

Also I’ve learned not to care if the audience likes my character. You gotta let that go. When I was playing Hedda Gabler, this man actually stood up in the audience and yelled at me, ‘You’re a psycho!’ A grown man. [Laughs.] I often play difficult characters. But I love them, I advocate for them. And if I’m doing my job, I’m not trying to make the audience like them either. That’s not telling the truth of the story.

I read that you’re drawn to gritty characters and survival stories.
Well, I know that’s how I get cast. [Laughs.] Over the years, that has been my work. Vinny has recently cast me in some very broad comedy. Talk about being scared out of my mind. But I sort of channeled Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball and I had a blast. I loved every moment of it. And while I was physically tired at the end of the night, I was not emotionally worn out at all. I love comedy, I love comic timing, I love the way it feels. It’s a different game. It’s fun. I’m actually hoping to do more.

But, you know, I’m getting ready to do the play “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” and since I knew who Mary Tyrone was, I’ve wanted to play her, so this is a huge artistic gift for me. My husband and I went to New London, Connecticut, and went to [Eugene O’Neill’s house], and I took my shoes off and walked on the floors and sat in her rocking chair—they’ve preserved it. I felt like I was holding my breath most of the time. You don’t often get to do that kind of research.

What was it about her character that was so enthralling to you?
I understand something about when the pain in your life becomes unbearable, having to do something to survive that. And while I blessedly have never been addicted to morphine or any other drug, I understand something about Ella’s [O’Neill’s mother on whom the character is based] inability to tolerate the circumstances of her life, so that she removes herself. And I’m interested in discovering in rehearsal how it affects the people around her. 

I play characters so often who suffer, and she certainly is suffering, but once she begins to use and remove herself from the suffering, it’s the people around her who suffer. And given what’s happening in our country with opioid addiction, with alcohol addiction—and certainly here in Baltimore, where we are suffering from heroin addiction right around the corner—once someone removes themselves and then are helpless to do anything about it, I think that suffering is sort of universal. And I hope that can be the catharsis with the audience. You don’t have to use morphine to understand the kind of pain that makes you pull in and pull away. Hopefully this play will strike a chord of compassion in the people who see it, for the people around them who are suffering.

Wow. That’s big.
At our best, our work is big. I’ve often, over the years, wondered: should I be a nurse, should I join the Peace Corps, is there something more valuable I can be doing with my life? At the end of “Death of a Salesman,” you could hear men weeping in the audience. When you have that catharsis, I truly believe it can change lives. That is what I’m after. 

Even if people spend two hours laughing together, there’s also that gift of sharing that moment. That exchange with the audience is everything. I’m very passionate about this right now because of what’s going on in the world, because of the divisions, because of the lack of compassion. I think we have to speak to the need to connect and the need to forgive and understand each other. We have to. I’m hoping I can be a part of that.

“Long Day’s Journey Into Night” runs from January 31-March 5.