[img1]The greatest hallmark of good acting is the ability to keep an audience captivated even when it has has no clue what is going on.

In the hands of a lesser cast, Foolin’ Around with Infinity might have seemed like a slightly pretentious play with a script too clever to hit home. Fortunately, its cast members commit so fully to their characters, one can’t help but give the show the benefit of the doubt.

The play deals in a non-linear manner with issues of personal responsibility, post-traumatic stress disorder, impending doom and father-daughter relationships. Its characters interact in a network of fall-out shelters during the late Cold War.

Mac (Dave Bales) and Jesse (Nathan Fisher), are Air Force officers with their hands on the trigger, awaiting orders to destroy the world. While playing amicable games of Monopoly in a missile silo somewhere beneath Utah, both men seek to master a situation with which they are ultimately uncomfortable.

The set, a giant Monopoly board, underlines the two men’s role as pawns in the game of nuclear warfare. They receive unexpected visits from Mr. Anderson (Daniel Wood), who bears important orders under the guise of a door-to-door salesman. Meanwhile, Mac’s estranged daughter, Luke (Sara Lachman), occupies a fall-out shelter somewhere nearby, distributing sage if idealistic advice and interacting with her father in a series of memorable scenes.

It is genuinely hard to believe these actors are undergraduates. They expertly grasp the depth and importance of their characters’ words, which often assume the form of cerebral phrases like, “Feed Jane Fonda to the whales,” or “We are playing Frisbee in a graveyard.” They question the purpose of consumerism in a world they know might not exist tomorrow. They struggle to dictate the direction of their own lives.

[img2]As Luke, Lachman seems a child prodigy whose brilliance causes rifts in her relationship with her father. Her eyes glitter mischievously as she calmly shares the inner workings of her mind. Yet it’s the men of the play — Fisher, Bales and Wood — who give it real fire. Wood slides gracefully into an array of different roles, while both he and Fisher excel at balancing their characters’ desire for control with their commitment to walking the line. All act with their entire bodies rather than just their mouths, a testament to their training and Nathaniel Porter’s direction.

The play tries to make the audience an active participant in the show by establishing a narrator named YOU (Anna Stromberg) and occasionally throwing in localized references to Greenwood Avenue and Seattle. These efforts can be effective, such as when Wood mentions the possibility of nuking Seattle and abruptly cues the house lights, spotlighting the entire audience. But with the collective virtuosity of this cast, neither Porter nor playwright Steven Dietz have to worry about tricking viewers into becoming invested in the play — the actors’ talents do that on their own.