Compelling conversations about ‘Divorce’

At: Williamstown Theatre Festival,

Nikos Stage, Williamstown.

Through tomorrow. Tickets $33-$35, 413-597-3400, www.wtfestival.org

WILLIAMSTOWN - For both artistic and commercial reasons, it makes sense for theater companies to tackle works that connect with the universal human experience.

Well, you can’t get much more universal than the subject of “You Better Sit Down: Tales From My Parents’ Divorce,’’ an engrossing production performed by the Civilians, and presented at Williamstown Theatre Festival through tomorrow under the direction of Anne Kauffman.

With impressive skill, the four cast members of “You Better Sit Down’’ pull off a kind of emotional backflip in this 55-minute production: They play their own parents, channeling the idiosyncratic voices of the people who raised them as the parents discuss the most intimate details of their relationships, including how their marriages fell apart while the actors were young.

Because the script was constructed from interviews that Matthew Maher, Caitlin Miller, Jennifer R. Morris, and Robbie Collier Sublett conducted with their parents, the characters speak in natural, stop-and-start conversational rhythms in describing their journey from early courtship to acrimonious (or amicable) breakup.

Adding to the meta-mix is the fact that their words are directed at the child who interviewed them and is now portraying them. So one moment they freely blurt out admissions or opinions; the next, they retreat into guarded, evasive answers or snappish replies, uncertain how much to reveal to their child.

“All I wanted to do was finally go to bed with him,’’ Beverly (Morris’s mother) says, describing the early stages of her acquaintance with Morris’s father. Then Beverly, embarrassed, stiffens into a formal posture, saying: “And this is really hard for me to talk about.’’

For the most part, the actors remain seated (in chairs from their parents’ homes) and face the audience. They stay in character throughout, making no attempt to suggest their own feelings about their parents’ divorces or the upheaval it created in their lives. But it peeks through nonetheless, as when Mary Anne, Miller’s mother, recalls that as she and her husband were getting divorced, the 5-year-old Caitlin used to curl up on the couch next to the court-appointed guardian ad litem who came to their home.