YOUNGSTOWN — Despite the title, there is no bear in Hopewell Theatre’s “Exit, Pursued by a Bear.”

There is a beast, though, an abusive husband who is about to get his comeuppance from his wife, her gay best friend and a stripper / aspiring actor.

That’s the wild, darkly funny premise of Lauren Gunderson’s play, which opened Friday at Hopewell Theatre for a two-weekend run. Two strong performances by Celena Coven and Nick Mulichak as the wife and husband keep the show anchored in the harsh reality of their relationship even as the story spirals in increasingly loony directions.

There are at least two things Nan Carter (Coven) loves more than her husband — animals and Jimmy Carter, who she wishes had been her father and who she quotes frequently. Her husband Kyle is physically and emotionally abusive, probably an alcoholic and an illegal hunter (although he equates killing the deer who venture onto their property in rural Georgia to lawn maintenance).

For his multitudes of sins, Nan duct tapes him to a chair, plans to surround him with honey and deer meat and let the local bears maul his bound body. But first, she plans to act out the many reasons why she’s leaving him with the help of stripper Sweetheart / Peaches (Sydney Campbell) and her friend and emotional cheerleader Simon (Bobby Brown Jr.), who dresses the part by arriving in a cheerleading outfit.

As ridiculous as this all sounds, Coven never lets the audience forget the anguish that fuels her rage. It’s a tightrope of a role that she skillfully navigates.

Mulichak is just as good. He’s hilariously expressive when limited to showing his terror with just his eyes and his grunts. And in the scenes where he encourages Nan to reenact moments from their courtship in order to persuade her to stop this craziness, the audience can see his manipulative power, how he first seduced her and why she stayed around as long as she did.

Brown embraces the extremes of the storytelling in his portrayal of Simon. The problem is he comes out so hot from his entrance that there’s no room for the character to build. He ends up shouting way too much of his dialogue.

The only problem I had with Campbell’s performance is either a flaw in the script or director Rosalyn Blystone’s staging. The play establishes early on that Sweetheart’s acting talents are limited (comically so) and her dreams of becoming an actor in California are folly. Campbell is convincing as a bad actor, which is harder than it seems.

But later in the play, she portrays Nan revealing the physical abuse she’s suffered. Her performance is nuanced and heart wrenching, far beyond the abilities of the woman at the beginning of the play complaining that her community theater didn’t cast her as Hamlet.

The later scene needs to have the dramatic impact it does, so I think the problem lies in the script. If it doesn’t, it’s a rare misstep by Blystone, who navigates the tonal shifts in Gunderson’s play capably and weaves the action around the technical demands of the show (the title is a stage direction from Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” and one of the conceits of the play is the stage directions are projected on a screen above the actors). Credit also goes to David Leach for the digital effects.

It all plays out on a very realistic set designed by Blystone. It’s challenging because Kyle needs to get out of the chair and get back in it multiple times during the play’s 75-minute running time, but they should have used more duct tape to bind Kyle to the chair. It’s not believable that so little tape attached to a fabric chair could keep him in place. More importantly, more tape also would have been funnier.

If you go …

WHAT: “Exit, Pursued by a Bear”

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday

WHERE: Hopewell Theatre, 702 Mahoning Ave., Youngstown

HOW MUCH: $15 for adults and $12 for students and senior citizens. Tickets are available online at hopewelltheatre.org. For more information, call 330-746-5455.