If you do a Google search, you can find out that if you see a possum in your dreams, it means that what seems apparent on the surface isn’t necessarily true, and that you need to dig beneath the surface to discover what is what. Maybe if you are from Virginia, like playwright Ed Falco, whose “Possum Dreams” is getting a world premiere at None Too Fragile theater, you would just know that.

Ed Falco, playwright. Photo from www.edfalco.us

Falco seemed to, for his rich but dark dark comedy has characters who don’t just look into secret (and maybe sacred, personal and spiritual) matters but who claw at one another to ferret out every emotion, every nuance of feeling and pain, and any unspoken subtlety of gesture.

Walter Landing (played by Andrew Narten) and Jan Landing (Leighann Niles DeLorenzo) know each other’s buttons, and they push them with deliberation and a fierce yearning to get at – and to – one another.

Walter has a secret. He has fallen for, and had sex with, a transsexual (male to female). It takes Jan a while, but she probes and jabs until she gets to all the dimensions of his affair (how many times, where, how he felt each time, and on and on).

Jan has her own. She thinks her husband (who has a bestselling book) is a hack and wouldn’t have had any notice at all if it weren’t for her strong editorial hand and her covering up. Walter finally gets to her by play’s end too.

These characters don’t seem to like one another. Not one bit. And by play’s end there is no sense of a kind of weird bonding that, despite it all, shows that they mean to stay together and somehow thrive. That makes this play different from Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” – which this story resembles in some ways. In that work, characters George and Martha went after each other one drunken evening – as Walter and Jan do – and tear down walls, mostly over the loss (real or not) of a young son. Their protection of each other’s secret makes their humanity and strange union shine forth.

In Falco’s work, the characters at play’s end only seem joined by a fundamental fear of life and living, and that has them clutching each other after their drunken night of emotional warfare as their children are coming home – no doubt to see a dead possum stuck to the wall and the house in major disorder.

Through all their outrageous – and hysterically funny – exposés and spiritual torture of each other, the revelation of sex toys and kinky sexual urges, and their weariness of each other, they seem to be a couple of mean-spirited people. And who wants that?

For all the emotional carnage, it is hard to figure out why a viewer could care about these characters one bit. But somehow we do, and that is because of the fabulous acting of Narten and DeLorenzo. Pick a technique – gesture, facial expression, dramatic pause, cadence of speech and range of tone – and they demonstrate it.

Leighann Niles DeLorenzo and Andrew Narten, in “Possum Dreams.” Photo courtesy of None Too Fragile

By play’s end, you know they are just people – screwed up as they may be – but human nonetheless and not monsters. Falco doesn’t seem to go for any comfortable resolution for them – or for us. What we get left with is a fundamental loneliness; that we are really in the midst of life all alone, even when we try to share it with someone else. Our experiences – and all the other weird urges – are our own. Falco seems to say that what we want is understanding if someone gets under the surface and sees the range of what makes us what.

Kudos to None Too Fragile for sticking to its edginess and bringing contemporary drama to the stage. Co-founder Sean Derry (who did a wonderful job bringing this new work to life) commented that the theater wants to bring “stories that need to be told.” This is one of them, and it is well worth seeing.

The world premiere of Ed Falco’s “Possum Dreams” is taking place at None Too Fragile, 1841 Merriman Rd., Akron; 330-671-5463; www.nonetoofragile.com. Performances run through June 28, at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, Monday and Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; and 2 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are $20 (or pay what you will).