Up on the roof The Huntington unveils Carol Mulroney BY SALLY CRAGIN

What actor wouldn’t leap to perform in a classic play? Still, you get a frisson when you appear in a show whose title is preceded by "world premiere." That’s the treat for the cast of Carol Mulroney, a new comedy/drama by Stephen Belber, who co-wrote The Laramie Project and whose Tape was made into a film starring Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke. Director Lisa Peterson oversees the debut by the Huntington Theatre Company, which opened last Friday. (Official opening night is October 26.)

Noted New York actor Larry Pine has been bowled over. "When I first read the play I thought, my God, it’s a sit-com and heads into soap opera and right in the middle it becomes this crazy Ionesco or Beckett kind of play and then Chekhovian."

Carol Mulroney is a young woman with a troubled social life. She finds refuge only on her roof, where, she says, "I feel like the shock of the city and the traffic and the people — all that stuff that slams you in the face when you get too close — that it somehow becomes beautiful."

Yet as the play opens, we hear she’s fallen off that roof and died. What happened? "I wanted to create a character through the perspective of other characters," says Belber. His initial vision — a dead character explained by other characters — came after contemplating Matthew Shepard’s final moments "when he died on that open plain overlooking Laramie." Belber is intrigued by "distance and how everyone needs to find their private place, and a rooftop is the one place in the city where you can have quiet and distance."

Peterson notes, "What drives the play is the delicate nature of happiness and why it is that some people just can’t find it. Carol is not a depressed person. She has some things in her life that are troubling — her marriage is falling apart. But she is actually a huge-hearted, generous person. It’s been interesting and even exciting to see how theatrical the play is, and the echoes and connections. It’s woven more tightly than I thought, and the humor comes through also."

One ongoing theme is sales — Carol’s husband and her father are salesmen. Peterson: "Most of the people in Carol’s life are salesmen and everyone has solutions to what they can sense is her unhappiness, but they work so hard at pitching these solutions that they don’t sit and listen to her." And Belber: "I see sales as an alpha male profession, but it’s misrepresented often. I wanted to get a glimpse of the humanity behind it. We’re all inundated with sales in this culture."

CAROL MULRONEY | Wimberly Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St, Boston | Through November 20 | $15-$52 | BCA box office or 617.266.0800 or http://www.huntingtontheatre.org/