Getting to the theater 10 minutes early to stare at Scott Bradley's set design is a great prelude to How to Write a New Book for the Bible. Virtually all the elements—save one door, a chair or two, and a box—are hanging from the ceiling, and most of them will glide down on wires to make their appearances then rise back up into the heavenly collection: an obelisk, a table lamp, a window with curtains, chandeliers, a square column of fluorescent light, and long strings of mirrors in a state of near-constant, slight motion reflecting bits of light around the highest edges of the stage.

On the ground below, we're about to watch someone bury his mother. Playwright Bill Cain (Equivocation, 9 Circles) is a Jesuit priest who took much of the story directly from journals he kept during the months leading up to his mother's death. He says in the program that this isn't really fictionalized.

When the ancient three-part canon Dona Nobis Pacem—"grant us peace"—starts coming in and out of scenes about halfway through the show, it'll raise the hairs on your arms. This set, these lights, this music that surround the action are what you expect from a big theater like the Rep, and they're grand. Big money can buy beautiful things, and those things can make you cry. In the bathroom after the show, a line of women fixed their wept-off mascara.

Bill, played by Tyler Pierce as a contemplative neurotic, is trying to figure out why his family is the way it is. His older brother, Paul (Aaron Blakely), a Vietnam vet whose breakdown just before intermission is as powerful as anything in the play, lives far away and has an agonized relationship with their mother. Their dapper father, Pete (Leo Marks), is long dead but makes plenty of appearances, both in flashbacks and as a ghost.

And this mother, named Mary: Linda Gehringer plays her impeccably. Sometimes doddering, sometimes girlish, sometimes leaping from her rocking chair to cheer a beloved sports team, her embodiment of this woman in every stage of adulthood, and into death, is believable every second she's onstage. She also knows Bill is writing about her. "You're not going to make me look foolish, are you?" she asks him plaintively. "That wouldn't be fair."

It's an elegant production; every transition is graceful. At more than two hours, it's a tad overlong, but if you ever find your mind straying, turn your eyes upward to those lovely bits of reflection skipping across the walls.