Prince Gomolvilas's Mysterious Skin opens as a UFO expert, against a dark, celestial backdrop, asks his television audience: "Have aliens contacted you?" It's a funny, uncomfortable moment – trouble hangs in the air, and it has nothing to do with the heavens. Mysterious Skin, adapted from Scott Heim's 1995 novel and receiving its world premiere at the New Conservatory Theatre Center, traces the trajectories of two young men from semirural Kansas who shared a childhood experience that shaped them in a way each is unable to control. Eighteen-year-old Brian (Taylor Valentine) knows something happened but has repressed a memory that, as it works its way to the surface, becomes an encounter with aliens. His childhood Little League teammate Neil (Joseph Parks) has a nose for another kind of green men – they wind up in his wallet, the spoils from his career hustling older men.

As Brian's and Neil's paths prepare to intersect once more, the plot only partially has to do with uncovering the incident, though Gomolvilas holds back the details, unlike Heim, as a way of building suspense. We detect the outlines of a pattern of child abuse. The real mystery, as the title suggests, concerns the seemingly unfathomable complexity of human desire introduced in the contrast between Neil and Brian. One has grown up fast, sexually precocious; the other remains emotionally corked, incapable of sexual intimacy. Both are living with the consequences of this defining childhood moment, but each experienced it very differently. As fundamentally as Brian blocks the memory, Neil – a willing victim, though still victimized – seeks endlessly to recreate it.

Haunted by a recurring dream and his inability to account for several hours of his life at age eight, Brian latches onto the UFO community, connecting with lonely and emotionally stunted 32-year-old Avalyn (Rebecca M. Fisher). She ends up driving away the deeply repressed Brian with her inept sexual advances but not before helping him decipher a dream image that points him in the direction of his old teammate Neil. Neil, meanwhile, has relocated to New York City with his kooky but concerned best friend, Wendy (Megan Towle).

Gomolvilas does an impressive job of turning Heim's provocative story into an intriguing piece of theater. Through a combination of direct address and frequent flashback sequences – the latter brought on in lightning-quick transitions signaled by a thunderclap of sound whose Hard Copy quality playfully carries over the TV conceit from the opening sequence – the intertwined story lines and background flow, for the most part, effortlessly. Good chemistry and solid acting from a committed cast, under Arturo Catricala's ever sharp and sportive direction, convey the full range of humor, pain, and compassion in the often excellent dialogue. Occasionally the story feels a bit thin – the somewhat abbreviated relationship between Neil and Wendy, for example – but Towle's slightly spastic energy works well opposite Parks's bon vivant (she and Rich Dymer do efficient work in a number of smaller roles).