YOUNGSTOWN — After directing the musical “Rent” in the spring at massive Powers Auditorium, Matthew Mazuroski is doing a 180, directing the intimate, two-character comedy-drama “Grace & Glorie” at Hopewell Theatre.

He compared the role of the director on a show the size of “Rent” as being, “A traffic cop while still trying to tell the story. This is a real actors’ piece.”

“Grace & Glorie” opens Friday for a two-weekend run.

“Doing ‘Rent’ was just an amazing thing to be a part of, but it was enormous and stressful,” Mazuroski said. “It’s nice to go back to a piece that’s much more intimate and having these wonderful conversations with actors about who these characters are and what motivates them and really being able to devolve into that.”

Tom Ziegler’s play is the story of a 90-year-old woman named Grace who lives in rural Virginia and is nearing the end of her life. Gloria, who Grace quickly dubs Glorie, is an Ivy League-educated New Yorker working as a hospice volunteer after recently moving to Virginia.

The play was adapted into a television movie starring Gena Rowlands and Diane Lane, and it played Off-Broadway with Estelle Parsons and Lucie Arnaz.

“Not only is there a generation gap between the two characters, but one of them is college educated and from New York City, a partner in a big consulting firm, and now she finds herself almost a fish out of water in a different part of the country,” Mazuroski said. “It’s a deeply human piece filled with two wonderful characters and the contradictions that make us human.”

Grace is played by Molly Galano and Gloria is played by Joanna Andrei in the two-character show. Mazuroski and Galano have worked together several times before, but his only experience working with Andrei was “Rent,” where she served as choreographer and was a part of the ensemble.

“There’s a shorthand that develops between an actor and director (who’ve worked together before) and a sense of ease,” Mazuroski said. “Molly knows what to expect about the process, how we’ll work together collaboratively through the rehearsal process … Joanna and I have never worked in this kind of intimate, detailed way, and she’s been thrilled to have that process.”

One thing that allowed, which would be impossible with a large-cast musical like “Rent,” is what Mazuroski called “organic blocking.”

Instead of telling the actors when and where to move during the scene, the actors and the director work together in table readings to understand the characters and their motivations and then use that knowledge to guide their initial movements on stage.

The director then decides which movements to keep, which ones to change and to encourage those instinctual movements they might not have acted upon in rehearsal.

The play takes place in a “granny cabin,” a small home on Grace’s family’s property, and Mazuroski also wanted to create as realistic of a setting as possible for that blocking. He found some helpful supplies at Hopewell, which recently completed a portion of a renovation project that added a permanent ramp to the Mahoning Avenue theater to make it handicap accessible. The discarded 2 x 4s from the temporary ramp railing were used to create that cabin feel.

“I found an old, wood-burning stove,” Mazuroski said. “We have a refrigerator from 1946 on the set. All of these found pieces give it a real rustic feel, which is something I found really appealing. There’s nothing country cutesy about this set. These are people who are hardscrabble, and the surroundings are perfect for what the older character has lived in her entire life.”

He believes that attention to detail benefits the audience as well as the actors.

“Characters are the things they possess sometimes, and we understand who the characters are by the things they have around them,” Mazuroski said. “You see the passage of time in these items the way you see the passage of time in Grace. I think it’s great for actors to have as many authentic things to help them find the authentic character, and it helps immerse the audience in that willing suspension of disbelief.”