Pru Payne, SpeakEasy Stage Company, Roberts Studio Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion, Boston Center for the Arts, through November 16. speakeasystage.com or 617-933-8600.

With ever-growing attention to dementia and Alzheimer's, playwrights have been giving important attention to thoughtful portrayals of patients and challenges to their memories and realities. Boston Playwrights Theatre fans may fondly remember Joanna Merlin's poignant work in Peter M. Floyd's touching 2014 drama "Absence."

Now gifted local actress Karen MacDonald is following up on a moving performance as a memory-challenged novice aging surfer in the disarming play "Wipeout" at Gloucester Stage Company with a haunting effort as a dementia-combatting critic in the blistering East Coast premiere by SpeakEasy Stage Company of "Pru Payne."

Steve Drukman's visceral 90-minute drama opens at a clinic named Brook Hollow—with a striking state of the art look in Christopher Swader and Justin Swader's scenic design. Here Prudence "Pru" Payne and her son Thomas meet with Dr. Dolan—Marianna Bassham crisply nerdy as a science-guided expert--on memory loss and its treatment. The fictional late-60's"public intellectual" (Drukman's own description) and seminal critic—with shades of the likes of Dorothy Parker and Mary McCarthy—Pru addresses the audience (the unseen other clinic patients) as though they are the American Academy of Arts and Aesthetics (which has given her the organization's coveted Abernathy Award). Masterful MacDonald captures the seriousness of the name-dropping critic (for example, Proust, Pinter, Rothko and Johns) and her telling early and increasing confusion and disorientation. Her very caring budding novelist son Thomas—played with strong empathy by De'Lon Grant—is very aware of the condition that found her insulting the likes of attending Norman Mailer at the awards ceremony. Drukman may have Pru over-referencing writers and artists in his ambitious 90-minute no-intermission play, but the insightful dramatist does make a moving case for the difficulties she faces regarding memory—especially as she struggles to write a memoir.

That struggle finds some beautiful solace in an unexpected romance with a fellow late-60's patient named Gus Cudahy. Custodial engineer Gus—attended by his early 30's dog-breeding son Art—senses that Pru would not be drawn to him anywhere else, but eventually the very different patients slow dance to the American Songbook classic "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire." Gordon Clapp artfully catches Gus' complicated simplicity as Pru embraces his singular combination of style and substance. Anyone who saw Clapp's virtuosic one-man performance in "Robert Frost: The Verse Business" should find some quiet irony in Gus' disclaimer about poetry even as Pru connects one of his quotes with Ezra Pound.

If there is a connection that some audience members may find too co-incidental it is the contrasting romance between Thomas and "butch" Art. To be fair, Druckman does establish early on Thomas's recognition of Art as they bring their respective parents to Brook Hollow. They do turn out to know each other from Rendigs Academy. While some theatergoers may find the development of their romance convenient, Grant and Greg Maraio—arrestingly agile yet vulnerable as Art—make their evolving intimacy fully convincing.

"Pru Payne," Paul Daigneault's penultimate effort as SpeakEasy's artistic director, is an unquestionable triumph. Pru—a tenacious critic who has battled kitsch throughout her career—has repeatedly counseled that "good enough" is not enough. By contrast, SpeakEasy Stage's riveting "Pru Payne" is much more than enough.