Venturing into ‘afterlife’

His frequent collaborator is Kate Warner, artistic director of New Repertory Theatre. She directs Yockey’s “afterlife: a ghost story,’’ Sunday through Feb. 6 as part of a National New Play Network rolling world premiere.

The play explores the darkest kind of grief. It begins seemingly close to realism, as Danielle (Marianna Bassham) and Connor (Thomas Piper) return to the beach house where their son drowned, intending to close it up before a storm. It ends in a poetic, purgatorial realm stalked by a giant black bird and other strange characters.

Yockey’s working relationship with Warner stretches back to the end of 2003 at Dad’s Garage Theatre Company in Atlanta. Warner was an artistic associate there, charged with curating a festival of very short plays. Yockey was marketing director for Dad’s Garage and told her he wanted to submit one. She didn’t even know that he was a writer. At some companies it might have been an awkward moment, but after reading it, she not only accepted his “Stop Motion,’’ she said she’d direct it.

“I can’t recall exactly if I jumped up and down or what, but I was very excited,’’ Yockey says by phone from Los Angeles. “Everyone needs someone to give them that chance, to give them a shot, and she was that person for me. And she has continued to support my work.’’

“A lot of Steve’s plays have this really incredible overlapping dialogue, and that’s all this play was, was overlapping dialogue,’’ Warner says. “It was really a challenge to rehearse and present.’’

Warner became artistic director of Dad’s Garage soon after and went on to direct three more short plays and two full-lengths by Yockey there and at other venues.

“We just have a really great working vibe,’’ Yockey says. “I tend to write things that have a bit of a dark tint to them, and she appreciates that and understands that that doesn’t mean the play in and of itself has to be maudlin or horrible, that it can be dark and fun.’’

Part of the joy of it was finding ways to produce Yockey’s often highly theatrical scripts on a low budget, Warner says. “Especially at a place like Dad’s Garage, where we were like the MacGyver of the theater. We were putting on huge shows with two nickels, a piece of string, and a jackknife.

“It’s magical realism, so there’s always some supernatural element that enters into a very realistic or naturalistic situation. And the reason he’s doing that is that he’s trying to highlight or examine or expose something that we may treat as normal that actually is bizarre,’’ she says.

Yockey earned an MFA in dramatic writing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a yearlong National New Play Network residency at Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley, Calif. Now he’s in Los Angeles, taking meetings about TV writing projects.

Warner, who came to New Rep as artistic director in 2009, says she cited her relationships with Yockey and other new writers when she interviewed for the job. “Steve’s work was the one that sort of jumped ahead in terms of, the New Rep’s audience is going to love this play, they’re going to love this writer,’’ she says.

The company is the second of three venues producing “afterlife’’ with the New Play Network, following Southern Repertory Theatre in New Orleans and ahead of the Edgemar Theater Group in Los Angeles. But Warner and New Rep really had it first, for an in-house workshop in the fall of 2009 and a staged reading for the public last February, both of which included Bassham and others from the current cast. Yockey said that part of the process was “incredibly helpful’’ in developing the play.

“It was a very thoughtful audience, and I took away from that talkback confidence in exploring this topic. Even though the play goes to unusual and challenging places, it still leaves people with this hunger to discuss what it means to lose something, what it means to explore this grief, and how that’s different for different people,’’ says Yockey, who also came to see a couple of days of rehearsals.

After the death of an aunt years ago, he adds, he felt grief that seemed out of proportion to their relationship, which wasn’t that close. He wondered, who decides what’s proportional?

“Clearly everyone doesn’t experience grief in the same — for lack of a better term — time signature,’’ he says. “And I don’t think it’s necessarily helpful for there to be this expectation for how long grief should last or its shape or form.’’

Joel Brown can be reached at jbnbpt@gmail.com.