It’s important to focus on the structure described in the program as you settle in to enjoy “The Pride.”

A first play, intelligently written by Alexi Kaye Campbell, it premiered in London and played off Broadway in 2010. The script focuses on stories of two troubled gay relationships, placed 50 years apart, with characters bearing the same names. Presumably, Campbell aims to show how things have changed for gay people in our society — or not.

In the first scene, set in 1958, we meet Philip, a closeted, repressed and unhappy real estate salesman, played by Jarrad Holbrook and his lively wife, actress-turned-illustrator Sylvia (Barbra Andrews). They await Oliver (Jake Walker), author of the children’s book she is illustrating. Sexual tension between the two men hangs in the air as Sylvia chatters. Philip is envious of their creative work, wondering what he might have been if his father hadn’t died and left him the business. “I’d have immigrated,” he says. (Read: run away).

Oliver, who is edgy and conflicted, says he had an epiphany at Delphi, where the oracle assured him that everything will be all right — there will be understanding somewhere in the future.

By scene two, it’s 2008 and we meet the fourth cast member, the versatile David Cates, who plays a talkative sex worker in Nazi garb. Sadism probably shouldn’t seem funny, but Cates is. The 21st century Philip is an openly gay photographer who has left Oliver because of his promiscuity. Sylvia is Oliver’s best friend.

Cates reappears as a trash-talking heterosexual editor, who wants Oliver to write a “gay piece for the straight man” for his men’s magazine, and later as a sober 1958 doctor describing aversion therapy to Philip, who is desperately fighting who he is.

Campbell’s lines are often beautifully and poetically written, and it’s a joy to hear these accomplished actors deliver them. Humor surfaces frequently. His 1958 scenes are crisper and more convincing than those set in the 2008 period, and in this staging the two periods are not as clearly delineated as they might be by scene change and costume.

This is Taylor Gonda’s directorial debut, although she has been involved with Paragon for some time. She and her cast have created a memorable production with complex material.