Imagine a time in the near future when scientists develop a procedure that will allow some people to become near immortals.

Lisa Sanaye Dring’s play Kairos is an interesting idea but her real subject is how precarious relationships can become when threatened.

Theatre Nova is presenting Kairos as part of the National New Play Network Rolling World Review, which includes stagings by other theater companies in Cincinnati and Los Angeles.

Kairos doesn’t begin as a sci-fi thriller. The challenge of immortal life is offered up as a unique test of human relations. So the play opens not with mad scientists but with two people looking for love.

It begins when two drivers have a minor car accident, which opens the door to romance. David and Gina are in their early 30s. David is black, Gina is white. David is attracted to Gina and she’s interested in learning about him, and so begins their sometimes blissfully happy and sometimes darkly unhappy relationship. Dring tells their story in a series of short vignettes.

David is a professor of classics, Gina works in marketing. They have a first date at a familiar bar and get to know each other. Each scene tells us that even happy couples shift over time. David is upfront about being bisexual. They both have family problems. They get mad at each other and try to work their way back to each other. Through it all, they grow closer. But the big test is Kairos.

"Kairos" is Greek for the right or critical time, and it refers to the project and to the couple's time together. Project Prometheus plans to choose the first recipients of the new immortality procedure open to men and women 25 to 34 years old. David is interested; Gina is bothered and upset. They debate, become excited, shift points of view, and wonder if they’ll be left out in the raffle of all raffles.

What would you do? That is the question that Dring raises, but it’s not really about an immortality procedure, it’s really about how fragile humans can be. What about children, what about one person getting the nod and another not? What about the dangers to the body and mind?

Director Brianna O’Neal keeps the staging simple on the tight Theatre Nova stage. The advantage of the tight stage is that the audience is close to the couple's intimacy through good and bad. O’Neal and her two-person cast understand that the play is not about sci-fi innovation but about the vagaries of a relationship.

Josie Eli Herman is Gina, a woman who hasn’t been lucky in her relationships, but she is attracted to David’s very different family, interests, and his own inner conflicts. Herman captures the many emotions that reveal Gina’s personality and the challenge of dealing with this new threat that the chance of immortality raises just as they do at the beginning of a promising relationship.

Mike Sandusky plays David, who finds solace in the classic Greek literature he teaches. In the beginning, Sandusky plays David as the quiet academic attracted to the outgoing and good-looking women. But David grows more assertive as he deals with different desires, his intense relationship with Gina, and his concerns for his parents. Sandusky handles the shifts expertly.

It wouldn’t be right to give away the end but it’s a poignant ending to Dring’s play.

The play is 90 minutes without an intermission.

Hugh Gallagher has written theater and film reviews over a 40-year newspaper career and was most recently the managing editor of the Observer & Eccentric Newspapers in suburban Detroit.

The Theatre Nova production of Lisa Sanaye Dring’s “Kairos” will be presented through March 16 at Theatre Nova, 410 West Huron Street, Ann Arbor. For information and tickets, call the box office at 734-635-8450 or go to theatrenova.org.