Grief, and ultimately a movement out of darkness into light, is at the heart of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole, movingly directed by Cynthia Hestand at the Contemporary Theatre of Dallas. The play treats a couple’s loss of their only child. While the couple’s healing is decidedly secular, the play’s resolution still deals with age-old themes of grace, forgiveness, and redemption.

In the play, Becca and Howie have recently lost their four-year old son, Danny. Howie tries to be cheerful, but he houses hidden stores of rage, disbelief, and resentment. Becca has had some taste of sorrow before—her brother died ten years earlier. She and her sister Izzy have both known mourning, but where Becca is prim and proper, straight-backed, and austere, Izzy has turned her grief into punk and heavy-metal, with piercings, chains, and gothish hair. The girls’ mother, Nat, clumsily wends her way through the seas of her family’s grief, trying to stay stylish and coy in the midst of it all. Finally there’s Jason, who accidentally killed Danny and wants to make reparations.

Hestand’s cast almost seamlessly responds to its weighty and sometimes light-hearted subjects. Marianne Galloway as Izzy, Becca’s mile-a-minute, brass tacks, sailor-mouthed sister, delivers her lines with such celerity, and yet with such pathos, that you’d be glad to sit for hours hearing her harangue and ridicule her family. Joanna Schellenberg (Becca) has Barbara Hershey’s mysterious and riveting features, storing all Becca’s anxiety, fear, and anger in the contours of her stony face. Her whole body tenses in grief; even her smiles are rigid.

By contrast, Ashley Wood as Howie initially seems buoyant, but Wood gradually turns Howie into a crippled and contorted man. Sue Loncar at first seems jarring as the girls’ mother, Nat. Her gaudy outfits and teetering heels seem to clash with a more somber tone. But in quiet moments of conversation, her introspection outdoes her outfits. Kyle Curry (Jason) seems like a kid who’s a little oblivious to the gravity of what he’s done; still, he risks a lot to try and make peace.

Rabbit Hole is a heavy and fraught play, giving a searing account of the bitterness and coldness that can accompany death. However, its subject also sweetens and warms as the characters develop. In a way, Rabbit Hole, which refers to Jason’s story of alternate universes with parallel but different versions of our own lives, isn’t about cloistering ideal worlds off from our own. Rather, if, like Alice, we go through the rabbit hole, we must eventually come out and join the world of the living again.

Rabbit Hole’s strength, and its beauty as enacted by Hestand’s cast, is its willingness to look into the abyss, to even fall into it, and yet at the same time to accept that “a squeeze of the hand” can make us burrow out again and soldier on.