Matt Bauman and Sara Betnel in a scene from Christine Evans’ play Weightless at Perishable Theatre.

Sara Ossana

It was back in August of 2001 when Christine Evans began writing her play about a broken family living atop a high-rise on the verge of collapse. Then two planes flew into the Twin Towers. Suddenly her off-beat farce didn’t seem so funny.

“All of a sudden this play took on a very different kind of resonance that wasn’t there when I started,” said Evans, who moved here from Australia in 2000. “I do think it’s a funny play, but it wasn’t a time when it seemed funny.”

So Evans set her script aside. But over the years Weightless has had a couple of staged readings. Now it is being produced for the first time at Providence’s Perishable Theatre on Empire Street. It opens in previews tomorrow.

Evans, who just got her doctorate in theater and performance studies from Brown, began working on Weightless in one of Paula Vogel’s “boot camp” sessions. Vogel, the Pulitzer Prize winner who has taught for years at Brown, would toss out ingredients and her students would have to hastily whip up a bit of theater. Evans finished her first draft in 48 hours.

“I like to think that some of the delirious quality still lingers,” she said.

There was something about that initial sketch that intrigued Evans. She was curious about the characters and began fleshing them out.

Vogel had asked that her students include a plastic surgeon and a lesbian among the cast. In Evans’ play they become the same character, Lillian, a woman who has a pathological fear of losing control.

Along the way we meet Lillian’s milquetoast husband, Horace, who refuses to stand up to his imperious wife and literally turns into a clucking chicken, and their juvenile delinquent son Seth, who Evans referred to as “the canary in the coal mine.” He picks up on the threat to the family when no one else does.

Then there is the foreign maid Arrende, who is played by a man and is “not a transsexual,” says the script, “but something much stranger: a being so altered by cultural and surgical amputation that her female parts and her sense of gravity have gone missing.”

In a way, Weightless is kind of like The Clean House on crack, said Evans, referring to the Sarah Ruhl play about a woman doctor obsessed with order and her joke-telling Portuguese maid.

“It’s a play about what goes up must come down, about trying to manage the surface of things and that surface tension is always cracking apart.

“But on another level, it is kind of an ordinary family drama. It’s not that different from A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which is about a day in which things slowly and horribly get worse.”

As you might have guessed by now there is something a bit surreal about Evans’ play. She likes to call it expressionistic, a style in which emotional states turn into concrete manifestations, like cowardly Horace becoming a chicken.

“Even though some of the things that happen in the play are very strange, they are literalizations of emotional states. It’s not a play that’s just random to me.

“For example, the foreign maid is slowly losing her sense of gravity. For me, that has to do with the fact that she’s slowly drifting away from her roots. To live in this country, she has to abandon what she knows and who she was in a different life.

In a way, that parallels Evans’ own experience.

“One of the things that happened to me when I came here was I felt my country had disappeared from the map. When you live in your own country, everything in the news is about your country. There is this kind of running story about your life grounded in a particular place. Then I came here, and Australia only appeared in stories about shark bites and poisonous animals.”

Weightless is one of five full-length plays Evans has written, most while a student at Brown. Before that, she was a composer and music director for Australian theaters, playing the sax and writing arrangements. Then one day she got up the courage to try her hand at writing and created a play about identical twins, one of whom is dead and comes back to haunt the sister who is laid up in the hospital after injuring her spine in a trapeze accident.

The play, My Vicious Angel, was picked up by the Adelaide International Festival of the Arts and achieved some degree of success.

“I felt, wow, this is it, I’ve got to be a writer. This is my life. Then I got this crazy idea to come to America.”

Soon after arriving in this country she enrolled in the graduate theater program at Brown, where she studied with another Pulitzer Prize winner, Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz, and fell in love with Latino drama.

“In a way my work is resonant with it, because there is that kind of magic-realist quality.”

Right now Evans, who teaches a couple of days a week at Harvard, is working on rewrites for her Slow Falling Bird, which a London director has expressed interest in. That’s about an Australian detention center where refugees from Afghanistan and Iraq are held without any legal rights or representation. It’s set in the desert, but it’s also about the “desert of the soul, when people behave in inhuman ways.”

Evans said it was one of the hardest plays to write.

“For one thing, the subject matter was so painful, and I really wanted to get it right because I felt I was speaking for people in a way. And the other thing was it pushed me into a realism I haven’t always had to deal with. So I really had to think about the style very hard in this play. It was a big stylistic challenge.”

The past month or so has also been spent furiously doing rewrites on Weightless, adding a long monologue for Lillian.

“It’s been a very hot process,” said Evans, “but I like that. You learn so much about your play when you hear actors reading it.”

Weightless runs through Nov. 11 at Perishable Theatre, 95 Empire St., Providence. Tickets are $10 for previews, which take place tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday, and $20 for the remaining performances. Students and members of the military are $15. Call (401) 331-2695.