Sola Mabunda’s “Where the Floor Softens” is structurally unusual in a way that is either going to be its defining strength or its central problem, and the Lighthouse Workshop’s decision to attach director Claudine Osei to the world premiere suggests they understand which risk they are taking.

The play runs October 8 through November 2 at the Lighthouse Workshop’s 85-seat main stage and braids two timelines without marking the transition between them: Adisa, played by Patience Ademi, moves between present-tense scenes of her mother’s advancing dementia and recursive past scenes of the same kitchen, the same arguments, the same silences, but with small shifts that accumulate rather than resolve. It is the kind of formal structure that owes a clear debt to Caryl Churchill, specifically the temporal fragmentation of “Fen” and the overlapping time of “Top Girls,” but Mabunda is doing something distinct with it. Churchill uses rupture to disorient. Mabunda uses repetition to map. The question is whether the distinction holds over ninety minutes.

Osei, whose last production at the Meridian Stage was a spare and formally rigorous staging of a new two-hander about grief and property law, is exactly the kind of director who makes this bet intelligible. She is not a director who flinches from stillness or from scenes that withhold conventional release. That matters here, because “Where the Floor Softens” apparently has no cathartic third act in the traditional sense; the structure requires a director who can trust the audience to do the work.

The cast includes Patience Ademi as Adisa, Kiran Mehta as her husband Brendan, Dayo Afolabi as the mother Efua, and Lena Schiffer in the rotating role of a social worker who appears in every timeline but is played differently each time, which is a formal choice I am watching with some attention. Used well, the rotating-character device reveals how institutional systems read the same family differently depending on context. Used poorly, it reads as a staging gimmick.

Mabunda is a 2025 recipient of the Scaffold Playwrights Commission, a $10,000 award given annually to an emerging writer working in structural or formal innovation. That commission was what gave the play its current shape; an earlier draft, which circulated among downtown readers last year, had a more conventional through-line and was considerably less interesting. The revision history here is actually the story. Mabunda made the harder choice, and the result is a play that deserves the serious production it appears to be getting.

The limitation I keep coming back to is scope. Mabunda is asking a lot of a structure that depends entirely on the audience’s willingness to sit with ambiguity across four distinct scenes that rhyme rather than progress. This works in Churchill because Churchill’s language is relentlessly active even when the plot is not. Whether Mabunda’s dialogue has that same kinetic quality is something I cannot assess from the script alone; it is the thing the production will prove or not.

Put it in your calendar early, not because it is guaranteed to succeed but because Mabunda is a playwright working in a tradition worth paying attention to, with a director who knows what the material requires, and because if the structure holds, you will want to have been in the room.

“Where the Floor Softens” runs October 8 through November 2 at the Lighthouse Workshop, 74 Commerce Street. Tickets are on sale now.