Many a good play is written in response to a question that is part-journalistic, part-philosophical: How could this have happened?

Mario Diament, an Argentine journalist-playwright who makes his home in South Florida, applied that question to the relationship of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi party in the 1930s, and his former student Hannah Arendt, a renown political philosopher who also happened to be Jewish.

Diament shares his insights, contained within his new play A Report on the Banality of Love, in a world premiere production by the intimate, Davie-based Promethean Theatre.

As philosophers, both Heidegger, whose greatest work was 1927's Being and Time, and Arendt, whose book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil posited that the architect of Adolf Hitler's ''final solution'' acted not from evil passion but out of unthinking obedience, were great, complex thinkers. But dense philosophy texts rarely translate into good drama, and Diament knows it.

So A Report on the Banality of Love explores the relationship and personal evolution of two unlikely lovers from the time of a 1925 ''conference'' in Heidegger's office at Marburg University to a 1950 encounter at a hotel café in Freiburg. Threaded through the play, offering perspective and context, are the sometimes damning videotaped comments of academics (played by Ken Clement, Mark Duncan, Margie Elias-Eisenberg, George Schiavone and Barbara Sloan).

In putting A Report on the Banality of Love in front of audiences for the first time, director Margaret M. Ledford has the incalculable blessing of two great, inventive actors in the roles of Heidegger and Arendt.

Colin McPhillamy, whose next acting assignment will be at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theatre, has performed on and off Broadway, in myriad regional theaters (including Florida Stage and Promethean), at the Old Vic and the Royal National Theatre. Amy McKenna, who recently moved to South Florida from New York, also has numerous New York and regional credits. Both bring all that experience to their riveting performances.

McPhillamy seems every inch the preoccupied, absent-minded professor when McKenna's timid Hannah first enters his office. Soon, though, he's using his plummy voice as an instrument of seduction, the married man with power convincing his besotted student to have an affair on his terms.

Through five encounters played out in Brechtian fashion against shifting black-and-white cityscape sketches, the two discuss their careers, relationships (including Arendt's two marriages), and what the Nazi rise to power means for Germany.

Heidegger, who joined the party less than two weeks after becoming rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933, claims not to be anti-Semitic but spouts defenses of Hitler that appall Hannah (and the rest of us). Hannah's journey, so richly detailed by McKenna, is from professor-worshipping student to flight from her homeland, brief wartime internment and finally a new, influential life in the United States.

The constant in the lives of these two unlikely lovers was, Diament suggests, just that: their love. That mysterious, inexplicable passion led Arendt to become a kind of apologist for Heidegger, trying to help resurrect her broken former lover's post-war reputation.

Perhaps only Heidegger and Arendt could have answered the how-could-this-happen question. But in Promethean's premiere, thanks in no small part to two sublime actors, Diament's inquiry becomes dramatically compelling.

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