GIVEN Hollywood’s current vampire obsession, thanks to the Twilight franchise and television’s True Blood, the title Blood: A Comedy might conjure up visions of the living dead. On the contrary, David Lee White’s play has absolutely nothing to do with vampires or gore and everything to do with family.

   ”A play called ‘Family: A Comedy’ might sound like an episode of ‘One Day at a Time,’” explains Mr. White, laughing.

   Associate Artistic Director of Passage Theatre, Mr. White has teamed up with Resident Director Adam Immerwahr to premiere Blood at the Mill Hill Playhouse in Trenton Nov. 5 through 22. The irreverent comedy about faith, science, family and hot pepper cheese cubes will feature Passage’s Artistic Director June Ballinger in the lead role of Jacqueline Stanzi. Rounding out the cast are Broadway veteran and Princeton resident Chris Coucill, Barrymore Award-winning actress Charlotte Northeast, Damon Bonetti and Sean Roach.

   ”It’s been a great joy to work on a play this entertaining, this thought provoking and this wildly, implausibly, comically brilliant,” Mr. Immerwahr says.

   The action centers on Jacqueline, an eccentric lifelong atheist and college professor who has just lost her tenure for trying to teach intelligent design in a science class. Struggling with confusion and memory loss, Jacqueline decides to start asking questions about faith while her mind still allows her to do so. “She has put fact and logic before fantasy all her life,” Ms. Ballinger says. “Now, in her 60s, she’s questioning this all of a sudden.”

   For the actress, the most intriguing aspect of her character is how Jacqueline takes a pragmatic and sometimes scientific approach to figure out where God fits in, in the greater scheme of things. “It’s fascinating as an actor who does have faith to play someone who doesn’t and is trying to sort out if there is something to have faith in,” Ms. Ballinger says.

   During her journey of self-discovery, Jacqueline decides that the best way to fix her highly dysfunctional family is to have a group confessional, during which she plans to reveal a big secret. The family includes her son, a vagabond who only comes home when he needs money for his questionable business ventures, and a daughter who has never left. On the eve of the daughter’s wedding, Jacqueline invites her future son-in-law, who is a born-again Christian, and his father to join them for dinner. Little do they know she has an agenda.

   Jacqueline, who picked up the wrong bag at the grocery store, takes advantage of the mix-up by devising a game — her guests will take turns telling secrets and receive cheese cubes as a reward. Not everyone wants to play along, however, and things start to spin out of control.

   Mr. White started writing the play around the time of the presidential election last year. Originally from Missouri, Mr. White began to connect with old friends on Facebook. It never occurred to Mr. White, a fairly liberal person, that the people he grew up with wouldn’t grow up to be liberal too. “That wasn’t the case. I was openly challenged — people were accusing me of turning my back on the community I grew up with,” he recalls. Instead of having a debate on Facebook regarding political divisions along religious lines, Mr. White decided to write a play about spiritual conflict.

   The play echoes the different religious organizations Mr. White was exposed to growing up in the Midwest. He remembers how at some of the churches his friends went to, Jack Chick comic books lined the pews. Mr. Chick’s controversial publications promote Protestant evangelism from a fundamentalist point of view, and target other beliefs and cultures in a negative light. Mr. White, whose father was a minister, found other churches to be strange and borderline abusive.

   What could have been a very cynical work ultimately became a comedy. “It would have been really easy to write a play that mocks religion and mocks spirituality, that’s certainly en vogue right now,” Mr. White says. “I think it started out that way, but the more I wrote, the more I realized it wasn’t a rich enough palette. It felt a little arrogant.”

   Passage did a three-performance workshop of Blood last year and received helpful constructive feedback from the audience. Mr. White wrote a new draft for a reading in New York at Ensemble Studio Theater and did more rewrites thereafter over the summer, leading up to the premiere.

   This marks the first full play at Passage that works on a residence-based theater company model. Ms. Ballinger is curious to see how this will impact Passage audiences, by having actors only from the Delaware Valley region perform the roles. It’s also the first time Ms. Ballinger has acted in a full-length play in her 13 or 14 years with the company.

   ”I always made the decision not to put myself on stage or direct because it took all my brain cells to get the theater up and running again,” she says. Now with an excellent staff in place, she and Mr. White have the luxury to step away from producing and artistic directing to act in or direct the company’s plays. The pair is also writing a work together for a spring show.

   To create the world of Blood, Mr. Immerwahr took a literal approach with realistic dining and living rooms created on stage. “The director has an obligation, if it’s the first time a play is ever being staged, to bring the playwright’s words to life in the purist, simplest way without getting in the way to much,” Mr. Immerwahr says. “In my mind, new plays afford directorial precision, and honing, but not necessarily conceptual vision.”

   Mr. Immerwahr, who is also producing associate at McCarter Theatre, says conceptualizing would take away from the comedy and he would rather audiences hear the play told truthfully. His primary goal was to work with the actors and help bring their words and the crazy, insane things their characters experience to life.

   Mr. White’s collaborations with Mr. Immerwahr at Passage include last year’s Random Horrible Thoughts About Love and his play Backfire, which was included in last year’s Play Lab production, The Gallery Plays. “Working with him is some of the most comfortable collaboration I do,” Mr. Immerwahr says. “Beside being disastrously funny, he’s also got an incredibly good theatrical savvy and knows how to create moments that really land for an audience.”

   Since Mr. White trained in improvisation and has studied the works of modern theater comic writers like Christopher Durang and old film comics like the Marx Brothers, Mr. Immerwahr finds his humor to be extremely precise. “He pulls the rug out from under you at exactly the right moment,” Mr. Immerwahr says, “so something can hit you in the heart.”

Blood: A Comedy, presented by Passage Theatre, will be on stage at Mill Hill Playhouse, Front and Montgomery streets, Trenton, Nov. 3-22. Performances: Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 3 p.m. Tickets cost $25-$30. 609-392-0766; passagetheatre.org