Although it won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for drama, "The Rabbit Hole" resonates as a serviceable, "little" play. It has a conventional, realistic living-room setting, an uncomplicated plot line and a central issue — a husband and wife struggling to deal with the accidental death of their young son.

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire provides no surprises, no twists in character or action, and a resolution that — although not tidy — is at least hopeful. It plays rather like a domestic melodrama made for television and aired on that touchy-feely channel.

So the real challenge is in deciphering what — if anything — makes it special.

It does offer excellent roles and the production directed by Joyce Maltby at Hawai'i Pacific University is well cast and very well executed.

Leslie Duval and Jim Aina play the central couple — educated, articulate, sensitive people who skirt around their son's death as if it were that proverbial "elephant in the room" that dominates the space, but which no one will address directly. They bicker over his clothes, his dog and his video tape. They approach and back away from fault-finding, responsibility and guilt. The foundation of their marriage teeters in the balance.

Amid those protracted drawing-room conversations, we are more easily drawn to the peripheral roles that are not so heavily laden with parental angst. The wife's sister (Clara Dalzell) is a mildly ditzy young woman who finds herself unaccountably pregnant by an unseen boyfriend. Their mother (Virginia Jones) is delightfully self-centered and uncomfortably forthright.

But clearly, the play is about dealing with grief. Yet there is hope as the childless couple begins to reconnect.