Wayne Rawley knows what it’s like to work a dead-end job behind a counter — the boredom, the interminability, the soul-crushing weightof mediocrity.

“As your soul is being sucked, someone comes in wanting a bagel,” Rawley said. “I think anyone who’s worked behind a counter can relate to that.”

Rawley’s distilled that feeling down into his newest play, “Live! From the Last Night of My Life,” a comedy opening tonight in OU Lab Theatre.

“Live!” had its first incarnation as a production for Seattle’s ACT Theatre in 2003, but Rawley has continued to develop the play, most extensively this semester as OU’s Faith Broome Playwright-in-Residence. The residency, which was created in the fall, has helped propel “Live!” into new territory, Rawley said.

“I never really had the opportunity to take that final push,” he said. “There were a couple structural things that weren’t really jelling. [Now], it has made a quantum leap from where it was.”

“Live!” tells the story of Doug, a convenience store employee who announces to the store’s security camera his intentions to kill himself at the end of his shift. Meanwhile, ordinary life rolls along as usual in the midst of this life-altering pronouncement — a smash-up of the banal and the profound that Rawley is very interested in.

“I feel like I’m attracted to things that are funny about real life, [like] the tiniest fender bender that results in a Greek tragedy,” he said.

Starting small can be key to opening up to a larger world in a play — an approach he’s taken with his own work and his students’ in the playwriting class he teaches as part of the residency, Rawley said.

Sometimes, a play just needs to be about the intricacies of a single meal, he says.

“I find that there’s so much interesting about breakfast,” Rawley said.

The convenience store fits that model — an insignificant place that can tell us a lot about human nature and even America.

“It’s a great metaphor for the huge and for the small,” Rawley said.

Developing “Live!” over the course of nearly a decade has caused Rawley to go through a number of phases — cultivating humor that is dark, but hopefully steers clear of “quirky,” an adjective that has been bludgeoned to death by the “Juno’s” of the world. And even though he says “dude” a lot, Rawley doesn’t want to be pegged into the Judd Apatow brand of comedy either, he said.

Even though some things may seem derivative after having been in the development process for so long, Rawley knows his material is personal.

“You have to write what’s true to you — then you’re OK,” he said.

Rawley plans to continue to tweak the play and has written a screenplay based on it. He plans on shopping both around after his residency ends.

Doug may or may not kill himself at the end of the play, but the life of “Live!” is just getting started.

OU Lab Theatre presents

"Live! From the Last Night of My Life" by Wayne Rawley

8 p.m. Tonight through Saturday

3 p.m. Sunday

Lab Theatre

Beatrice Carr Wallace Old Science Hall

Tickets: $6 student, $8 adult

OU Fine Arts box office (405) 325-4101