Alliance Theatre Lab returns with a haunting production of a play about damaged souls finding hope.

Stephen Metcalfe's Strange Snow has a history in South Florida theater.

The powerful 1982 script about two damaged Vietnam veterans and a lonely woman was first staged here in 1990 by Acme Acting Company, then one of the region's edgiest small theater companies. When Acme's Juan F. Cejas became artistic director of the Florida Shakespeare Theatre (the company that evolved into GableStage), he opened the troupe's new space at the Biltmore Hotel with another production of Strange Snow in 1996.

That Acme connection continues with a fine new production of Strange Snow by the Miami Lakes-based Alliance Theatre Lab.

Artistic director Adalberto J. Acevedo, once a member of the Acme company, has relaunched Alliance after a long hiatus with a tender, stirring staging of Metcalfe's play. The show kicks off an ambitious June for the company, which will follow Strange Snow with the first South Florida production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie. That solo show, about an idealistic young American's death in the Gaza Strip, stirred such controversy when Plantation's Mosaic Theatre announced it in 2007 that Mosaic dropped the show.

If its artful Strange Snow is any indication, the reorganized Alliance has the mojo not only to stage Rachel Corrie but to pull it off.

Though Strange Snow deals with men who served in Vietnam, it is anything but a dated play.

One of the veterans, a garage owner nicknamed Megs (Andy Jean-Gilles), shows signs of manic depression. His war buddy David (Cliff Burgess) is a full-on alcoholic. Both men are clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor guilt. These terms aren't used in the play, but they describe these foundering men in ways that many an Iraq War veteran would understand only too well.

What makes Strange Snow more than a study of the hellish aftereffects of war is the presence of a third character. Martha (Jennifer Toohey), David's sister and roommate, is a single teacher whose idea of a great evening is nibbling away at fudge as she grades papers. Her life is one of numbing routine -- the papers, gathering her brother's empties, dealing with a piercing loneliness even when David is there -- but dreams of romance still smolder within her.

When Megs shows up to take her brother fishing, pounding on the door at the crack of dawn one day, the skittish Martha is scared of this stranger David has never mentioned. But over the course of a long day and evening, history and fears and truths get revealed. And for all three characters, sparks of hope point the way to a reengagement with life.

Acevedo, who establishes the era with songs by Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Donovan and others, draws a trio of terrific performances from the Strange Snow cast.

At first, Jean-Gilles is so full of manic energy and forced laughter that Megs' designed-to-charm comments register as too frenetic. But when the mask cracks and the actor reveals the wounded soul beneath the buoyant banter, he becomes deeply affecting.

Toohey's Martha is heart-breaking, a woman whose controlled life breaks open to allow years of girlish romantic longing to surface. And Burgess, though playing the angriest and least sympathetic character, expertly digs down from David's benumbed surface to the man's broken heart.

Strange Snow, running just through June 14, is a simple yet layered play, one full of anger, regret, longing and the possibility of redemption. Though its three characters have been living lives that feel like one long winter, what they discover together -- and what Alliance achieves in its production -- will warm your heart.

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.

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