When the author is David Lindsay-Abaire, what you expect from a play called Rabbit Hole is Alice, not astrophysics. So this carefully calibrated, painfully funny domestic drama — in which slim comfort arrives in contemplation of the cosmos — comes as a surprise on the heels of the wildly whimsical Fuddy Meers, whose heroine awakes every day with amnesia, and Kimberly Akimbo, in which a teenager has a disease that causes her to age at the rate of ripe Stilton. In contrast to the wacky, dysfunctional fantasias on which South Boston native Lindsay-Abaire has made his name, Rabbit Hole (presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through December 3) is, for all its allusion to parallel universes, solidly set on planet Earth — Larchmont, to be precise. And it represents both a step forward and a step back for the playwright, whose imaginative earlier works are more theatrical but also more arbitrary. It’s as if Craig Lucas had gone to bed and awakened as Donald Margulies.

RABBIT HOLE: For all the allusion to parallel universes, David Lindsay-Abaire’s play is set solidly in Larchmont.

Rabbit Hole, Lindsay-Abaire’s first play to be presented on Broadway, was nominated for a 2006 Tony; the poignantly acted, nicely manicured Huntington staging marks its area premiere. At the center of the drama are affluent, intelligent suburban couple Howie and Becca, whose marriage is under strain in the wake of unspeakable loss, information about which is reeled out like fishing line. In the first scene, we meet Becca in her grand-scale kitchen crisply folding laundry as freewheeling sister Izzy recounts a bar fight. Inch by inch, Izzy’s tale of decking a woman who harassed her in a tavern turns into the revelation that Izzy is pregnant by her musician boyfriend. And inch by further inch, we learn that the tiny clothes Becca is boxing used to belong to her four-year-old son, who eight months earlier was killed by a teenage driver after chasing the family dog into the street.

The most wrenching thing for Becca and Howie, obviously, is the loss of their child. But second is the couple’s inability to comfort each other. Manhattan broker Howie clings to his memories like a lifeboat, waking up in the night to watch home movies in the dark, whereas Becca sets out to erase every painful reminder from the surface of their life. He is painfully, even lugubriously in touch with his sorrow; hers is spikier and easily turned to anger. They aren’t even sinking in the same ocean, and Becca’s relatives — the kooky sister whose egotism is a good-natured elephant in the room and a blunt mom whose attempt at advice turns into a tangential rant on the curse of the Kennedys — are no rescue team. Throw in the awkward, hurting teenager who ran over the kid and sends Emily Post–polite pleas for absolution and the bereaved couple have their hands full.

Unlike Lindsay-Abaire’s more idiosyncratic works, this one might easily be a film or television drama. But it is controlled and affecting, without an occasional wild hair out of place. If this is kitchen-sink stuff, it puts forward a deep but unsloppy sink with a pretty ruthless disposal. In fact, at the Huntington, in John Tillinger’s modulated production on James Noone’s comfortable, opulent set, it puts forward much of a pleasant suburban home, the kitchen rolling off to reveal the living room and, later, the dead boy’s room being packed up by an unflinching mother and grandmother, the latter at last dispensing some worthy counsel as she (who also lost a child) describes seasoned grief as less a vaporous sadness than a brick in your pocket.

The performances pull at your heartstrings while tickling your funny bone. In his jeans and perfectly ironed shirts, Jordan Lage’s Howie seems a guy who’s learned to wallow in anguish manfully; even his dictates are piquant. And Donna Bullock is a Becca bristly yet rigid enough that, when she does shatter in the geeky shadow of someone else’s son, the grief is a relief. Geneva Carr is adorable, from spiky locks to paisley tights, as unorthodox, childish Izzy. Troy Deutsch, his coiffure a sculpted bedhead, radiates awkwardness as the inadvertent killer who brings healing news of possible, happier universes. Best of all is Maureen Anderman, who infuses Becca’s scattered, foot-in-mouth mom with an off-kilter wisdom that suggests Lindsay-Abaire, newly wrapped in a towel of naturalism, shouldn’t throw out all the crazy bathwater.

TWELVE ANGRY MEN: Reginald Rose’s nag isn’t ready for the glue factory.

You’d think an old warhorse like Twelve Angry Men (at the Colonial Theatre through November 19) would be ready for the glue factory. But there’s life in Reginald Rose’s nag, whose stable is a hot Manhattan jury room circa 1954. Originally written for television, the Constitution-waving, human-life-respecting smackdown in Jury Room 2A, where an all-male jury is persuaded by one doubting member to consider what at first seems an open-and-shut case, achieved its greatest fame as the 1957 Sidney Lumet movie that starred Henry Fonda. No less a director than Harold Pinter revived the stage play in 1996. But the secret of Scott Ellis’s period-preserving 2004 Roundabout Theatre Company revival, which was nominated for a Tony and won the 2005 Drama Desk Award for outstanding revival, is that its accomplished cast of working actors makes Rose’s dozen cranky males seem like ordinary strangers brought together to exercise their civic duty. The touring version of the show does field entrance-applause-inducing television-series vets Richard Thomas and George Wendt. But who could be more all-American and ordinary than John-Boy Walton and Norm from Cheers?