Life in a Shaker community sure is a paradise. There’s the constant chore load, the bland food and the celibacy. There’s even time for leisure activity — confessing every sin.

Heaven on Earth is severe and austere in “As It Is In Heaven,” Arlene Hutton’s play about upheaval in a 19th Century Kentucky Shaker community. OU Lab Theatre is staging the play through Sunday.

The Shakers broke off from the Quaker community in the 1700s, fueled by the belief that God was both mother and father, and leader Ann Lee was the second coming of God on Earth. Fifty years later, a revival of sorts broke out in the community, revealing generational rifts, as seen in Hutton’s play.

Hutton’s feelings toward her characters are established early, as the play opens with the nine sisters engaging in group confession for some egregious sins — not finishing one’s dinner, taking pride in a new apron or teasing the chickens. The scene is played for laughs, but these women are deadly serious. The Shakers strived for perfection on Earth by working to eliminate sin completely.

That makes for a tenuous utopia sustained by rigid structure, with the women’s interludes of song and dance the only seeming respite.

What’s expected gets interrupted when one of the younger sisters, Fanny (drama junior Michelle Roberts), begins claiming to see heavenly visions of angels and Mother Ann Lee herself. Fellow young women Izzy (musical theater freshman Alie Walsh) and Polly (drama senior Danielle Rohr) experience the visions as well.

The older generation of women is variously skeptical, angry and confused that their order is being upset and that they themselves seem unable to experience the same. A series of overblown non-chronological scenes shows the older women interrogating the younger, Gestapo-style.

These scenes punctuate a tedious rhythm that envelops the audience in the same kind of stupor of routine that the Shakers depend on. The actors mime sewing and fold sheets with a kind of dazed boredom, while simultaneously rejoicing in their own slice of heaven.

Hutton’s ambivalence toward her characters turns into something rather nastier in the play’s final scenes that relay an eruption of joy among the sisters. I suppose one could take the ultimate harmony that seems to result at face value, but there’s a sense that each sister is either a hypocrite or just plain crazy.

OU’s production, directed with rigorous blocking by Alissa Millar, is bolstered by a community of strong performances, particularly those playing the trio of young women. Drama sophomore Kourtney Kae also does excellent work as Hannah, who is most resistant to the heavenly outbursts, and struggles to reconcile her beliefs with the increasingly apparent changing of times.

“As It Is In Heaven” keeps its subjects at arm’s length — and the sheer unfamiliarity of the Shaker mindset to our modern sensibility makes this an understandable choice.

It’s a valid artistic decision, but it ensures a theater experience nearly as ascetic as the lifestyle of those it portrays.

Playbill

What: “As It Is in Heaven”

When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday

3 p.m Sunday

Where: E. Frank Gilson Studio Theatre, Old Science Hall

640 Parrington Oval in Norman

Cost: $5 at the door