“Do you have children, Noah?” she asks, her hand resting on the small of my back as mine was on hers. I shake my head no. “Do you want to?”

I see her lover Clay in the kitchen, going about his routine, oblivious to our presence. I turn my head back and meet her eyes: “Sometimes. But it’s a cruel world.”

Without a doubt the best part of this “job” is watching a group of artists hone their voice.

For the past few years I’ve been following the work of the Firelight Collective, the project of Stephanie Feury and Nathan Keyes, which calls upon the talents of the students and company members of the Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre in Larchmont. The group has specialized in transforming that space into a tight labyrinth for environmentally staged vignettes, usually on a theme of love found and lost.

So far the work has largely confined itself both to the home theatre of the group (with a slight detour during Hollywood Fringe) and to a kind of heightened poetic reality that brought groups of ten to fifteen through a processional more performative than what we usually think of as immersive. The staging was there and the veil of the fourth wall thinned, but never quite torn in the way it is when companies go all the way.

With Stars in the Night, the Collective takes an evolutionary step forward while retaining some of their signature vibe.

The piece can best be thought of as a short story collection anchored by a novella, starting as a series of thematically connected vignettes that play out in a processional in Hollywood leading up to the centerpiece in the Hollywood Hills.

An initial encounter with a slightly sloshed Man in The Orange Tie (Matt Brown), which folds the business of immersive (signing the necessary paperwork so that you won’t sue if you twist your ankle on a curb) into the frame of the piece. Brown’s Man feels like a refuge from the 1970’s, lost in drink and the fractured recollection of personal tragedy. Wearing two (metaphorical) hats means that Brown’s performance has to skate the line between Firelight Collective’s “other side of the veil” default mode and a conversational style. Especially if you have a talkative audience member in your trio, as I did on preview night. (No, it wasn’t me. It’s rarely me.)

Brown parried what questions he could deftly, but on preview night it was clear that some contingencies hadn’t been thought through yet. (Be nice now: that’s what previews are for.) Still: it was a precursor of what was to come: as the veil frayed a little more than what is usual with Firelight right from the start.

After a couple of blocks Brown deposited us at a boutique whose storefront had been flipped into a venue for the evening. There we encountered three more characters drawn from Firelight’s well of love, loss, and frustrated dreams. Flashes of conversational interaction took a backseat to the mode of passive observation through this sequence.

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At this point it felt as if we were being given pieces of a puzzle that would be resolved by the end of the night. Storylines that would get tied up by the time we reached our final destination. Although for a minute there I also wondered if the planned house had fallen through and we were going to be winding our way through the back of the store, or on to more destinations in the streets of Hollywood.

When the last vignette in the storefront was done we were taken to a waiting black SUV where three masks awaited us. My companions for the night weren’t used to ye olde secret location drive, but I buckled myself in and popped the sleep mask on without a word.It’s weird what becomes “normal” after a couple of years of doing this sort of thing.

There was some timing issues on preview night with our arrival that led to a breaking of the tonal spell (which had really worked itself up by that point) as we waited on the previous group to wrap up. Again, figuring out timing is one of the things previews are for and if anything it’s a testament to what came next. It would have been entirely possible for our trio to get disconnected from the heartbeat of the show while making idle talk with our driver.

The second half of Stars in the Night, all on its own, is an engrossing piece of site-responsive theatre. A stand-alone novella that hopefully will act as a lighthouse for future Firelight Collective productions.

The heart of the piece is a three-hander featuring David Haley, Allison Byrnes, and Deanna Noe in a story about two relationships at dramatic odds with each other. Offered up as a kind of memory within a memory — first of the house and then of Noe’s character — the Collective seamlessly slides between conversational and observational styles.

An initial chat over cocktails with the beguiling Noe sets up a frame that is beautifully shattered in the fly-on-the-wall scene work of Haley and Byrnes. That pair lay out a domestic scene with masterful restraint: letting the emotion simmer under the surface that manages to make the audience’s presence all the more voyeuristic in nature. Easily the most accomplished site-responsive dramatic work I’ve seen since Chalk Rep’s bravura staging of Fool For Love years ago.

Restraint is the tool of great cinematic actors, and Haley and Byrnes manage to ride that line beautifully. This is the great power of site-responsive acting when it is staged well: to draw the viewer in totally with the power of both the close-up nature of film and the embodied performance of theatre. The company hits that line flawlessly here.

That scene is punctuated by a coda from Noe that is both open and bold. Between her two scenes Noe is called upon to be the emotional anchor that grounds the play and the poetic kite which lifts it into the firmament. Not everyone can do both jobs, let alone in a single piece.

Nor can every company navigate between these two modes of theatre — the performative and the conversational — and weave them into a greater whole. One that explores a very particular part of the immersive spectrum. This second half of Stars in the Night shows that Firelight Collective can, a whispered promise of what is to come.

What we don’t get is any narrative resolution to the tales of the characters we first met. With the second act being so strong, it somewhat begs the question of what the initial processional is doing there in the first place aside from acting as queuing mechanism for the centerpiece. If anything those first encounters set up expectations that are unfulfilled, which cuts against the grain of the how well the second act works as a whole.

It really can’t be overstated how good that second act is.

The execution is solid across the board, but the novella cries out to either be developed as a feature-length piece or to inform one. This is a vein of work we need to have fully explored here in Los Angeles, one that could open so many more to the power of immersive theatre and it’s exciting to see another company ready for the challenge.

Stars in the Night plays through September 29th in Hollywood and the Hollywood Hills and is currently sold old. We can hope for a remount or a second extension.

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