Stories of successful young creators have been a staple of literature and theater for years, but the genre gets a fresh twist in Rachel Bonds’s compelling new drama Jonah, which opened Thursday at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre. At its center is an up-and-coming writer named Ana, brilliantly played by Gabby Beans, whom we first meet as a corn-rowed high schooler flirting with a gawky geek named Jonah (Hagan Oliveras, perfectly capturing both the precocity and awkwardness of adolescence). We follow Ana through college, and then later to a rural writer’s conference after she’s successfully published her first book.

Ana’s gift for storytelling emerges early on, as she confides in Jonah some of her romantic fantasies — elaborate, Harlequin-worthy yarns about camp counselors and work colleagues who go to great lengths to confess their undying for love for her. While Jonah remains hormonally fixated on the physical act of love-making, Ana is fixated on the long wind-up before the point that, in her words, “then I guess we have sex.” Climax is more like the punctuation at the end of a sentence whose central point is the sense of connection that is forged between two people.

That becomes clearer when we meet Ana’s slightly older stepbrother, Danny (Samuel Henry Levine), who emerges as both a protector (from his unseen but clearly abusive dad) as well as a tormentor. He has an unhealthy fixation on Ana, and a volatile temper, that neither of them seem to have words to explain or mediate. It’s only later, in her 30s, when she attends that writer’s colony and meets an ardent ex-Mormon (John Dzrojeski, projecting chipper Eagle Scout energy), that Ana seems prepared to confront her past — and how best to navigate a path forward.

Like her lead character, Bonds is interested in the stories that we tell, both to ourselves and to the outside world, in the midst of trauma too upsetting to fully process in the moment. Our willingness to recast events — death, rejection, assault — in ways that allow us to go on day to day. She also expands her thematic focus to explore modern approaches to religion: Ana describes herself as a former Catholic, while Dzorjeski’s Steven broke himself from the Mormon faith during his adolescence. Both seem drawn to the idea of a higher power, something larger than themselves, while rejecting organized faiths that seem to center on shaming the body and bodily acts.

Beans is astonishing as Ana, aging a couple decades over the course of the play without the use of external aids like makeup. She convincingly grounds us in the moment-to-moment reality of her character. Under the fluid direction of Danya Taymor, the rest of the cast perfectly capture the play’s more fantastical elements while making their almost archetypal characters convincingly real. Jonah is a well-structured puzzle-box of a play, a portrait of the artist as a young woman — and a preternatural survivor.