To watch “Time Stands Still’’ just days after the death of Anthony Shadid is a fraught experience. Shadid, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and a former Globe reporter, died last week at 43 in Syria, apparently of an asthma attack.
He had made his way across the border to report on the Syrian resistance. It was the latest of many times Shadid had put himself in harm’s way in the Middle East because he believed it was vital to tell the human stories of that tormented region. Plenty of other journalists have done the same, albeit few with his acuity of insight.
The urgent need to bear witness, and the toll that can exact, lie at the heart of Donald Margulies’s “Time Stands Still,’’ now at the Lyric Stage Company under the subtle and probing direction of Scott Edmiston.
Margulies’s deceptively small-scale drama explores the fissures that open within the relationship of two journalists who’ve been on assignment covering the Iraq war. As they settle back in at their Brooklyn loft, they try to cope with the wounds they sustained - some visible, some not.
This is a play whose delicate balance would be disrupted by the slightest bit of heroic posturing. There is none. The Lyric’s production shares with the play’s protagonists an unwillingness to settle for easy answers to the challenging moral questions they confront as the past bleeds into the present.
Sarah Goodwin (Laura Latreille), a magazine photographer, is on the mend, having barely survived a roadside bomb that knocked her into a coma and killed the Iraqi interpreter who was with her. Now, she wears a brace on one leg and needs a crutch to get around. One of her arms is in a sling. Her face is a welter of scars and clenched anger.
Latreille commands our attention even when Sarah isn’t speaking; she imparts a restlessness to Sarah’s movements, constrained as they are, and even to her stillness. Near-death experience or not, Sarah can’t wait to get her camera back in her hands and get back to work, back to where the action is. A freeze-frame effect, created by lighting designer Karen Perlow and sound designer Dewey Dellay, reinforces this impression: Sarah sees all of life as a potential picture in the making.
In the case of freelance reporter James Dodd (Barlow Adamson), the residual damage from the war is beneath the surface, concealed, for a while at least, by his bonhomie and his solicitude for Sarah. But the trauma he experienced has changed him in ways that are loaded with implications for their relationship.
Sarah and James are visited in their loft by Richard Erlich (Jeremiah Kissel), a longtime friend who is the photo editor at the magazine, and his new girlfriend, Mandy Bloom (Erica Spyres), a bubbly event planner three decades Richard’s junior.
The performances by all four cast members are so firmly anchored in character that the play’s larger themes - such as the tension in the struggling news business between the obligation to report on suffering in faraway places and the urge to drive up circulation with fluffy celebrity pieces - emerge naturally from their exchanges, rather than seeming like set pieces or speeches.
Although Sarah caustically dismisses Mandy as a “lightweight’’ at first, it is the artless newcomer who forces the others to confront the ethical implications of what they do for a living. Looking at a photo Sarah took of an Iraqi mother crying over her dying child, Richard murmurs, “Great shot,’’ in a tone of professional appraisal, but Mandy, the non-journalist, responds with a torrent of raw emotion. Even after Sarah points out that rescue workers were on the scene, Mandy demands to know how she could possibly have taken that picture rather than try to help.
Replies Sarah: “I was helping them . . . By gathering evidence. To show the world. If it weren’t for people like me . . . the ones with the cameras . . . Who would know? Who would care?’’
Powerful words, but not the last word. Sarah and James have plenty more to wrestle with, professionally and personally, before the play reaches its quietly moving end. At that point, and at several other points along the way, this fine production is suffused with an awareness that only in the click of a camera’s shutter does time ever stand still.
Try BostonGlobe.com today and get two weeks FREE. Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.