If you’re directing a play about teenagers – even teenagers in the year 2048 – you had better be sure that it sounds and feels authentic to, well, teenagers.

Elizabeth Helman says “The Light Keepers” passes that tough test.

Helman, the coordinator of Oregon State University’s Theatre Department, first came across Oregon writer Lindsay Partain’s play when she directed a reading in August 2022 at Theatre 33, Willamette University’s new-play development company. That “Pop-Up Reading” — essentially just a public reading with actors at music stands that allows the playwright to get feedback from an audience — included a number of Helman’s students from OSU.

Those students connected with Partain’s play, Helman said.

“They just loved the play,” she said. “It really just resonated with them. … Some of the students were like, ‘Oh, I wish I had had a play like this when I was in high school.’”

Now, Helman – and a number of the students who were in that first staged reading – get a chance to bring a full production of the play to the Whiteside Theatre in Corvallis. “The Light Keepers” opens Friday, May 12 at the Whiteside for the first of six performances over the next two weekends. (See the box at the bottom of this story for details.)

“This play’s so weird and interesting,” Helman said. “It’s sad and funny. It just hit a lot of the good, sweet spots.”

As a fan of “The Light Keepers,” Helman is among good company: Partain’s play is one of five full-length selections in this year’s Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival, which honors new works that offer dynamic performance opportunities for college-age actors. The festival kicks off later this month on the campus of Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau.

“The Light Keepers” is set in Oregon in the not-too-distant future – Helman said that if you do the math, the year works out to 2048. It follows a group of high school friends during the first week of their senior year.

It’s been a tough stretch for the students: The senior class has faced a series of tragedies, including the death by suicide of another student.

Then, a tear in the fabric of the universe (a concept that proved a crucial element in movies like “Everything Everywhere All at Once”) allows the friends to see what amounts to a parallel version of their home and their lives.

But, Helman said, audiences needn’t focus on the sci-fi aspects of “The Light Keepers.”

“It’s really a play about friendship,” she said, “and depression and mental health are very much a part of it.”

And despite the serious themes, “The Light Keepers” is light on its feet, Helman said: “It’s also very funny and sweet and poignant.”

So, when Helman was casting about for a bookend for this year’s season of OSU Theatre productions – a year when just about every production was on the road in a different location as work continued on the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts on the OSU campus – she thought “The Light Keepers” might fit the bill.

And it’s the first production of the OSU season that’s been staged in a full-fledged theater, albeit a renovated movie theater. Helman, who has staged plays this season at a winery and at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Sciences Center, welcomes the return to more familiar territory, even as she’s worked around limitations such as the Whiteside’s limited wing space – and she’s come up with creative solutions for exits and entrances: “We certainly will have actors running outside of the building dressed up like cheerleaders and space-cult members and all sorts of weird costumes. So it’s downtown Corvallis. It’ll fit right in, right?”

She added: “We found some cool stuff to add a little theater magic to it.”

It all works, she said, to explore some universal themes: “People change, the world changes, but we humans still deal with loss and grief, and trying to figure out your place in the world. I think those things are really relevant to young people.”

And to everybody else.

If you go

What: “The Light Keepers,” by Lindsay Partain, a production of Oregon State University Theatre.

When: May 12-13 and 18-19 at 7:30 p.m. and May 14 and 21 at 2 p.m.

Where: The Whiteside Theatre, 361 SW Madison Ave., Corvallis.

How much: General admission tickets are $15. Youth and senior tickets are $12. Students with ID get in for $5. Call the OSU Theatre Box Office at 541-737-2853 or click here to order tickets.

Of note: Playwright Lindsay Partain will be on hand for a post-show discussion after the May 14 matinee.

Correction

The original version of this story misrepresented the initial reading of “The Light Keepers” at Theatre 33. The story has been corrected.