ACT’s world premiere production of Joseph Dougherty’s thrilling new play, Chester Bailey, is a blessing for the Bay Area, which hosts so few major debuts, at least of this quality. This relatively straightforward two-hander about the lies we tell ourselves to reconcile our inner worlds with uncomfortable reality is a compelling 90 minutes that draws you in from its first moments and never lets go until its final, uplifting (in a heart-rending sort of way) resolution.

The titular character is a young New Jersey-ite whose parents use their small influence to secure a job for their son at the local shipyard. This war-supportive duty means Chester (Dan Clegg) can spend his days riveting inside the hulls of ships instead of going into battle. Every evening, instead of k-rations, Chester gets mom’s home cooking. But when he is horribly injured on the job, he retreats into an unshakeable delusion.

Enter Dr. Cotton (David Straithairn), who is tasked with finding a way to bring Chester back to reality. Straithairn gives a marvelously natural and easy-flowing performance as a psychiatrist with very real issues of his own that he’s not facing up to. Straithairn makes his work on stage seem effortless; we never get the sense of him as an actor practicing a craft, only of a character struggling with very human challenges and desires. Clegg plays the deluded Bailey with equal verisimilitude. His character (thanks to Dougherty’s brilliant script) makes us believe that a man can create an inner world that feels so true to him that what is actual reality can find no chink in Chester Bailey’s self-wrought armor.

Chester Bailey put me in mind of the wonderful mini-series by Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective, in which a man suffering from debilitating psoriasis retreats into a fantasy world.

Without spoiling the ending for you, I'll just say that sometimes delusion is the only cure for the perils of reality.