Julia Greer and Bruce McKenzie Photo by Travis Emery Hackett

Characters labeled simply as Dad and Daughter are about to take off on a cross-country road trip from New York, where they currently live, to California, where the now adult Daughter was raised. It's a trip they took in reverse when she was a child, but now their mission is to empty out Dad's last bit of West Coast storage.

After she considers that she might want to cut down on her consumption of snack food, he reassures her with, "You're young and healthy," before adding, "you have a great body."

In director Sarah Blush's production for The Hearth, one that can twist the brain with its steadfast refusal to linger on moments, actor Bruce McKenzie's delivery of the line is in no way lascivious, but it does jut out a bit, and Julia Greer, as Daughter, gives a quick, subtle reaction which is in no way highlighted as their upbeat chatting continues.

Not that it's been all kitchen sink drama up until that point. Set designer Brittany Vasta has the audience on three sides of a playing space composed of a square pit furbished in the kind of neon orange shag the cool kids in the 1970s used to use to cover their car seats. (There's a patch of the material displayed in the lobby for audience members who can't resist a feel.) Though much of the 60-minute play takes place in their car, there's none of the standard theatre staging of actors sitting next to each other with one miming hands on a wheel. Dad and Daughter freely roam the perimeter of the pit, lending uncertainty to exactly where and when their interactions are taking place.

But we do know what state they're in because co-lighting designers Cha See and Bev Fremin have company members using a flashlight and handheld stencils to project every new locale on the upstage wall.

The pair hasn't even gotten out of New Jersey when Dana's dialogue offers an earful of the intriguing mix of sentimentality and reserve that seems to define their relationship. Daughter asks what she was like as a kid and her father responds with a perfunctory list of adjectives: "Introspective, quiet, gentle, obstinate, self-involved, pliable, chubby, gullible, imaginative...," concluding with the suddenly parentally cheerful, "The best!"

When he asks if she remembers her childhood fondly, she also responds with a list. "I remember it in flashes, in migraines, in dance sequences, in hide and seek, in vaudeville acts, in shellshock...," before summarizing, "I remember it like it was tomorrow."

But their favorite road trip conversation involves who can come up with the most creative palindrome–those words and phrases that read the same forwards and backwards. When Daughter was a child, simple ones like "racecar" might suffice, but now their game has been upgraded to entries like, "Did Hannah see bees? Hannah did."

If their game suggests the possibility of seeing things exactly the same way from two different directions, sound designer John Gasper demonstrates how that's usually not the case by filling the time between scenes with what sounds like the garbled audio of vinyl records being played backwards, like from the days when doing that on Beatles albums supposedly offered clues as to if Paul McCartney was dead.

Specifics of past events are occasionally brought up, but not to the extent where the audience can immediately piece together their significance. Both single and out in the dating world, the pair seems to function more as pals than parent and child, and when new characters enter the mix, they assume they're a couple.

While Dad prefers not to get involved with strangers they encounter along the way, Daughter comes upon a woman (Camila Canó-Flaviá) who seems to know everything about her, a man (Ryan King) who is sure they've spent "one wild night" together, and a man (King) with a silent child (Canó-Flaviá) who Daughter suspects may be in danger.

With McKenzie and Greer creating a sound base of naturalism in their empathetic portrayals, the other characters are set on a broader plane of reality, particularly Jessica Frey's cheerfully loquacious Wendy's drive-through employee.

After hitting its surrealist peak in California, the play indeed takes on a palindrome-like structure as the pair head back to New York, only in this direction the pace quickens and unspoken truths that were buried in subtext have risen to the surface. It's a lot to take in (and to be honest, I had to read the play after seeing it to experience the full impact), but it's theatrically quite thrilling.