“Bust,” the new genre-hopping play making its world premiere at the Alliance Theatre, starts off as grounded as a lightning rod.

It’s present day Huntsville, Alabama, and a Black couple is sitting on their porch in the evening, watching a neighbor arrive home, when he is stopped outside his house by the police. So far, so familiar.

But then playwright Zora Howard yanks the tablecloth and sends her characters somewhere unforeseen, a place that everyone associated with the play desperately wants not to spoil. Instead of plot points, they talk about surrealism and “different realms” and “an alternative universe.”

“The play addresses America’s oldest problem in an absolutely new way,” says Christopher Moses, co-artistic director for the Alliance. “Just when you suspect you know where the story is headed, Zora introduces a new element. It’s as impossible to classify as it is to forget.”

Credit: Jason Zeren

Credit: Jason Zeren

“‘Bust’ wants to be a big play. It wants to stretch out and be on multiple realms,” says Howard. “It’s not some ‘little black box play,’ no offense, because I write those, too. So literally it needs something like the Coca-Cola Alliance Stage.”

The production includes a special effects coordinator for its different realms.

“‘Bust’ is really a meditation on rage,” says Howard, whose mother named her after Zora Neale Hurston. “In 2013, I wrote a poem called ‘Rage’ specifically in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin, and to the not-guilty verdict that the jury came to. I felt a lot of rage in that moment, and that poem was an attempt to ride through that so it did not consume me. ‘Bust’ is an extension of that.”

Figuring out what to do with that rage drives “Bust.”

“What can we do with our rage that might be constructive rather than destructive?” says Howard. “How do we not die at the hands of the rage that consumes us? How do Black people navigate, hold, carry all of the things that we are, reconcile, reckon with what we have to do in order to be with our rage and still survive in this country?”

Howard’s first play, “Stew,” which also dealt with themes of racism and violence, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2021.

As the “Say Their Names” list grew (George Floyd, Breonna Taylor), Howard worked on “Bust.” Acclaimed director Lileana Blain-Cruz came on board to help shape the project, even before Howard had finished the play, and theatrical companies and investors started paying attention.

Credit: Alliance Theatre

At that point “Bust” was subtitled “An Afrocurrentist Play,” a term coined by a friend of Howard’s, playing off “Afrofuturism.”

Afrofuturism is a loose heading for Black-centric art, fiction and culture that the critic Ingrid LaFleur called “a way of imagining possible futures through a Black cultural lens.” Frequently but not always science-fiction, Afrofuturism includes, among many examples, the Marvel comic book and movie “Black Panther,” the mother ship mythology of Parliament / Funkadelic, the novels of Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany.

“In Afrofuturism, you think about the possibilities that are imagined for Black peoples in the future,” explains director Blain-Cruz. “Zora challenges us to imagine it happening in the present with the actors, with the people living on stage and also with these kind of surreal explosions into something new.”

Blain-Cruz has experience with theater that is daring and hard-to-pin-down. Although specializing more often in new plays, she drew raves for her 2022 direction of the Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” the 1942 allegorical time-skipping play in which humans share the stage with dinosaurs. Montana Levi Blanco, the show’s costume designer, called Blain-Cruz “a master of curating chaos.”

Howard lists an eclectic bunch of artists whose work influenced “Bust,” not all of whom are necessarily Afrofuturists, including musicians Sun Ra and Miles Davis and writers James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Audre Lorde and Gwendolyn Brooks.

“All those artists speak to having the agency to move yourself where you want to be and not having that movement surveilled, not having that movement policed,” she says.

“I think all of those artists also speak to transcendence and what it means to transcend the most immediate reality that you face day to day, and how that’s a spiritual thing, an intellectual thing, a psychological thing. This play might suggest that it is also a physical thing.”

In 2020, during the pandemic, the Cape Cod Theater Project staged a Zoom table reading of “Bust”; some of the actors have followed their roles to the Alliance premiere.

Actors with previous Alliance credits include Victoria Omoregie, Caitlin Hargraves and Keith Randolph Smith; other key roles are played by Cecil Blutcher, Renika Williams Blutcher and Caroline Stefanie Clay.

The Alliance is coproducing the play with the Goodman Theatre in Chicago; after it closes in Atlanta it runs for a month with the same cast at the Goodman.

“It’s such a rare experience to read a play and find yourself equal parts reflective, surprised and thoroughly entertained,” says Moses. “I was laughing one moment, stunned and crying the next. Before we even finished reading the play, we knew unequivocally that we had to produce it here in Atlanta.”

“There’s a kind of beauty in it, landing in this city,” says Blain-Cruz. “As a play that’s set in the South, getting to do it in the South and having it premiere in the South feels really significant.”

With so much mystery and spoiler avoidance, what does Howard hope Atlanta audiences will take away from “Bust”?

“The only thing I can ask for is that there is movement,” she says. “In all my plays, I hope that there’s movement, that something has changed from when you walk in to when you walk out. But with ‘Bust,’ that you are moved in a real way, and that that movement extends beyond just the moments when you’re reflecting on the play. Specifically, Black people in this city, imagining a future occupying that space in the current moment.”