Every once in a while, a new voice emerges to shake up the theater scene. Actress-turned-writer Kate Douglas announces herself with buzzworthy distinction with The Apiary, a taut, nearly perfect one-act dark comedy that opened Tuesday at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater. Douglas has a wonderful way of constructing scenes so that the exposition feels natural, and the turns in plotting come with a jolt that the characters on stage feel them along with the audience.

We begin with Cece, a young woman with an African inflection to her voice, who shares a story about the beehives that her family used to keep in their backyard and the tradition of “telling the bees” when important events occurred in the family — and the superstitious belief that the hive would meet with dire consequences if it was kept out of the ebbs and flows of life in the home. Nimene Wureh brings an appealing forthrightness to the character, one of several that she portrays over the course of the show.

Soon, we shift our focus to an underground laboratory — re-created in sterile detail by set designer Walt Spangler and lighting designer Amith Chandrashaker — where an all-female team is struggling to revive a bunch of ailing bee hives. The supervisor, a woman of serious by-the-book demeanor and sharp elbows, is played with alpha energy by Orange Is the New Black alum Taylor Schilling. Newcomer Zora (April Matthis, commanding without being overbearing) has just arrived, obviously overqualified with her PhD and her past experience as the head of a much bigger, better funded operation across town. And Pilar (Carmen M. Herlihy, a cuddly yes woman) is the sweet-natured worker bee, easily swayed when Zora suggests a set of clandestine experiments to boost the vitality of the bees.

The animating principle behind the experiment is a doozy — pushing The Apiary deep into pitch-dark comedy territory without ever losing its grounding in the real world. Even when dancer Stephanie Crousillat pops up in a glass-walled inner chamber as a queen bee, writhing and stretching with the possibilities of growth for her precious hive, we remain in the thrall of the remarkable world that Douglas has created.

Like a bee collecting nectar and pollen while barely grazing the surface of a flower, Douglas shows a similarly light touch as she addresses issues of female jealousy, office politics, the ethics of science, the global threat to honeybees, and the desperate measures people take to keep their jobs and livelihoods. “It can be hard when you make a living from something you love,” Pilar tells Zora at one point. “Did you know that the word amateur means ‘lover of’? So when you go from being a lover of something to a professional of something…. It can really suck the joy out of it.”

There is much joy to be found here, as well as deeper truths that emerge off-handedly, without Douglas or director Kate Whoriskey calling attention to them — and these bursts of meaning become all the more effective for that naturalistic approach. It helps that the cast plays off each other with a mutual respect that’s borne of their characters’ common goals. You might expect these coworkers to turn on each other at some point, for voices to be raised, and yet the verbal fireworks never come. Instead, we watch as the tension simmers with exquisite gradualness — delivering an ending that feels as satisfying as it is well-earned. The Apiary is a honey of a play, and one to be savored.