Omar (Antony Makhlouf) is a seventeen year old in freefall. His family situation has deteriorated; he’s sleeping under a bridge; he’s made fast friends with a sex worker named Ahmed (Mansoor Noor) who shares marks with Omar when they need the money; and Omar is running on rage and fumes alone. Making a good life is hard enough for a first-generation Lebanese Muslim Australian, and things keep getting worse.

Enter Dawn (Maggie Blinco), a white, ferocious eighty year old woman who is assigned to take Omar in off the streets and into her home as a foster carer. He’s furious at all times to protect his tender heart; she’s patient but steely. Slowly, they reveal themselves to each other.

Omar and Dawn is James Elazzi’s first play, and it exists in the coiled tension between suffering and relief. Why wouldn’t Omar maintain his rage when even a chance to train with Dawn’s brother Darren (Lex Marinos), a mechanic like Omar’s dad, comes with casual racism against Lebanese Australians? Why wouldn’t Omar assume that Dawn can’t relate to Ahmed’s story, cast out by his family for being gay, unable to bring himself to come in from the cold? There is a chasm between Omar and Dawn that slowly fills with glasses of fanta and late night chats and moments of both generosity and misunderstanding.

Elazzi writes with sensitivity but without sentimentality; there are sharp edges on this play and it is all the better for it. Omar and Ahmed sound like real young people; Darren and Dawn are finely observed and complicated. Each character is given room to be complex, which helps us sink into their emotional reality, and because this is a play driven on feeling, there were tears streaking plenty of faces on opening night. The shape of the play and how it shares plot information feels like a first play – you know roughly where this wave will take you from the beginning – but it’s a wave in which you want to be immersed.

Director Dino Dimitriadis, who finds the beauty of broken and striving humanity in its darkest places, has coaxed strong relationships out of his quartet of actors. Blinco anchors the piece as Dawn – even her stillness has depth – and she carries the heart of the play in her long hair and open hands. And if she is the heart then Noor is the play’s soul as Ahmed – always onstage, always curled up in the cold; never forgotten; his homelessness isn’t something you can ignore.

Makhlouf has to carry a great deal of anger and despair as Omar, which is a tall order for any young actor, but in the moments that matter most he rises to the occasion. Marinos provides gruff support as Darren, and while his own emotional journey isn’t as well integrated into the story as the other three characters, he’s an essential element of the work.

On a gravel-lined stage that brings the world into Dawn’s modest kitchen (designed by Aleisa Jelbart and lit with care by Benjamin Brockman), it’s near impossible to forget that we easily dismiss and diminish Australia’s most vulnerable: people experiencing homelessness, sex workers, queer people of colour, and elderly people – especially women. Omar and Dawn puts it all front and centre, transforming what people often reduce to concepts back into people – and people you’ll fall in love with. This is a play that reaches a hand offstage and takes care of its neighbours. It’ll make you want to take care of your neighbours, too.