Live theatre is a gamble, but I was ready to take a chance when I purchased tickets to Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse. I knew nothing about the play. The title alone drew me in.

The setting is a small prison cell in Berlin, which makes the intimate playhouse theatre feel even more confined. The year is 1933. The action starts with Hannah Arendt (Mrs. Stern) getting escorted into her dark cell by the secret police for crimes unknown.

The play developed naturally enough with each actor (there are only three parts) admirably animating their roles. The part of Hannah was particularly well played by Ella Dershowitz, who portrays a believable 20-something philosopher. We see Arendt as scared and confused, but still the poised young woman who had studied at Heidelberg University and quickly made a name for herself as a brilliant thinker.

The drama is essentially a Socratic dialogue between Hannah and her Nazi interrogator. What unfolds is an intense interchange over 90 minutes that delves into Kant’s ideas of moral imagination and how one applies rules in a world where they can arbitrarily change. It also probes the nature of justice, Zionism, antisemitism, assimilation — let’s just say, it was a lot.

It played faster than you might imagine, and it has resonance today as we struggle with so many similar issues. On many levels, it’s profoundly disturbing.

If I’m being really honest, I might not have attended had someone told me that it was going to be a recitation of Immanual Kant’s philosophy as retold by Hannah Arendt. But seeing the play prompted me to think hard about our world and the part we play in it. Arendt is the same woman who in the early 1960s covered the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for the New Yorker. She talked about the “banality of evil” and the idea that Eichmann in a different time or society isn’t a monster; rather, he’s a boring guy who keeps trains moving on time. She challenged conventional thinking her whole life.

Great theatre does that, too. It makes us question our world a little more intensely. Art often makes us feel uncomfortable, but we tend to dismiss what makes us uneasy — not out of some moral high ground, but simply because it’s easier not to be challenged. After all, life is hard enough. Plus, public discourse takes real energy, and it requires community spaces (newspapers, theatres, town hall meetings). Unfortunately, many of these institutions (as well as our energy to be in them) are crumbling.

I’m glad that the play challenged me to confront hard ideas. I happily applauded the performers for prompting me to question myself: How much am I just witnessing what’s happening in our world and what more could I be doing? It also made me wonder how we rebuild sustainable ways of having open dialogue that leads to positive outcomes — and not for one side versus the other, but for all.

At a time when we seem to be watching theatre of absurd play out in real life, it feels right to think more deeply about how we shape a more humane world.

Maybe it starts with a night out at the theatre.