A biblical story gets a contemporary spin in “Searching for Eden: The Diary of Adam and Eve,” which Selah Dessert Theater opens tonight for a three-weekend run.

Playwright James Still drew inspiration from “Extracts from the Diary of Adam” and “Eve’s Diary” by humorist Mark Twain, who was inspired by the story of the first couple, Adam and Eve.

While those two stories inform the first act, the second act imagines the couple in middle age and in the present as they return to Eden, which has been transformed into a resort called E.

“The second act is directly connected to a comment Eve makes in the Twain stories about Eden, about someday Eden being a resort,” director Mary Ruth Lynn said. “It’s just one little comment she makes in the scheme of things and that sat in his brain when he read the stories and said, ‘What would happen if, in the future, Eden was a resort,’ so he wrote the second act in modern-day time.”

After doing Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party,” which sold out its three weekend run in advance, Lynn was looking for something a little lighter to balance the season, but she said “Searching for Eden” is not a lightweight script.

“We see what has happened to them over the years and how they’ve grown apart and gotten into their respective businesses,” she said. “We learn the main reason for the separation between the two of them was the death of Abel that she was never able to work through. This play seems upon first reading as fluff. If you read quickly, it’s like, ‘Oh, this is a cute little play,’ but there is a lot underneath it that really speaks to life experience and the joys and agonies of long-term relationships and how people deal with it.”

Lynn needed actors who could portray the characters during their youthful innocence in Eden as well as the middle-aged couple hardened by life’s experiences. Lynn opted for actors closer to the youthful version of the characters by casting Adam Dominick as Adam and Sydney Campbell as Eve.

“In my own experience, I find it’s a little easier to play older than it is to play younger, simply because your life experience is there, your body changes and you’re not as lithe and light as you used to be,” Lynn said. “I personally think it’s easier to play an older character. That’s not true for everybody, and what’s interesting in this show is that one of my actors is very comfortable in the younger role and has struggled to find that older character, and the other one is more comfortable playing the older character and has more difficulty getting into the younger character. That’s been a very interesting piece, but they’ve come a long way. They’re, just lovely in the show.”