CORVALLIS - Willamette Stage Company's production of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Auburn's "Skyscraper" begins with an entirely ordinary scene that nonetheless takes on a surreal light.

Six strangers are scrambling about their daily lives when they literally bump into each other on the streets of Chicago. Well, four of them do, and the other two merely share a glance as if understanding on some subconscious level that they're bound to meet again.

All six are bound to meet again on the roof of a building slated for demolition. Set in 1997, the building - and the play - look back over the past century as if not entirely sure of what it all means, even as it's sure it means something that might soon be lost forever.

Two of those strangers, Louis (Calvin Ward) and Vivian (Stacy Bostrum) meet shortly after the street vignette on the roof in question, sharing what seems to be a nonsensical exchange made up of confused timeframes, muddled memories and half-understood gestures. Calvin is an old man with a failing mind, and Vivian dances just out of reach along the roof of the building like a memory destined to be lost.

At a nearby restaurant, a lawyer named Jane (Shelley Moon) consults with her client, Jessica (Billi Veber), about an accident she suffered while exploring a building set for demolition the following day. Jessica is a photographer and preservationist, doing her damnedest to save the past from the "progress" of the future. She feels more comfortable with cold, dead architecture than with the present world of humans she seeks to avoid.

Jane's an insecure sex fiend who's taken 19 lovers in less than three months. Her desperate need for affection leads her to an encounter with Joseph (Paul Huppert) on the roof of a nearby building.

Joseph has just been fired by his brother Raymond (Charles Prince), the workaholic control freak in charge of the company set to tear down the building. He's forced to see it one last time when he learns that emergency vehicles have surrounded the building because of a possible jumper on the roof.

The first act comes full circle, with Vivian and Louis speaking of the past on the roof. She is intent on killing herself, and he is intent on stopping her. A photo of her is called into question, a photo that becomes a symbol of the fragile, fleeting nature of life.

To tell you more of the story of the play would be to shatter the delicate mysteries that are the sturdy frame of the story. Who are Louis and Vivian, and how will their characters' lives intersect with those of the other four? Why must Vivian kill herself and how is Louis' fate linked with hers?

While these questions will surely propel the audience through the production, the interior or soul of the play are the nuances of history and architecture, the substance of memory and the perspective it's viewed from.

Through Jessica and Joseph's obsessive celebration of the building, it becomes a character in and of itself, a character that in a subtle way resembles the Overlook Hotel in "The Shining," with its stores of psychic energy.

Of course, there are no creepy twins or elevators bursting with blood here; only a building, a powerful and lasting symbol of the past. Its archaic, baroque construction and fine dust of human experience speaks to a rapidly expiring perspective that will never come again. Like Louis, its memory is doomed to failure.

After Willamette Stage Company's premiere with "My Fair Lady," director Robert Hirsh followed it up with "A Walk in the Woods," a black comedy about communication, war and the dooming of humanity to fail at both. Now he brings us "Skyscraper," a philosophical mystery about a beloved building destined for oblivion. It's certainly not a far stretch to see echoes of the recent Whiteside Theater debate in the play's story, and watching it makes you wonder what facet of our lives Hirsh will train our minds upon next.

As the talented and perfectly cast Ward says as Louis, "I get fragments that I can't put in the proper sequence." Half of the fun of "Skyscraper" is trying to put the lives and memories of these people together like puzzle pieces, and the other half is in enjoying the riddle for its own structural nuances.

Check It Out

What: Willamette Stage Company's production of David Auburn's 'Skyscraper'

Where: Corvallis High School's Black Box Theater

When: 8 p.m. Feb. 22, 28, 29 and March 1; and at 2:30 p.m. Feb. 23, 24 and March 2

Cost: $15 for adults and $12 for students and seniors

Tickets: Available online at www.willamettestage.org

Content note: Play contains some mature language and themes. Might not be suitable for younger viewers.