The past shapes the present, giving us tools and regrets, coloring our lives. Or sometimes, forever poisoning them.

Playwrights know that bringing siblings together to deal with their shared past can make for explosive drama. Sam Shepard did it in his violently comedic True West, Suzan-Lori Parks in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog, Neil LaBute in his unsettling In a Dark Dark House. And John Kolvenbach does his own exploration of that volatile territory in On an Average Day.

The newest show from South Florida's Ground Up & Rising theater company, On an Average Day continues the troupe's edgy artistic journey as well as its peripatetic wanderings from one regional venue to another. Done as a fundraiser at GableStage, the play is at the Byron Carlyle in Miami Beach for two more performances before it plays ArtSouth in Homestead next month. All that moving around makes cultivating an audience a next-to-impossible nightmare.

Ground Up & Rising's artists know that, and they're hoping to make Miami Beach their home. Sounds promising: Since the pioneering Acme Acting Company and Area Stage left in the '90s, no artistically adventurous young theater company has stepped up to fill that niche on the Beach.

On an Average Day is a mysterious, slowly unfolding piece that gains power and speed as it goes along. Truth be told, it isn't an ideal fit for the Byron Carlyle, a space too large for the play's intimate intensity. Sit close, so you don't miss the nuanced intricacies in the performances by Arturo Fernandez and Arnaldo Carmouze as the damaged sons of an emotionally deadened father. Fernandez, Ground Up & Rising's artistic director, also staged On an Average Day. As the younger brother Bobby, he has the more obviously showy role of a boy-man likely suffering from bipolar disorder.

Lanky and disheveled, Bobby speaks softly and quickly, smiling at the wrong times, repeating himself, going off on paranoid tangents. He is in trouble, not for the first time, but this is really bad: He's about to go on trial for throwing a guy from a speeding car. Bobby assures Jack, the brother he hasn't seen since he was 15, that he didn't do it. He's beside himself with happiness at Jack's reappearance, sure that the brother who took care of him after their father vanished when Bobby was just 7 is there to rescue him again. Not so.

As we learn when Carmouze finally gets to the truths of Jack's seemingly successful life, little in On an Average Day is as it first seems. Kolvenbach explores the life-sustaining power of lies, the festering damage of emotional depravation, the slim but real possibility of healing. After an almost languid start, the action accelerates with the repeated blast of a gun, an almost deadly fight, an overdue airing of the truth. With On an Average Day, Ground Up & Rising demonstrates yet again both its power and potential. Now all it needs to do is forge an ongoing connection with an audience hungry for provocative, emotionally involving theater.

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.

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