BREWSTER – Who knew simply counting could be so funny?

The prologue of the cryptically titled “Circle Mirror Transformation” – a gem of a play by Annie Baker making its local debut at Cape Rep Theatre – consists entirely of five people in an acting class lying flat on the floor of a dance studio in a community center in a small Vermont town. You can see just shoes, legs, hair; they only occasionally shift position; and they take turns saying a number as part of an exercise on focusing.

What: “Circle Mirror Transformation”

Written by: Annie Baker

Presented by: Cape Rep Theatre

When: 2 p.m. Sunday, 7 p.m.

Tuesdays and Wednesdays and 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays through July 16 Where: Cape Rep’s Indoor Theatre, 3299 Route 6A, Brewster

Tickets: $25

Reservations: 508-896-1888 or www.caperep.org

“One.” “Two.” “Three.” Really, those are the lines. Yet by vocal inflection, pauses and sighs, this becomes a laugh-out-loud scene and one that somehow makes you disposed to be intrigued by every single character before you ever see a face.

When the lights go down for the final time, it’s clear Baker has carefully crafted a moving, involving and revealing character study. But both director William Roudebush and actressVicki Summers said in a recent interview that the script doesn’t wow on the page. “One, two, three” – how could it?There are conversations in some of the other many short scenes, but they are often quick snippets interrupted by someone walking into a room.

Most of what is learned and revealed about these five disparate people, and how they and their lives change (so“transform” …) over six weeks, happens during class assignments, whether they are acting out stories about each other or making sounds and jumping around the room. (The title comes from the name of an exercise, though it’s never said in the play.) So it is when an insightful director like Roudebush and actors as subtly skilled as the five here add the facial expressions, the body language and movement, the pauses, and the furtive watching of each other in silences that this play hits you in the gut.

There seem to be few plays that rely this much on the collaboration between director-actor interpretation and playwright intent, and when the two jell like this, a production sings. Cape Rep’s version is completely absorbing for nearly two hours without intermission, the production is often funny and often touching, but it isn’t easy to explain why any of that is true.

Marty (Summers) is a hippieish teacher who starts this class with high-energy, big-smile enthusiasm out of a firm belief that these abstract exercises will break down people’s self-consciousness and inhibitions and allow acting to happen. Her students are husband James (Cleo Zani), an insecure man who often doesn’t seem to want to be there; Schultz (Ian Ryan), a divorced carpenter still smarting from his loss;Theresa (Kira McCarthy), an open free spirit who has retreated toVermont after a lack of success in career and love; and teen Lauren (Cara Gerardi), whose goal is to succeed and get out of a troubled home and who wonders in frustration just when the class is going to start reading play scenes and really study acting.

Much of what we learn about these people comes from an exercise when one student has to interview another (offstage) then describe that person’s background and personality.They are interesting scenes that say as much about the person delivering the monologue as the student fully engaged in listening to his or her own story.

Nobody’s past or present is completely clear, but the actors all manage to convey enough personality and emotion in their characterizations that you feel as if you can project much of what has happened beyond the studio walls. And you care about all of them.

Ryan McGettigan’s set design and Herrick Goldman’s lighting make the studio so real that tiny ballerinas could take over the stage during daytime hours. And Roudebush slyly uses the space for more small character cues, down to how someone flips on the bank of fluorescent lights when he or she is the first to class.

Baker was described as “one of America’s most exciting new playwrights”when Cape CodTheatre Project in Falmouth debuted her “Nocturama” in 2008. Since then,“Circle Mirror Transformation” won the 2010 Obie Award for Best New American Play and Boston theaters collaborated last fall to stage three of her scripts as the “Shirley, Vermont” plays. “Circle Mirror” was one, and a second, “Body Awareness,” will be staged by Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater this fall. Based on this Cape Rep production of Baker’s work, I’ll be getting in line early at WHAT.

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